100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #24 Radiohead – Everything In It’s Right Place

Released: 2000

It’s (polluted) water long gone under the bridge now, but hell, if there was one record – a single piece of culture – which finally snapped the links between this century and the last, it was the release of Kid A. Radiohead were after all the most popular alt.<whatever> band on the planet, but here was something complicated, abstract, texturally apposite to it’s predecessor. It’s body felt conceptually like the scene in the Wizard of Oz when the witch turns up dead under the house, where the shoes she was wearing might as well have been “Ok” and “Computer” respectively.

Kid A was an attempt to escape from the sarcophagus of rock n’ roll, the archaic medium which some said belonged in the previous thousand years. Not that Thom Yorke ever necessarily saw it that way, but as the sessions for it proved to be fragmental in purely band terms, this new form became an immolation of everything which had gone before. For bystanders and fans alike, this new environment possessed all the characteristics of a man with a fucked head fucking with your head.

This was in effect true. This ugly child was a suite in pieces, like the man who’d written it had ended up after Ok Computer as he stared back into a broken mirror. Everything In It’s Right place was a direct reference to Yorke’s near-past sense of powerlessness and rescinded control. Where were the guitars? They were buried somewhere dark, and you could play them to yourself as you sung along to these words about mental illness and being trapped in a glass jar full of waves, waves. Dead shoes, dead instruments, dead identities. Out here everything real and not real had all gone the way of Kansas.