Indulgence or Ingenius?

As art is very much a subjective thing, it’s inevitable that there are going to be drastically different opinions on the worth (or lack thereof) of any piece of art that its creator chooses to put forth for public consumption. Indeed, opinions are often so divided that any notion of general consensus is dashed. As the saying goes, one person’s trash is anothers treasure, and rarely is this so eloquently expressed as in the music world. Public perception of a group’s work can make or break their career, especially in the over-saturated present era that demands instant gratification or instant dismissal.

Perhaps the most widely disputed record of the last few decades, Radiohead’s Kid A is as perfect an example of divided opinion as one is ever likely to find. Hailed by some as the greatest record ever made and dismissed by others as worthless trash, Kid A was - in the most impartial terms possible - the record that divided Radiohead’s fans and took them in a very different direction to that which they had been traveling. Eschewing the standard verse/chorus song-form that even the mildly revolutionary OK Computer had adhered to, Kid A was loaded with ambient textures, vastly manipulated vocal takes and even tracks made entirely of electronic elements.

“Bummer, innit?” quipped Thom Yorke when an interviewer pointed out to him that there were three guitarists in the band who had publicly proclaimed a newfound hatred for the instrument. The public were not so blasé about the group’s decision to put guitar to the background and bring electronica to the frontline. Large numbers of people seemed genuinely offended that a group they had “trusted” to delivered “good pop music” were turning their backs on their fanbase and releasing “self-indulgent rubbish” without so much as a single “decent song”. “Try humming me a single melody off of it,” a workmate challenged me when I told him how much better I thought Kid A was than The Bends.

That particular quote illustrates the difference in criteria that individuals would have in mind when approaching a work of art. For me personally, melodies are one of the last things I would be concerned with. I’d be more inclined to judge a record on the basis of how original it is, how emotionally affecting I find it to be, how effectively produced it is, how well the songs flow… Those sort of things. Exactly the sort of things Radiohead showed obvious mastery over on Kid A and exactly the sort of things that were lost upon many in their audience (and, apparently, on the critics who damned them).

Similar complaints were leveled against Nine Inch Nails’ sprawling double-disk The Fragile only a year prior but at least in this circumstance people were generally aware that Trent Reznor was liable to offer something of a challenge with his music, unlike Radiohead, whom most everyone seemed to want to stick to writing easily-digestible pop songs. With The Fragile, the question was raised as to whether people really “needed” double albums anymore. I find this to be perhaps the most incomprehensible concern imaginable. If two disks is too much for you then couldn’t you simply not worry about listening to one of them?

My opinion is that if an artist wishes to release two disks (or more) then they should be entitled to do that. After all, they’re the only ones who know how the piece should be presented and if they think it needs two disks then I’m pretty sure it does. But we’ve settled into an era where hit albums run for a half hour and attention spans seem to have diminished just as readily. What we need to remember is that artists tend to see the world a little differently to your average person and even if we don’t understand what they’re getting at, the chances are good that if we open our mind we’re likely to get something rewarding from their efforts.