Juxtapoz # 220

Juxtapoz is pleased to announce our Winter 2022 Quarterly, featuring Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood on the cover. 

At the top of a short wish list of bands who might reissue a box set, of all the albums to do it with, I would say that Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac are at the top. Let me explain: I’m of a certain age, was actually a freshman in college, when Radiohead played “The National Anthem” on SNL in the fall of 2000. I felt the shock wave of innovation and art that I didn’t imagine possible on mainstream television. It hit like a bolt of lightning, something very different and apparently, very new century. Looking back 21 years later, and surveying the landscape of Billboard music, that Kid A made its debut at #1 in the album charts seems unfathomable. An artistic statement from such a popular band doesn’t slam into public consciousness like it used to, and perhaps it might not again. That said, what a testimony it is that difficult and challenging creative outputs did occupy a potent place in our wider pop-culture.

This issue thrives on rule-breaking. Salman Toor, Afrofuturism pioneers, Tania Franco Klein and the other featured artists speak about break from tradition, and the result is something graceful, experimental, urgent and sublime. Kid A was perhaps the first great work of art of the new millennium, something aficionados of any genre return to as an example of rebirth and reimagination in collaboration. The band has begun to unpack the work of that time, in their own voice, inspiring confidence to widen our own potential. Sometimes taking a chance is the best practice of all.