The part most worth reading asks:

“Can great art be great political art?  Two of the worst books you will ever read are two of the most renown[ed] pieces of political fiction there are: Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.  Instead of choking down three pounds of half-rate prose, read George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, a much more personal, much less political work.  And maybe that is the answer: the best art is timeless and personal art.  Political art cannot be either, by definition.”

But maybe not. Especially when there is more in the music in question than is contained in your definition.  Take Phil Och’s “I aint’ Marchin Anymore.” It’s from a different time, the 60s, and it’s about the war propaganda throughout history (i.e. timeless).  And Ochs sounds more personal and genuine than any other folk singers of the time ripping off Woody Guthrie and dreaming of the bigtime in New York City (which Ochs did not do, though there was that strange album cover showing him in a sequined suit.  But I digress).

Or take Radiohead’s “Exit Music (for a film),” which seems to fuse Shakespeare’s old tale with illicit loves from any decade you like to pick. Timeless, personal, grammy-winning (even), and political.  Scratch that: just read Jerome Melancon’s “The Real Politics in Radiohead,” Chapter 12.

Tonight, we ride

Music blog The Meteor Cannot Be Stopped recently interviewed my co-editor Brandon Forbes concerning Radiohead, philosophy, and everything. Interview chunks below:

Part 1 and Part 2

Another trailer in support of Radiohead and Philosophy. The footage of “The Bends” comes from a live show in Atlanta in 2001.

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Compare this version to the below original off of Kid A:

Interesting competing versions, are they not?

In Chapter 16 of Radiohead and Philosophy, entitled “The Mutilation of Voice in Kid A (Or, My John Mayer Problem),” Adam Koehler takes the task of comparing these two versions as an important philosophical problem concerning contemporary culture. Looking to German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Koehler asks why Yorke’s voice on “Kid A” is so disconcerting, yet so familiar. He finds the answer in the electronic saturation of technology that surrounds us. As he relates, Kid A

at once shows us how popular rock music can point us toward the synthetic, technological textures of our lives that we’ve come to depepend on while at the same time enacting how we have come to accomodate the dangers and anxieties that such dependencies produce.

In a sense, it is the avoidance of these dangers in Mayer’s cover that gives Koehler such difficulty in accepting it. Yorke’s “Kid A,” on the other hand, embraces “the will to face the technological saturation of our cultural moment and to try not only to make sense out of it, but to make it sing.”

Interesting in learning more about Koehler’s argument?

Read all of Chapter 16: “The Mutilation of Voice in Kid A (Or, My John Mayer Problem)”

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A fan of the book and the band has released this trailer in support of Radiohead and Philosophy. The footage of “Pearly” comes from a live show in Atlanta in 2001.

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Established in October of 2007, Publish Chicago covers news and analysis of the Chicago publishing industry.

Published in April of 2009, Radiohead and Philosophy offers insight into the philosophy surrounding Radiohead’s music. For a look at the Table of Contents, click here.

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“Not a band to simply knock out two-minute pop songs on unrequited love, Radiohead condensed Ballard’s preoccupation with the spectacle of tragedy – most famously explored in the story Crash – into some of their most celebrated work. OK Computer, their 1997 album, includes two songs influenced by Ballard’s worldview. Opener Airbag describes a car crash almost in slow motion – “In a fast German car/ I’m amazed that I survived/An airbag saved my life” – while the haunting Lucky relates a near-death experience in a crashing airliner. Singer Thom Yorke, never one to wear his esoteric pursuits lightly, blogged excerpts of Ballard’s anti-consumerist novel Kingdom Come in the run up to the release of the band’s 2007 album In Rainbows.”

To read more about Radiohead’s Ballardian exploration of the tragic and its relationship to technology, try these moments in Radiohead and Philosophy:

• Chapter 1, “Is Radiohead the Pink Floyd of the 21st-Century?,” where George Reisch outlines Yorke’s preoccupation with “the fragility of our advanced, technological civilization” as evidenced in OK Computer (pgs. 7-9).
• Chapter 6, “Why Such Sad Songs?,” where Micah Lott explores how the tragedy found in Radiohead’s songs resonates with us in a way that helps us understand what it means to be human (pgs. 78-79).
• Chapter 11, “Nietzsche, Nihilism, and Hail to the Thief,” where Devon Lougheed discusses how the survival of tragedy in “Lucky” is a stepping stone on the way to the Ubermensch (pgs. 142-43).
• Chapter 14, “Where Power Ends and Violence Begins,” where Brandon Forbes treats the survivors of “Lucky” and “Airbag” as metaphors for Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality (pgs. 175-176).

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J G Ballard, RIP

As the introduction to the book states, “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 21st-century. But judging by the philosophical visions of Radiohead in these chapters, the light has not gone out.”

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Wake, from your sleep

Stream or download this chapter as a podcast. (mp3, 7.6 MB)

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iPod and Philosophy, ed. by D.E.Wittkower