The Shock Of The New

In E.H. Gombrich's classic phrase, too much of criticism is "based on what we know rather than what we see". Speaking of the works of Edouard Manet, he describes how, by seriously challenging the conventions of the day, Manet's work was banned from the official French art exhibition known as the "Salon" and ended up in the "Salon of the rejected" - where critics would gather to laugh at the audacity of one who dared to defy what had been proscribed to be the only true way of painting.

What so upset the hacks of the day was that Manet and his colleagues didn't paint "picturesque" works. Instead their impudence led them to paint "impressions" - combinations of tones, configurations of colours and forms and patchworks of coloured shades. We now know these artists, who were laughed out of polite critical society, as the Impressionists. And we know the critics to be fools.

You'd want to be Captain Mad from the Planet of Extremely Mad People to suggest that, in years to come, Radiohead's Kid A will one day be acknowledged as a masterpiece along the lines of a Manet, but the feverish debate (not to mention the feverish utterances from Thom Yorke who has only done 23 "exclusive" interviews to support his work) surrounding the new album has raised more issues than the songs themselves.

Elvis Costello once remarked that Morrissey's song titles were more interesting than the songs themselves. Very prescient, because now the "culture" of a work (the reviews, interviews, general babble about it) has superceded the work itself. Don't quote me on this, but I would think that of the many acres of press devoted to the Spice Girls over the years, about four per cent would actually focus on their songs - the rest on boyfriends, what they wear, who they're photographed with, blah, blah, blah. You see it with Madonna all the time - why hold her work up to rigorous critical scrutiny, when more fun is to be had reading what "secrets" her sacked nanny has told the tabloids? What tells us more: the fact that Madonna sends out a search party to find some hip, Face magazine-endorsed DJ for that elusive "contemporary" touch on her new album, or how she has succeeded in "reinventing herself again" as if the "reinvention" is devoid of all content, merely the act of it being important.

And it's everywhere. The product and the by-product are mixed up at every turn, with the result that they have collapsed into each other. The only difference when it comes to Radiohead and how they are fetishised in the magazine market is a quantitative, not a qualitative one. Q magazine (wouldn't have it in the house myself) ran a front cover story on the band last month, which would surely qualify as publishing blueprint for a indie version of Hello!

It just stopped short of revealing the Third Secret Of Thom Yorke.

Hastily getting back to the music, the damning reviews of Kid A - "tuneless twaddle", "self-indulgent muso wank" (and they're the best ones I've read) are, conceivably, betraying a conservatism bordering on fundamentalism. If the reviewers want verse-chorus-verse songs with nice melodies, there's always Coldplay. Look it another way: by evoking the spirit of obscure Autechre tracks, being as artistically bloody-minded as an Ornette Coleman and releasing an album that makes OK Computer sound like Kajagoogoo's Greatest Hits, there's something wonderfully bold and proper about Radiohead are doing - after all, the last "greatest band in the world" who had the creative freedom to do something new as creative musicians came up with Be Here Now.

At least Radiohead had the balls to go for it, and in these S Club 7 days that should still count for something. And don't worry if you can't get your head around the album - neither, I suspect, can they. If you want something that does exactly what it says on the tin, stick with your reissues and spare us the "but it's got no tunes" histrionics.

Just as it's incredibly stupid to have OK Computer voted as the best album ever released (that's Q readers for you), it's equally fatuous to dismiss Kid A as something even Syd Barret would balk at for being too "out there". The history of music criticism is littered with people getting it wrong, particularly when someone offers up something "exotic" in place of meat and two veg. Such is the shifting of the sands that Lou Reed's Metal Ma- chine Music is now being slowly, if cautiously, hailed in some quarters as a "lost classic" (It's not. It's unlistenable noise - that was the whole point of the album. It was to annoy his record company).

WHICH is not to say that Kid A will not undergo a thorough process of revisionism and emerge in a few years' time as a work of genius, although having said that, let's see your odds first. Also, consider this: by releasing such a defiant and challenging work, Radiohead have taken a torch to their student miserabilism past, laughed ironically at the "best band in the world" hyperbole thrown their way and attempted to sort their fans out from the cultural voyeurs who swarmed around them.

Best of all, though, the People Who Play Squash - who swooned away to The Bends - will never have Kid A playing on their BMW in-car stereo. How noble an achievement is that?

Kid A is on Parlophone Records. Radiohead play Punchestown Race Course today, tomorrow and Sunday