Why was Butch Vig disappointed after hearing Radiohead album ‘Kid A’?
By the start of the 2000s, Butch Vig didn’t have to prove his chops to anyone. Being a foundational piece of the alternative rock outfit Garbage, Vig had also earned his reputation as a cutting-edge producer, crafting some of the best-sounding albums of the ’90s, like Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream and Nirvana’s Nevermind. While Vig may have been in tune with the zeitgeist, he wasn’t the biggest fan of where one of his favourite bands was going during this period.
Around the same time that Garbage was finding their feet, a few other bands were beginning to emerge out of Nirvana’s wake to make songs that were of a similar ilk. Although most of these acts claimed to rep for Seattle, Radiohead was a different breed, coming from England and smashing onto the scene with the song ‘Creep’.
Although the band has since disowned their signature hit, Vig was impressed with what they worked on in the late 1990s. Coming out of the shadow of grunge, most of their second album, The Bends, was pulling from the sounds of Britpop as well as arena rock and new wave, earning the band even more acclaim through singles like ‘Just’ and ‘High and Dry’.
By the time they hit OK Computer, Radiohead had turned themselves into one of the biggest rock bands in the world, spawning huge singles that would forever change the course of rock music. Even though they had made something perfect, the band decided to move in the opposite direction for their next album.
Embracing the world of electronic music, Kid A was about creating a sparse arrangement for most of the songs, leading to most of the tracks being consumed by glitchy production. While there was a certain aesthetic going along with it, Vig wasn’t all that impressed after hearing what they could do as a rock band.
When talking about the record years later, Vig talked about the lacklustre feeling after hearing it for the first time, recalling in Classic Rock, “It didn’t connect with me. The songwriting on The Bends is genius. Then when I heard Kid A, I was like, ‘Oh, okay, they’ve crawled up their own bums now, they’re just getting artsy-fartsy.'”
Given the man’s track record for production, it’s easy to see where Vig is coming from. With a rap sheet including the likes of Against Me, Green Day, and Foo Fighters, Vig has always been partial to hearing bands in a room playing together instead of trying to work around different electronic textures.
That didn’t deter Radiohead from moving forward, though, returning to their roots on later albums like In Rainbows and being confident enough to incorporate electronics even further on albums like The King of Limbs. Despite his distaste for Kid A, Vig still admires where Radiohead has gone in the past few years, recalling, “I still have immense respect for them, they’re an incredible band, but I thought they kinda lost the plot with that one.”
