radiohead and philosophy

With the death of British writer JG Ballard yesterday, BBC News had this to say about his influence on Radiohead’s philosophy:

“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).

Buy Radiohead and Philosophy

Buy books by JG Ballard

J G Ballard, RIP