The Greatest Show on Earth has come to Glasgow. As the sun sets in the Scottish sky, some 8,000 concertgoers gather under a huge blue tent tipped with flashing red lights. Suddenly, the lights go down and a roar goes up. The British rock quintet Radiohead has taken the stage. Unsatisfied with traditional venues and their corporate-logo-covered interiors, the band is touring Europe with a portable circus-like tent. Singer Thom Yorke introduces each number with curt, dry wit; the music is forceful and precise, combining punkish attitude, tasteful art-rock grandeur and judicious electronic sampling. Jonny Greenwood taunts his guitar into some snarling arpeggios and, switching instruments, adds warm, supportive keyboard colors to other songs. This is the sound of a band that, with the possible exceptions of the American groups the Roots and Rage Against the Machine, is the best young band in the world.
Neil Young was right: rock 'n' roll can never die. The wildly talented alternative-rock band Nirvana, so self-aware and yet so self-destructive, penned rock's suicide note. Hootie-lite fluff bands like Matchbox Twenty supplied the sleeping pills. And gangsta-rap acts like Jay-Z, gloating over their genre's dominance in the marketplace, delivered the eulogy. But rock still isn't dead. In fact, in the past two years it has been rejuvenated creatively and commercially by hip-hop rock acts such as Deftones and others. And this week rock receives another jolt of new life in the form of Radiohead's spectacularly inventive album Kid A (Capitol). As the funeral procession winds through the streets, rock rages on. It sounds pretty good for a dead man.
Radiohead has changed its sound on every album since its debut, never allowing itself to sound stale, never allowing its music to wither. At first, the group followed trends, echoing the roar of Seattle on its tentative debut album Pablo Honey (1993) and mastering the genre on the more assertive The Bends (1995). On its critically acclaimed third album, OK Computer (1997), Radiohead began to write its own rules, creating rock mini-suites like Paranoid Android and writing lyrics that captured the numbing ambivalence that many people feel about living in a microprocessed age. On Kid A, another Radiohead emerges: if the last album was about technology using up humans, the new one is about humans using technology. Kid A relies heavily on samples and synthesizers. The sound is experimental, but the songs all have a Eureka! quality about them: they seem unthinkable, but once thought, seem only natural.