Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [2]
VOLUME 35
Star Trek and Philosophy: The Wrath of Kant (2008) Edited by Jason T. Eberl and Kevin S. Decker
VOLUME 36
The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy: I Link Therefore I Am (2008) Edited by Luke Cuddy
VOLUME 37
The Wizard of Oz and Philosophy: Wicked Wisdom of the West (2008) Edited by Randall E. Auxier and Phillip S. Seng
VOLUME 38 Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter Happier More Deductive (2009) Edited by Brandon W. Forbes and George A. Reisch
IN PREPARATION:
Jimmy Buffett and Philosophy (2009) Edited by Erin McKenna and Scott L. Pratt
Stephen Colbert and Philosophy (2009) Edited by Aaron Allen Schiller
Transformers and Philosophy (2009) Edited by John R. Shook and Liz Stillwaggon Swan
Supervillains and Philosophy (2009) Edited by Ben Dyer The Golden Compass and Philosophy (2009) Edited by Richard Greene and Rachel Robison
World of Warcraft and Philosophy (2009) Edited by Luke Cuddy and John Nordlinger
Anime and Philosophy (2009) Edited by Josef Steiff and Tristan D. Tamplinin
1 Step
Phew. For a minute there, we lost ourselves. We were about to publish this book without a price and ask Radiohead fans to pay what they want for it. But then we remembered. While the music industry was up-ended in 2007 by the debut of In Rainbows and other albums distributed by artists themselves, the world of book publishing remains a few steps behind. For now, at least.
Philosophy, though, has no difficulty keeping up with Radiohead. We had a pretty good hunch going into it, but putting this book together made it plain to us that there are good reasons why Radiohead has succeeded The Clash as ‘The Only Band that Matters’. Some of those reasons are philosophical. Not that Radiohead says much about competing theories of truth or subtleties of the mind-body problem (for humans or androids). Instead of abstractions, Radiohead’s music points toward philosophical analyses of actual experiences in the world. Yes, some of these experiences were analyzed by Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, but others belong exclusively to us, here and now. As Mark Greif put it in his groundbreaking essay, “Radiohead, or the Philosophy of Pop” (included here), Radiohead not only suggests the question, ‘How should it really ever be possible for pop music to incarnate a particular historical situation?’ They show how it’s done.
Take the video for In Rainbows’ “House of Cards.” Because it uses cutting-edge three-dimensional modeling technology, we don’t actually ‘see’ Thom Yorke’s face as he sings the song and attends a neighborhood party. Instead, a rotating laser digitally captures the events, the people, and the houses. In our world, the video reminds us, only the underlying data matters—our very lives and selves, in many ways, are now digital. Radiohead pushes this insight to its artistic limit by making available the video’s source code so that end users (previously known as “fans” before our digital age) can manipulate and re-image the data for themselves. This is one of many philosophical spaces Radiohead has opened for us—spaces in which their music, their worldview, and their encounter with the world can connect to our own.
Whether it’s because of their Oxford pedigree or just raw talent and intelligence, Radiohead’s effortless fusion of Joe Strummer’s politics with the technological interrogation of the Talking Heads (to whom they owe their name) leads all of the scholars in this book to fascinating and new encounters with philosophy. From Heidegger’s phenomenology and the manipulation of Yorke’s voice on Kid A, to Marx’s take on the “pay-what-youwant” model of distribution, to the pathos of Aristotelian tragedy unfolding in so many Radiohead songs, each of these encounters engages our understanding of our historical situation in all its beauty, its terror, and its unimagined possibilities.
This is philosophy in the twenty-first century. But judging by the philosophical visions of Radiohead in these chapters, the light has not gone out.
Anyone Can Play Philosophy.(yes yes yes yes yes