Memory Bank

Editor’s Note: Every once in a while I discover a record that profoundly impacts me, that forces me to think about life in a different light. Hearing Nick Drake’s Pink Moon for the first time during my freshman year of college or achieving the “ah-ha” moment when absorbing the dizzying Bitches Brew for the umpteenth time, are musical experiences I’ll never forget.

For this week’s Memory Bank, SLYEMAN eloquently recounts his reaction to discovering Radiohead’s Kid A in his Kentucky dorm room back in 2002. It’s a watershed moment that we can all relate to.

Radiohead’s Kid A has always invoked the sharpest mental images. When the falling keys of “Everything in its Right Place” blends with Thom Yorke’s garbled lyrics to begin the album, I cannot help but picture a boat harboring an unexplored continent, a shore land expedition/coastal invasion, and the good-willed mess that follows.

The frame crawls its way through thick cattails, dark-sanded shores, mysterious copses teeming verdantly, until arriving at the spot where the event happens. The catastrophe is vague—disease, terror, maybe just the most fundamental of misunderstandings, but its passing is assured. And nothing remains the same afterward, though the picture stops.

For me the beauty of this album, and particularly this track, has always laid in the tension of everything being in its right place while waking up sucking on a lemm-on, and the picture that such a line yields upon a cerebral canvas. With each phrase Mr. Yorke utters, I feel—and see—more clearly that everything is not in its right place. The line he sings almost monkishly, “There are/Two colors in my head,” worked its way around the inside of my head for weeks upon hearing it.

I knew a number of people who had just two colors in their head. The spectral images cast by Radiohead contrasting the dismal black and white view. The just as potent, but equally subtle, “What is that/You tried to say?” swam up to the surface when I had played the album out thoroughly, restarting the investigation.

In fact, that “Everything in its Right Place” was ever played by a set of speakers after my first listen, I would beg to differ. It seems deeper, a soundtrack of the mind, perception rather than sensation, memory, not activity. When the album continued to haunt me, the bleeps and bells of “Kid A,” the foggy guitars of “How to Disappear Completely,” I dug into it more completely.

It was the first LP I became completely obsessed with. I stayed up late exploring the Internet for others’ views and opinions, playing it quietly not to wake the roommates. I wanted to know about the artwork, the recording process, how the other members of the band felt being replaced largely by computers. I thought Radiohead was against that kind of thing. The Orwellian politics. And I came to think of it as perfect for all of its paradoxes: the humanity of it, while sounding overly digital, the bleak outlook with the dark humor.

It felt exactly like 2002, a time of life begun the September prior to it. A time when the pictures mattered more than the words, when two colors filled our heads, when we could not hear our neighbor. But we saw.

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