‘Kid A’ vs ‘Dark Side of the Moon’: Musical existentialism a great leap apart
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(Credits: Far Out / Album Covers)
Not every band is meant to write about traditional love songs for the rest of their lives. That’s just one small facet of what everyone goes through, and looking at some of the biggest albums of all time, artists are looking to ask the harder questions about life that no one had ever touched on before. While Dark Side of the Moon was unprecedented for its time by bringing up real questions surrounding everyday life, the impact Radiohead made with Kid A showed that the next generation also had their very own set of issues along the same lines.
But first, we need to understand what made Pink Floyd’s masterpiece work back in 1973. Roger Waters had already started to find himself as a vocalist, but as the band still tried to understand the loss of their friend Syd Barrett, making an album about the cycles of life came with a lot more baggage. No one will be able to outrun the realities put forth on tracks like ‘Time’ and ‘Money’, but maybe some weren’t quite ready to listen to them in that context just yet.
Rock bands don’t wait around until just the right time to say what’s on their mind, though. The role of an artist is to give listeners what they didn’t know they needed to hear, and by keeping everything incredibly simple, Waters and David Gilmour hit on something incredibly profound while still trying to deal with existential dread.
It was already daunting to see Pink Floyd ask those questions in the vinyl era, but as the new millennium approached, Thom Yorke was on a slightly parallel track. The road to making Radiohead’s OK Computer already made him concerned about the dangers of the rise in technology, but outside of the brilliant choruses, he knew something had to change.
So, instead of rolling over and making the U2-adjacent album that everyone probably expected, Kid A saw Yorke deal with those same existential pressures in real time. But whereas Pink Floyd touched people’s hearts by keeping lines incredibly simple and to the point, Yorke found his way through by making the kind of music that evoked that sense of emotion with absolute gibberish.
No one’s exactly going to try to connect the dots on a tune like ‘Everything In Its Right Place’, but that doesn’t mean it has no message behind it. Lines about everything being in place, followed by the line about waking up sucking on a lemon, are admittedly wacky, but given the elongated time signature and the cold sound of synthesisers, there’s something about the tune that fills absolutely ominous.
Where Floyd had been dealing with the struggles of humanity when it comes to dealing with madness, Radiohead seemed to flip the same concept as it pertains to the rise in technology. The world still seemed to have a bright future ahead in Floyd’s piece, but by the time Yorke talks about seeing someone in the next life, it’s unclear whether he let the darker thoughts take over his mind and is awaiting a new phase of existence to start up in its place.
But while Dark Side of the Moon and Kid A are far from the sunniest albums ever made, they do have a similar reminder of how one relates to their fellow man. No matter how hard it seems to exist at any age, it’s always worth it to hold onto one’s humanity rather than lose themselves to the darkness.
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