Parenting & Family Quote by Colin Greenwood

Radiohead’s biggest flex in the Kid A/Amnesiac era is that the “rock band” signifier gets demoted. Colin Greenwood’s line is a backstage admission of intent: the guitar isn’t abolished, it’s anonymized. It stops being the instrument that points at the listener and says, here’s the riff, here’s the hook, here’s the heroic center. Instead it dissolves into the mix like weather.

That phrasing, “one more texture,” is doing cultural work. Texture is a producer’s word, not a guitarist’s word; it belongs to electronic music, film sound, ambient, musique concrete. Greenwood is quietly reframing what counts as musicianship: less fingers-on-strings virtuosity, more sound-design thinking. The subtext is a rejection of the guitar-as-personality model that dominated alt-rock in the ’90s. If OK Computer was anxiety set to stadium-sized guitars, Kid A and Amnesiac are anxiety rendered as systems: loops, ghost chords, processed edges, sounds you feel before you recognize.

“Difficult to separate” points to the listening experience they engineered. These records invite you to lose track of sources, to hear instruments as shapes moving in a shared space. It’s also a strategic move against genre policing: if the guitar can’t be cleanly identified, the band can’t be cleanly filed under “guitar music,” either. In the early-2000s moment of post-Y2K unease and rising digital life, that blur reads like a thesis statement: identity, even sonic identity, is unstable on purpose.