Review: Steven Hyden’s This Isn’t Happening contextualizes the impact of Radiohead’s landmark Kid A album

Kid A may not be Radiohead’s best album, but it is definitely their most intriguing. After the worldwide success of 1997’s OK Computer launched the band into the arena circuit, with critics and fans hailing the band as the saviours of rock, frontman Thom Yorke began formulating plans to tear it all down.

Following a pair of nervous breakdowns during OK Computer‘s massive touring cycle, Yorke began imagining a new start for Radiohead, one that would eschew the soaring guitar epics and plaintive vocals that had made them one of the biggest bands in the world and replace them with the colder, electronic-influenced material that would make up 2000’s Kid A. Author Steven Hyden (Twilight of the Gods) takes a deep dive into that tumultuous period with This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s Kid A and The Beginning of the 21st Century (Hachette), an eminently readable new book that places the band’s highly influential and challenging album into a wider cultural context.

This Isn’t Happening posits that Kid A was the end of a chapter in the way music was consumed, released, and discussed, and ushered in our current era of hyper-connectivity (for better or worse). With the advent of the Internet, Radiohead fans were able to follow the band’s progress on the album, from guitarist Ed O’Brien’s frank and open digital journal entries, to fan forums and live bootlegs where fans could listen and share early live versions of tracks that would eventually find their way onto the finished album. That process cemented a huge network of diehard Radiohead fans around the globe, which paid huge dividends when the band made the controversial decision to release 2007’s In Rainbows album as a pay-what-you-want download, an industry-shaking move that forever changed the way major albums are released and marketed.

Although Kid A was released in 2000, it is often thought of as an album about 9/11, with highly-charged political tracks like “The National Anthem” and “Idioteque.” Hyden explores the general societal unease at the time that bled into the record, and how the album helped soundtrack the terrible aftermath of 9/11 and the brutal wars that followed it (realities Radiohead would explore on 2003’s unsubtle Hail to the Thief).

While Kid A is filled with angst about an uncertain and possibly apocalyptic future, Hyden adds plenty of levity here, from sharing his glowing review of Radiohead’s Pablo Honey written when he was a teenager to contrasting the band’s career trajectory to that of U2, The Rolling Stones, and even Linkin Park (it makes sense in context).

Without the benefit of any new interviews from the notoriously press-shy band members, Hyden adds in his personal reflections on the band and their career, while placing Kid A in context amidst the Radiohead albums that led up to its release, and the subsequent albums that have followed in the ensuing two decades.

In many ways, Kid A can be seen as a harbinger of things to come, from the ways bands interact with their fans to the political and environmental issues the band warned about that have only become direr since its release. It was a purposefully difficult record meant to shatter the overwhelming expectations that had been put on the band, and serves as one of the most fascinating left turns in rock history. This Isn’t Happening is an enthralling look back at the beginning of the millennium when Kid A was birthed, just before Radiohead and the world at large would be forever changed.

This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s Kid A and The Beginning of the 21st Century is out on September 29 via Hachette Books.