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

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