Episode 80: The Pit and the Pyramid, or, How to Beat the Philosopher's Blues

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2020

⏱️ 78 minutes

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Summary

Your hosts' exploration of mysticism and vision in pop music continues with two powerful pieces of popular music: Radiohead's "Pyramid Song" from the 2001 album Amnesiac, and Fran Landesman and Tommy Wolf's "Ballad of the Sad Young Men," from the 1959 Broadway musical The Nervous Set. Synchronicity rears its head as the dialogue reveals how these two gems, selected by JF and Phil with no expectation that they might form a set, begin to glow when placed side by side, amplifying and focussing each other's eldritch light. This episode touches on Neoplatonic myths of spiritual ascent, African-American spirituals, Plato's realm of Forms, Gnosticism, dream visitations by the dearly departed, the travails of the Beat generation, the objectivity of hope, the implosion of America, and that particularly modern condition of the soul which Phil calls the "Philosopher's Blues." REFERENCES Radiohead, "Pyramid Song" Fran Landesman and Tommy Wolf, "The Ballad of the Sad Young Men" Edgar Allan Poe, "The Pit and the Pendulum" Charles Mingus, Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Plato, Phaedrus Plato, Republic Plato's Unwritten Doctrines The Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast, episode 69: "Plutarch's Myths of Cosmic Ascent" William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience Pierre Hadot, French philosopher Algis Uzdavynis, Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth: From Ancient Egypt to Neoplatonism Charles Taylor, Canadian philosopher Phil Ford, "The Philosopher’s Blues" (Weird Studies Patreon exclusive) Peter Sloterdijk, German philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure, French linguist JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice JF Martel, "Stay With Mystery: Hiroshima Mon Amour, Melancholia, and the Truth of Extinction" in Canadian Notes & Queries, issue 106: Winter 2020, edited by Sharon English and Patricia Robertson Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction Jay Landesman and Theodore J. Flicker, The Nervous Set, musical Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture Jay Landesman, American publisher and writer Marshall McLuhan, "The Psychopathology of 'Time & Life'" Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man William Butler Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium" Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country For Old Men Mike Duncan (Twitter) Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:20.8	For more episodes or to support the podcast,
0:23.3	go to weirdst. I'm J.F. Martel.
0:52.3	This is the second of two episodes this summer devoted to what you
0:56.7	might call the mysticism of pop music. Longtime listeners will recall that we perform this experiment
1:02.4	once before in episodes 27 and 28 of the podcast. The idea then and now was for Phil and I to each
1:10.6	pick two pieces of music that spoke to
1:12.6	us, give them a listen, and then have a discussion. In the last episode, Love, Death, and the
1:18.1	Dream Life, we talked about Nina Simone's version of James Shelton's lilac wine and Ghostface
1:23.6	Killers underwater. Today our focus is on Radiohead's Pyramid Song from the 2001 album Amnesiac,
1:30.7	and Fran Landiseman and Tommy Wolfe's Ballad of the Sad Young Men,
1:34.5	from the 1959 Broadway musical The Nervous Set.
1:37.7	Astute listeners will see in the title we chose for this episode, The Pit and the Pyramid,
1:41.9	a play on the famous Edgar Allan Poe short story,
1:45.6	The Pit and the Pendulum, first published in 1842.
1:49.4	While that story doesn't come up in the conversation you're about to hear, a few words on it
1:54.4	are, I think, in order, since it shares the central theme of our conversation, namely
1:59.9	existential despair, or what Phil called the Philosopher's Blues in a recent essay.
2:06.3	Poe's story is well known. A man is imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition. We never learn the nature of his crimes, but his judges have deemed them serious enough to warrant a particularly sadistic form of execution.
2:20.1	Strapped to a table, the prisoner is forced to watch as a great scythe swings on a pendulum above him,
2:26.9	descending one step lower with each swing.
	...

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