Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [135]
JERE O’NEILL SURBER is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Theory at the University of Denver as well as a working musician. He was an (abject) graduate student at the Pennsylvania State University and the University of Bonn (Germany) and has taught at the University of Mainz (Germany) and the Katholieke Universiteit-Leuven (Belgium). He has long been intrigued by Julia Kristeva’s idea of ‘the abject’ and its artistic expressions but never really knew what it sounded like until he started listening to Radiohead. He’s written several books and articles (including some in the Popular Culture and Philosophy series) on German Idealism, Postmodern Philosophy and Culture, and Aesthetics.
JOHN SYLVIA IV is completing his M.A. in philosophy at The University of Southern Mississippi. During his undergraduate work at Mississippi State University, he had to road trip four hours to New Orleans in order to see Radiohead live. It’s likely that this caused him to miss a few philosophy classes when he overslept the next morning. Now that he finds himself in the role of an instructor, he has so far been unable to convince his department that a field trip to a Radiohead concert is a worthy endeavor for his philosophy students (but perhaps this book will change that).
JOSEPH TATE published The Music And Art Of Radiohead (Ashgate) in 2005 and has lectured internationally on the band. “Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea,” the lyrics beginning Kid A’s “In Limbo,” confused Joseph so much he tracked down their source to a BBC Weather Shipping Forecast. He has cherished and nurtured his happy misunderstandings of Radiohead’s obscurity since that time. He is a writer living in Seattle.
MICHAEL L. THOMPSON is currently finishing his dissertation for a Ph.D. at the University of South Florida. His research interests focus around Immanuel Kant and the Imagination. He has also published on the connection between sublimity and tragedy as well as African philosophy. His first appreciation of the power and refinement of Radiohead’s music came during a long drive through the Rocky Mountains while listening to Pablo Honey.
DYLAN E. WITTKOWER teaches philosophy at Coastal Carolina University and studies how technology either encourages or prevents the formation of collaborative creative communities. In other words, he is like a “Web 2.0” tech geek, except with a whole lot more fretting, fussing, and Marxist rhetoric. He has recorded audiobooks of numerous philosophy texts, which may be downloaded at librivox.org. He edited iPod and Philosophy (2008). He also wants you to go to YouTube and watch the video for “All I Need.”
PERRY OWEN WRIGHT lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is a songwriter and musician, composing albums engaging the ideas of uncertainty and fidelity through a host of narrative frameworks as varied as the Jonestown event of 1978 to works of fiction and even tedious philosophy. Surprisingly, Radiohead has never asked his band, The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers, to open a world tour for them or even to get coffee. But this one time in Charlotte, Thom Yorke contextualized one of the songs from the In Rainbows material as, “This is when you just got laid,” and sitting in the audience, Perry credited that as a follow-up interview with the artist for his chapter in this volume. He has a master’s of divinity from Duke, where he traded the cow