[Weiser Wonder]

So that's what Radiohead was doing on their 3 year hiatus between Kid A/Amnesiac and HTTT.

If Klosterman is making the point that Radiohead's Kid A was about modern society existing on the brink between order and chaos, then it's a good point. I guess related to the sensationalist 9/11 attacks to gain readership.

I often find Kid A to have more relevance now than it did when it was released. It incorporates modern thought and perspective into a historical and philosophical perspective. There's no moralizing about the evils of technology or the modern world. It more acknowledges the technological world as fact and works within that.

It's critique lies more in how people engage the modern world. Optimistic is about how modern, educated people can be just as blind and hypocritical in how they perceive the world as people have been in the past. In the Western world, people sort of engage in a false reality of humanitarianism and platitudes while in African world it's horrifying chaos. Emphasized in the juxtaposition between "you can try the best you can, the best you can is good" and the detailed descriptions of death and destruction. Radiohead's point is not to moralize, rather to point out even though many think that education and science have separated modern society from religion, we still engage in the same thought processes through different outlets.

Not wanting to write a novel, I will say other songs engage other aspects of modernity. Loneliness, alienation, joy (yes, Radiohead believes in joy), paranoia etc.