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"). The song has been played at nearly every concert since 2001.

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 was working on Kid A.

According to Thom Yorke, "Idioteque wasn't my idea at all; it was Jonny's. Jonny handed me this DAT that he'd gone into our studio for the afternoon... and, um, the DAT was like 50 minutes long, and I sat there and listened to this 50 minutes. And some of it was just (garbled speech), but then there was this section of about 40 seconds long in the middle of it that was absolute genius, and I just cut that up and that was it... [and then wrote the song around it]."

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. On the original album release, the song was credited as having been written by Radiohead with an additional credit for the samples used. On the group's later I Might Be Wrong live release, the songwriting credit is given to "Radiohead & Paul Lansky".

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 possible references to natural disaster, war and technological breakdown.

Many interpret "Idioteque" as having something to do with climate change, 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. (Although the idea that a trend of global warming would provoke another ice age might seem counter-intuitive, scientists have warned that long-term melting of polar ice could potentially cause a shut-down of the Gulf Stream and other warm ocean currents that stabilize temperatures in Northern Europe and North America far above what they would otherwise be. See Climate change.)

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 songs to its charity compilations in 1995 and 2005. The band has been outspoken against recent wars.

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." Other people believe that the title of the song is a pun on the word "idiotic", which is structured almost identically.

Near the end of the song, a line that sounds like "the first of the children" is repeatedly sung, possibly a reference to the album's title Kid A. However, when Yorke sings the song live, it varies between "the(re's) fathers and the children," "this one is to the children" and "this one is for the children." Yorke and his partner's first son Noah was born in early 2001, soon after the release of "Idioteque." He has described many of his more politicized lyrics of the current decade as inspired by having children and fearing for their future.

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. Several of the "Idioteque" lyrics (as well as those of certain other songs from the period) are audibly different in live performance. 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 listeners' attempts at interpretation, beyond pointing out general themes.

Trivia

• The synth pads on Idioteque are sampled from a Paul Lansky song, "Mild Und Liese" written in 1973 on an IBM Computer Mainframe located on the Princeton University campus at the time. It used FM synthesis, which had just been worked out at Stanford, and later became the staple of Yamaha's famous DX7 series of synthesizer.
• In live performances, most notably the performance on SNL Jonny 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.
• The haunting four-chord progression which creates most of the harmonic body of the song actually consists entirely of four different inversions of an Ebmaj7, or tonic seventh, chord (Eb G Bb D); the first two chords consist of two pairs of perfect fifths (G over D in the bass clef with Eb over Bb in the treble, then the opposite), while the latter two consist of two pairs of fourths (D over G in the bass clef with Bb over Eb in the treble, and then the opposite.)
• In live performances, singer Thom Yorke is known to dance onstage during the song.

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