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Radiohead’s surprising collaboration with Epic Games is out now. The Kid A Mnesia Exhibition is a virtual environment designed to accompany and celebrate Radiohead’s classic Kid A and Amnesiac albums. It’s an odd project, but it’s one that makes sense for a band that are often experimental and technologically progressive.
Then they’ve also made items and costumes available for Rocket League, Fall Guys and Fortnite, turning Radiohead into just another brand to be engaged with in Epic’s dull metaversal future.
The Fortnite and Rocket League items are fairly straightforward, with a flag for Rocket League and a song to play in the in-game lobby and a custom loading screen for Fortnite. In Fall Guys, however, you can now dress as the crying minotaur from the cover of Amnesiac.
The crying minotaur was designed by Stanley Donwood, an English illustrator who creates all the artwork for Radiohead with Thom Yorke. As part of an exhibition of his work, Donwood reportedly once described the crying minotaur as an interpetation of the original Greek myth, “a monster aware of his fate, conscious of his isolation, his own imprisonment and of the abhorrence and fear he causes to all who see him.”
Anyway here it is as a bean:
We’ve teamed up with @Radiohead to bring their Crying Minotaur costume to the game!
5 👑 (Radio) Head
5 👑 (Radio) Butt pic.twitter.com/IYE2phVlhz— Santa from Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) November 19, 2021
I’m not a huge Radiohead fan or anything. It’s also important to not take yourself too seriously, and for all their pompous sadness, Radiohead do have a sense of humour.
But I also feel it’s important to say when things are shite. This seemingly endless trend of Funko Poping every cultural work, rendering it as a contextless bauble which exists only to be owned, is total shite. Radiohead participating in it is so incongruous as to just be funny, but the broader trend, god, I’m so tired.
The virtual Kid A Mnesia exhibition is available free from the Epic Games Store now.