Joseph Tate's book of Radiohead essays is due early in 2005

Joseph Tate, an English instructor at Oregon State University, has edited The Music and Art of Radiohead, a collection of academic essays on the band due early in 2005. Ashgate, the publisher, has taken pre-orders since March for a January release in paperback and hardback. Tate told Shannon Salyer of the campus paper, The Daily Barometer, how his colleagues usually answer when he mentions the book.

At least with faculty members, the response is most often, 'Who is Radiohead?' Or as someone asked me, 'So what is the music of Eraserhead like?'

Joseph Tate¹

Tate, who is finishing a doctorate at the University of Washington, has already brought the band into his own classes. He has taught “Optimistic” alongside Orwell's Animal Farm, and used the “Paranoid Android” video in a class on censorship, since parts of it were cut in the US and Canada.

It was Kid A that moved him to put out a call for papers on the internet, and the essays he chose come from the US, Canada, Australia and the UK. He knew few of the writers beforehand, several only by name, and picked their work for how it fitted together and for its range. Some essays study the songs themselves, tracing influences from avant-garde classical composers to the Pixies; others take the band as a cultural product, down to their place in the global economy.

He also invited two writers himself: Paul Lansky, the composer whose music supplies the sample in “Idioteque”, and the rock scholar Kevin Dettmar, who writes the foreword.

Overall, the approach is more intellectual than fan-based. But all the contributors were fans to begin with.

Joseph Tate¹