Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories

THIS ISN'T HAPPENING

Steven Hyden

Radiohead's "Kid A" and the Beginning of the 21st Century

The story behind the making and meaning of Radiohead's groundbreaking, controversial, epoch-defining album, Kid A. Perfectly timed for the 20th anniversary of Kid A, This Isn't Happening will showcase why Kid A is THE album of the 2000s. Also, as the first major book to explore Radiohead's music and career, it is bound to appeal to their engaged fans.
In 1999, as the end of an old century loomed, five musicians entered a recording studio in Paris without a deadline. Their band was widely recognized as the best and most forward-thinking in rock, a rarefied status granting them the time, money, and space to make a masterpiece. But Radiohead didn't want to make another rock record.
Instead, they set out to create the future.

For more than a year, they battled writer's block, inter-band disagreements, and crippling self-doubt. In the end, however, they produced an album that was not only a complete departure from their prior guitar-based rock sound, it was the sound of a new era, and embodied widespread changes catalyzed by emerging technologies just beginning to take hold of the culture.
What they created was Kid A.

At the time, Radiohead's fourth album divided critics. Some called it an instant classic; others, including the U.K. music magazine Melody Maker, deemed it "tubby, ostentatious, self-congratulatory... whiny old rubbish." But two decades later, Kid A sounds like nothing less than an overture for the chaos and confusion of the 21st century.

Acclaimed rock critic Steven Hyden digs deep into the songs, history, legacy, and mystique of Kid A, outlining the album's pervasive influence and impact on culture, in time for its 20th anniversary in 2020. Deploying a mix of criticism, journalism, and personal memoir, Hyden skillfully revisits this enigmatic, alluring LP and investigates the many ways in which Kid A shaped and foreshadowed our world.

Steven Hyden is the author of Twilight Of The Gods, Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me, and (with Steve Gorman) Hard To Handle. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Billboard, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Grantland, The A.V. Club, Slate and Salon. He is currently the cultural critic at UPROXX. He lives in Minnesota with his wife and two children.
Available products
Book

Published 2020-09-29 by Hachette Book Group - New York (USA)

Comments

Even if you've immersed yourself in Kid A thousands of times, Steven Hyden's passionately argued and kaleidoscopic This Isn't Happening will make you rethink and reimagine Radiohead's most audacious album and its place in cultural history - and history itself.

A review in Bad Feeling magazine says the book is "eminently readable.[and] enthralling." Read more...

Pitchfork Book Club ran an experpt Read more...

The Wall Street Journal article that posted over the weekend and is in print today calls author Steven Hyden "one of America's foremost rock critics." And The Wall Street Journal included it among the notable books in their Fall Arts & Entertainment preview. And Steven Hyden was interviewed by the WSJ's music writer Neil Shah for a feature piece dedicated to the book that will run on pub date. Read more...

This Isn't Happening is beyond a mere analysis of Kid A. It is a vast and contextual examination of the world, both inside and outside of Radiohead, leading up to and flowing away from the creation of Kid A and its impact on both the band and culture as a whole. Connecting the record to film, politics, current events, and the cultural morass that comprised the final moments of the '90s, Steven Hyden gleefully and with meticulous absurdity dissects, deconstructs, and decodes the first great artistic enigma of the new millennium.

From the author of Your Favorite Band is Killing Me, Twilight of the Gods and Hard to Handle comes a new book examining the importance of Radiohead's Kid A, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. Titled This Isn't Happening: Radiohead's "Kid A" and the Beginning of the 21st Century, Steven Hyden examines the most dramatic shift in the back catalogue of one of the world's most influential and critically-acclaimed rock bands. Through a deep dive of its songs and a discussion of its legacy, Hyden explains an album that not only made us think differently about Radiohead, but about our world more broadly. Read more...

This Isn't Happening not only is an excellent way to revisit Kid A but also a springboard for thinking about the shifting fortunes of rock music, the Internet, and the uneasy century we've been living in for the past 20 years.

Radiohead, music, and culture all stood at a crossroads in the year 2000. With insight and grace, Steven Hyden explores the ways in which the Kid A album pointed toward a future that no one could fully imagine - and captured a moment that, two decades later, we're still trying to comprehend.

Italy: Bur / Mondadori

... looks into the songs, history, legacy and mystique of Kid A, outlining the album's pervasive influence and impact on culture, in time for its 20th anniversary in 2020. Read more...

If there was ever an album that deserves a book-length exegesis, it's Kid A, and there's no one better than Steven Hyden to unpack its mythologies and prophecies, and the extraordinary way it appeared to set the stage for the century that followed. This Isn't Happening is a smart, riveting, and dynamic history of a watershed moment for both music and the world.