YMMV / Kid A

• Common Knowledge: Kid A is often referred to as the album where Radiohead abandoned the use of guitar. In reality, most of the album's tracks still used guitar, just not always in the conventional way. In fact, only two tracks are entirely devoid of guitar, those being "Everything in Its Right Place" and "Motion Picture Soundtrack" (the first and last tracks on the album), whilst the ambient track "Treefingers" is largely constructed from manipulated recordings of Ed O'Brien's guitar playing.
• Contested Sequel: At first; upon release, the album was highly divisive for its genre shift to electronic-tinged Post-Rock, with many desiring for the band to return to the abstract guitar-driven Alternative Rock of OK Computer. Amnesiac drew similarly mixed responses for being a direct continuation of Kid A, and this led to Hail to the Thief being a considerable source of hype among those who felt alienated by the more experimental direction Radiohead had taken in 2000.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: A number of fans and critics consider Kid A a more viable candidate for Radiohead's greatest album than its much better-known predecessor, OK Computer. "Idioteque" in particular deserves mention for becoming so much of a cult hit among fans that it ended up being one of Radiohead's best-known songs.
• Epic Riff: "Idioteque" manages to pull this off with a sampled keyboard.
  • The bass riff in "The National Anthem" stands out throughout the whole track, even during the flurry of horns.
• Even Better Sequel: Fans of Kid A tend to treat it as this in comparison to OK Computer immediately before it.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "FASTER JONNY"^Explanation A phrase Thom Yorke often shouts to Jonny Greenwood during live performances of "Idioteque" to cue him to speed up the song's tempo; it being as common as it is led to it quickly catching on among fans, resulting in it often being invoked whenever the song comes up anywhere, as well as leading fans to joke about Jonny viewing the song as The Dreaded for how often he's told to speed up during it.
  • "Radiohead predicted Ice Age!"^Explanation The second verse of "Idioteque" opens with the lines "ice age coming/ice age coming." Kid A came out in 2000, while the first Ice Age movie came out in 2002; the discovery of this coincidence led to many fans joking about it whenever "Idioteque" or Kid A as a whole comes up.
  • "KID A Pitchfork review" ^Explanation  When KID A received a mixed reaction from the music press, the most overtly positive response was from the then-nascent website Pitchfork, which gave it a perfect 10. The review and KID A's future appraisal has since led Pitchfork to become one of the biggest and most respected music reviewing sources. However, it has also since been made extensively fun of for its oftentimes overwrought writing and general emphasis on abstract superlatives over any meaningful analysis. Many now use it as a shining example of pretentious online critics, with the review's whole text sometimes being used as copypasta in response to any overwritten musical analysis.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Kid A Mnesia folder lists the many creepy things you can find in the album, from the tracks themselves to Stanley Donwood's art.
• Sampled Up: The keyboard line and glitchy drum fills from "Idioteque" were sampled from Paul Lansky's "Mild und Leise" and Arthur Krieger's "Short Piece", respectively. Since neither sample was an especially prominent part of its original song but became vital parts of "Idioteque", the average music fan probably associates the two clips more with Radiohead than with Lansky or Krieger.
• Special Effect Failure: While fans generally agree that the quality of the blips is top-notch, even they accept that the full-color CGI Modified Bears are... wanting, to say the least (the stark black-and-white ones are generally considered to be better-looking). This seems to be why they only barely show up in the blips, as well as why they received a substantial redesign for their return in the blips for Amnesiac.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: The ambient sounds at the very end of "Motion Picture Soundtrack", which deliberately invoke a heavenly atmosphere and are downright soothing to listen to because of it.
• Tear Jerker:
  • "How to Disappear Completely" is a good example. Thom painfully singing, "I'm not here; this isn't happening" is enough to bring many to tears. The lines were actually given to Yorke by Michael Stipe as a sort of mantra, a way to disconnect himself from a situation, avoiding discomfort, particularly with performing onstage.
  • "Motion Picture Soundtrack," the final track, has an air of desperation to it. It's a sad and almost pathetic reconciliation with the rest of the world after the most alien and emotionally tangled album Radiohead has ever put out. Oh, and the angelic harps are killer.
    "It's not like the movies
    They fed us on little... white lies."
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Many listeners initially weren't kind to Radiohead's Genre Shift on this album, having expected OK Computer 2 and instead getting the exact opposite. Fans who disliked the band's experimentalism gravitated toward bands like Coldplay, who had their breakthrough around this time for the same reason.
• Ugly Cute: The Modified Bear logo/character created for promoting this album manages to be oddly endearing despite its unsettling design.
• Vindicated by History: The album got mixed reviews when it first came out, but now it's considered the best album of the 2000s by many and an incredible note to close the 20th century out on (a verdict that Pitchfork might have had a hand in).

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