Radiohead and Philosophy

Author: Brandon W. Forbes
Publisher: Open Court
ISBN: 0812697006
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
Since their breakthrough hit "Creep" in 1993, Radiohead has continued to make waves throughout popular and political culture with its views about the Bush presidency (its 2003 album was titled Hail to the Thief), its anti-corporatism, its pioneering efforts to produce ecologically sound road tours, and, most of all, its decision in 2007 to sell its latest album, In Rainbows, online with a controversial "pay-what-you-want" price. Radiohead and Philosophy offers fresh ways to appreciate the lyrics, music, and conceptual ground of this highly innovative band. The chapters in this book explain how Radiohead’s music connects directly to the philosophical phenomenology of thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, the existentialism of Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre, and the philosophical politics of Karl Marx, Jean Baudrillard, and Noam Chomsky. Fans and critics know that Radiohead is "the only band that matters" on the scene today — Radiohead and Philosophy shows why.

Dexter and Philosophy

Author: Richard Greene
Publisher: Open Court
ISBN: 081269726X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
What explains the huge popular following for Dexter, currently the most-watched show on cable, which sympathetically depicts a serial killer driven by a cruel compulsion to brutally slay one victim after another? Although Dexter Morgan kills only killers, he is not a vigilante animated by a sense of justice but a charming psychopath animated by a lust to kill, ritualistically and bloodily. However his gory appetite is controlled by “Harry’s Code,” which limits his victims to those who have gotten away with murder, and his job as a blood spatter expert for the Miami police department gives him the inside track on just who those legitimate targets may be. In Dexter and Philosophy, an elite team of philosophers don their rubber gloves and put Dexter’s deeds under the microscope. Since Dexter is driven to ritual murder by his “Dark Passenger,” can he be blamed for killing, especially as he only murders other murderers? Does Dexter fit the profile of the familiar fictional type of the superhero? What part does luck play in making Dexter who he is? How and why are horror and disgust turned into aesthetic pleasure for the TV viewer? How essential is Dexter’s emotional coldness to his lust for slicing people up? Are Dexter’s lies and deceptions any worse than the lies and deceptions of the non-criminals around him? Why does Dexter long to be a normal human being and why can’t he accomplish this apparently simple goal?

Everything in Its Right Place

Author: Brad Osborn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190629231
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
Everything in its Right Place identifies the secret to Radiohead's immense commercial and critical success in the band's ability to navigate a sweet spot between expectation and surprise. The author uses tools from musical perception, semiotics, and music theory to demonstrate this reconciliation of extremes, and analyzes musical meaning with lyrics, biographical details, and intertextual relationships.

The Mystic Experience

Author: Jordan Paper
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791484289
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Book Description
The mystic, zero, or void experience—the ecstatic disappearance of self along with everything else—is considered by those who have had it to be the most beautiful, blissful, positive, profound, and significant experience of their lives. Offering both a descriptive and a comparative perspective, this book explores the mystic experience across cultures as both a human and cultural event. The book begins and ends with descriptions of the author's own mystical experiences, and looks at self-reported experiences by individuals who do not link their experiences to a religious tradition, to determine characteristics of this universal human experience. These characteristics are compared to statements of acknowledged mystics in diverse religious traditions. The mystic experience is also situated within other ecstatic religious experiences to distinguish it from similar, but distinct, experiences such as lucid dreams, shamanism, and mediumism. Jordan Paper goes on to look at how the mystic experience has been considered in various fields, such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, biology, and comparative religious studies.

Kid A Mnesia

Author: Thom Yorke
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 1838857745
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Book Description
Whilst these records were being conceived, rehearsed, recorded and produced, Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood made hundreds of images. These ranged from obsessive, insomniac scrawls in biro to six-foot-square painted canvases, from scissors-and-glue collages to immense digital landscapes. They utilised every medium they could find, from sticks and knives to the emerging digital technologies. The work chronicles their obsessions at the time: minotaurs, genocide, maps, globalisation, monsters, pylons, dams, volcanoes, locusts, lightning, helicopters, Hiroshima, show homes and ring roads. What emerges is a deeply strange portrait of the years at the commencement of this century. A time that seems an age ago - but so much remains the same.

Led Zeppelin and Philosophy

Author: Scott Calef
Publisher: Open Court
ISBN: 0812697766
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Book Description
Led Zeppelin, who bestrode the world of rock like a colossus, have continually grown in popularity and influence since their official winding up in 1980. They exasperated critics and eluded classification, synthesizing blues, rock, folk, rockabilly, funk, classical, country, Indian, and Arabic techniques. They performed the alchemical trick of transmuting base led into gold—and platinum—and diamond. They did what they would, finding wisdom through personal excess and artistic self-discipline. “Not a coda to Zeppelin’s legacy, but a blast of metaphysical graffiti as relevant today as the first time we heard the opening chords of ‘Stairway to Heaven’. From Kant to ‘Kashmir’, from Freud to ‘Fool in the Rain’, Calef and company explore Zeppelin’s music in an introspective, suggestive manner worthy of both a blistering Page solo and a bawdy Bonham stomp.” —BRANDON W. FORBES, co-editor of Radiohead and Philosophy “Led Zeppelin’s albums, personalities, live performances, art work, myths, influences, and more, all come under the microscope. Compelling insights and observations add more depth to a subject that continues to thrill and inspire. Each chapter is driven by an unquenchable thirst for Zeppelin knowledge and pulls the reader deeper into the world of Led Zeppelin . . .” —DAVE LEWIS, editor, Tight But Loose

The Rolling Stones and Philosophy

Author: Luke Dick
Publisher: Open Court Publishing
ISBN: 0812697588
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
From their commanding role in the so-called British Invasion of the early 1960s to their status as the elder statesmen (and British Knight) of rock and roll, the Stones have become more than an evanescent phenomenon in pop culture. They have become a touchstone not only for the history of our times--their performance at the Altamont Raceway marked the "end of the sixties," while their 1990 concert in Prague helped Czechoslovakia and other eastern bloc nations celebrate their newfound freedom (and satisfaction) out from under Moscow's thumb. Because of their longevity, the music and career of the Stones--much more than The Beatles--stand as touchstones in the personal lives of even casual Stones fans. Everyone of a certain age remembers the Stones on Ed Sullivan, the death of founder Brian Jones, their favorite songs, concerts, or videos, and their stance in the classic "Beatles versus Stones" debates. In the wake of Keith Richards's bestselling autobiography, Life (2010), many are now reliving these events and decades from the viewpoint of the band's endearing and seemingly death-defying guitarist. The chapters in The Rolling Stones and Philosophy celebrate the Stones' place in our lives by digging into the controversies, the symbols, and meanings the band and its songs have for so many. What might you mean (and what did Mick mean) by "sympathy for the Devil"? Did the Stones share any of the blame for the deaths at Altamont, as critic Lester Bangs charged they did in Rolling Stone magazine? What theories of ethics and personality lay behind the good-boy image of the Beatles and the bad-boy reputation the Stones acquired? If Keith Richards really had his blood replaced four separate times, does that make him a zombie? How do the Glimmer Twins help us refine our understanding of friendship? Written by a dozen philosophers and scholars who adore the Rolling Stones not only for their music, this book will become required reading for anyone seeking maximum satisfaction from "the world's greatest rock and roll band."

Humor

Author: Stanley Donwood
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571312454
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 131

Book Description
There was disaster coming; that was blindingly obvious. Life had been almost ridiculously easy, and now things were going to get worse. Much, much worse. I couldn't believe that I had ever thought otherwise. I couldn't believe that I'd ever thought that there could be any other outcome. Stanley Donwood's fictional universe is one in which anything can happen, and frequently does. Disappearances (people, things) are everyday. Relationships are unstable. Nature has turned unnatural. It's the kind of world (the kind of book) in which you might walk into a room only to find, that room, has ... no ... floor. A substantial selection of Stanley's fiction over the past ten years or so, (title) shows a contemporary master of the micro narrative. Apocalyptic, funny, unsettling and hallucinogenic in their intensity, Stanley Donwood's stories present a series of haunting episodes in a world drained of meaning, sense and consequence.

Fear Stalks the Land!

Author: Thom Yorke
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 1838857753
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Book Description
In which the writings of the authors Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood are gathered together. This commonplace book includes faxes, notes, fledgling lyrics, sketches, lists of all kinds and scribblings towards nirvana, as were sent between the two authors during the period 1999 to 2000 during the creation of the Radiohead albums Kid A and Amnesiac. This is a document of the creative process and a mirror to the fears, portents and fantasies invoked by the world as its citizens faced a brave new millennium.

Bad Island

Author: Stanley Donwood
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324001860
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 91

Book Description
A starkly beautiful, wordless graphic novel about the end of the world by the cult artist and longtime Radiohead collaborator. A wild seascape, a distant island, a full moon. Gradually the island grows nearer until we land on a primeval wilderness, rich in vegetation and huge, strange beasts. Time passes and man appears, with clubs, with spears, with crueler weapons still—and things do not go well for the wilderness. Civilization rises as towers of stone and metal and smoke choke the undergrowth and the creatures that once moved through it. This is not a happy story, and it will not have a happy ending. Working in his distinctive, monochromatic linocut style, Stanley Donwood achieves with his art what words cannot convey, carving out a mesmerizing, stark parable of environmental disaster and the end of civilization.