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Radiohead and the Resistance Concept Album: How to Disappear Completely. By Marianne Tatom Letts, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. ix-xv + 235 pp (softcover). Bibliography, Discography, Index. ISBN 978-0-253-22272-5. Price: $19.95
As the title suggests, Marianne Tatom Letts' book delves into the concept behind Radiohead's first two albums of the twenty-first century: 2000's Kid A and 2001's Amnesiac. Known by many today as master anti-marketers as well as talented, insightful musicians, Radiohead continually probe the boundaries of popular music, those amorphous borders where musical creativity meets mass production. Letts's book returns to the origins of the band's subversive marketing strategies with Kid A and Amnesiac, and discusses Radiohead's hesitant, perhaps divergent relationship with pop culture and capitalist global markets. As Letts states in the opening chapter, her goal is "to examine in detail Radiohead's 'experimental' concept albums, Kid A and Amnesiac, and to investigate the band's ambivalence and resistance toward its own success" (p. 2). Letts believes that Radiohead traces a narrative of alienation in the face of the modern world (technology in particular) through both albums by way of a fragmented, distorted, and at times absent subjective persona.
As any Radiohead aficionado would assert, the band began teasing the relationship between music, humans, and technology with 1997's OK Computer. Letts, too, begins her narrative with Radiohead's albums from the '90s, admitting that even their first single, "Creep," was flush with themes of alienation and self-abnegation. What separates the later albums from those of the early '90s, says Letts, is the depth and totality of isolation experienced by the songs' subject, and the technology with which the band experiments musically....