Idioteque

"Idioteque"
Song

"Idioteque" is the eighth track on Radiohead's album Kid A (2000). Driven by electronic beats, it was seen as a departure for the rock band, but remains a fan favourite, especially at live concerts. Singer Thom Yorke usually dances during the song, and the crowd joins in singing the second verse ("Ice age coming, ice age coming").

Samples

"Idioteque" contains two credited samples of experimental 1970s "computer music." The first is several seconds of mild und leise, a piece by Paul Lansky, forming the four chord progression repeated throughout the song. mild und leise is 18 minutes long and through composed, so the portion sampled by Radiohead is only heard once in the original piece, very briefly. Also sampled is "Short Piece" by Arthur Krieger, apparently during the drum break. Both tracks were compiled on the now-rare LP First Recordings — Electronic Music Winners (1976), which Radiohead multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood stumbled upon while the band were working on Kid A.

Paul Lansky approved Greenwood's sampling and has written an essay on "Idioteque," found in the book The Music and Art of Radiohead. Though Lansky later moved onto other styles, his mild und leise was one of the very first pieces of music created entirely by computer. When Lansky was composing electronic music in the 1970s, it required months of processing time on huge supercomputers just to "render" the final sound. Today Radiohead members Thom Yorke or Jonny Greenwood often compose music on their laptops, even while on the road touring, making it possible to create an electronic song in Cubase or ProTools in several minutes. Lansky also noted that, while Radiohead's song may hinge on a sample from his work, the mild und leise chord progression they used was itself "sampled" by Lansky from a leitmotif of the Richard Wagner opera Tristan und Isolde.

Video

The official video features the band playing the song inside a studio, however, the version is different from the one heard on the album. Though there was a video, no official single was released.

Lyrics and Interpretation

Yorke does not directly explain his lyrics, but "Idioteque" has been described by others as an "apocalyptic" song, with references to natural disaster, war, and technological breakdown.

Many interpret "Idioteque" as having something to do with climate change or global warming, an issue on which Yorke is outspoken and which he has admitted inspired subsequent songs, such as 2003's "Sail to the Moon" and those on his 2006 solo album The Eraser. The lyrics "ice age coming" are paralleled in the visual artwork for the album Kid A by Stanley Donwood and Yorke (aka Tchock). Donwood's paintings depict a wasteland covered by huge sheets of ice and snow, with fires raging in distant forests and genetically "modified" bears and other mysterious shapes taking control of human civilization. Animated "blips" or videos created to promote Kid A often showed polar bears or a Grim Reaper figure floating on icebergs. Also, many official Radiohead shirts sold during a 2001 tour had a picture of a melting iceberg with the lyrics "This is really happening" (from the song) written underneath. A special edition of the album packaged as a children's book includes statistics on the melting of glaciers. However, "ice age coming" has also been seen as a possible reference to seminal punk band The Clash and their album London Calling, a favourite of the band. The song "London Calling" had the line: "Ice age is coming, the sun zooming in."

The song opens with the lines: "who's in a bunker, who's in a bunker, women and children first..." Yorke has not explained the reference, but has said other songs, such as 2003's "I Will" and "Sit Down. Stand Up." were about civilians killed in military conflict and genocide ("I Will" had originally been written before Kid A. Its lyrics also reference a "bunker," likely based on an incident in which Iraqi civilians including women and children were killed by air raids on the underground Al Amiriyah shelter in the 1991 Gulf War). The cover image of Kid A was itself inspired by the war in Kosovo and the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, according to artist Stanley Donwood. The Kid A special edition book by Donwood and Yorke references threats of air strikes. Radiohead has been a supporter of the War Child organisation, contributing two songs to its charity compilations in 1995 and 2005. The band has been outspoken against recent wars.

At the end of the song, the line "the first of the children" is repeatedly sung, in a possible reference to the album's title, Kid A. When Yorke sings the song live, it sounds more like "the farthest of the children" or "the fathers and the children." Yorke and his partner's first son Noah was born in early 2001, soon after the release of "Idioteque" and Kid A. He has described many of his more politicized lyrics of the current decade as inspired by having children and fearing for their future.

Many people have interpreted the title "Idioteque" as a hybrid of "idiot" and "discothèque." "Idioteque" has been called a "blatantly stupid attempt at making a cheesy dance song" ^[1], and some initially compared Radiohead's electronic music on Kid A with rock band U2's "ironic" dance-inspired phase in the 1990s. However, references to technology and the pace of modern consumption are found throughout the lyrics: "mobiles chirping,"; "take the money, run"; "I'll laugh until my head comes off, I'll swallow till I burst"; "I have seen too much, I haven't seen enough." The song's chorus is usually heard as either "Here I'm alive, everything all of the time" or "Here I'm allowed everything all of the time."

Confusion arises because the lyrics were not printed in the Kid A liner notes. Yorke has shied away from describing his music as directly political, and sometimes denies any intended specific meaning to his work beyond what a listener hears in it. Among songwriters whose lyrics are chosen for their sound, changing them in performance is common. The "Idioteque" lyrics, like others on Kid A, were said to be formed of cut up phrases drawn from a hat, a method that may have been inspired by the dada movement. The result is fragmented and frustrates attempts at interpretation, beyond pointing out certain themes.

Trivia

• For the popular anime and manga series Bleach, creator Tite Kubo assigned the song "Idioteque" as the theme song for one of the main characters, Uryuu Ishida.
• In live performances, most notably the performance on SNL Johnny Greenwood has used the Analogue Systems RS8000 Integrator system, which is used along with an analogue sequencer to provide the track's cold and electronic drum sound.

External links

• Radiohead Official Site
• At Ease: song lyrics and info
• ^ Green Plastic: lyrics, tabs, interpretation
• Homepage of Paul Lansky: explanation by the composer of the song's relationship with his piece mild und leise
• SongMeanings.net: listener interpretations