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A Support Group For Jaded Radiohead Fans

Good grief. Even the BBC thinks Kid A was overrated.

Remember when Kid A came out and every music publication and critic everywhere collectively shat themselves? I'm sure you soiled yourself too. It was a more than notable moment in a career of an otherwise band.

Up until that point, Radiohead only had three albums to date—1993's unforgivingly bland (but now charmingly archaic) Pablo Honey, 1995's grunge-in-repose record The Bends, and 1997's sonic-anomaly OK Computer.

Each record shows a distinct progression and by the time of the millennium switch, Radiohead unveiled their ticky-tacky, digitally deconstructed electronic future. In that all-too-telling post-Y2K way, Kid A and it's sister record Amnesiac (released a year later), were loaded with digital fractures that would have been unacceptable if it weren't for the end of the world not coming at midnight on December 31st, 1999.

Kid A was hauntingly large at the time of its release, expelling itself like the collective sigh of the '90s, blowing everything else released that year out of critic's top ratings, and still managing to stump just about everyone who listened to it. But now it's 2011, and Radiohead, while still a potent artistic force, are becoming just another one of those bands that only matches their listener's expectations, rather than actually exceeding them.

Obviously I'm not the only one noticing this: even the BBC, the bastion of all that is relatively unfunny and straight-laced, is right there with me. Turns out there are plenty of folks out there who share an exhaustion of Thom Yorke's silly dancing and Johnny Greenwood's spasmodic guitar arm, and as this video posits, there are support groups out there for us.

So have a chuckle at the expense of a band that once was "it," and still is in many ways. Radiohead now represent the heights that all great alternative bands wish to achieve while they are still together, but be careful to never, ever say OK Computer is overrated.