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Shakespeare scholar Joseph Tate edits a book of Radiohead essays
first posted on Treefingers by Miro · rewritten for the archive
Joseph Tate, a graduate student at the University of Washington who is writing his dissertation on Shakespeare, is editing The Music and Art of Radiohead, a book of academic essays, Travis Hay reports in The Daily.
His favourite essay is “My Radiohead Adventure” by Paul Lansky, a Princeton professor. In the 1970s Lansky made a piece of computer music on punch cards, and Jonny Greenwood later found it and sampled it on “Idioteque”.
Tate fell for the band with Kid A when it came out in October 2000, and the unfamiliar sounds on it sent him looking for more. As a teenager he had been drawn to Michael Stipe's half-mumbled lyrics with R.E.M., and the words on Kid A held the same pull.
At the time, I had never heard any type of music like it.
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He runs a Radiohead website, pulk-pull.org, which looks at the band's artwork, their advertising and their other oddities. One of its first pieces traced the line “Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea” in “In Limbo” to the BBC shipping forecast; he is now working on the hidden message in “2+2=5”, whose title comes from George Orwell's 1984.
He sent out a call for academic papers on a mailing list. More than 30 replied, and he has chosen 11 contributors. The UK publisher Ashgate will put the book out, with no release date set yet. Tate's own essay looks at their internet advertising campaigns.
The close reading has not spoiled the music for him. The more I think about their music and the more I analyze it, [my interest] doesn't die.
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