In this brief and entertaining clip from the late-night ITV program Rocking In The UK circa 1989, Pere Ubu frontman/lifeblood David Thomas responds to the questioner’s innocuous-only-maybe-not question about Thomas’ perception of the various incarnations of Ubu over the years with an ontological disquisition guaranteed to blow the minds of undergraduates everywhere.

The answer seems a mite overdetermined, perhaps fitting for a band whom the admiring Allmusic.com refers to as having a “long, convoluted career” in the first sentence of their bio. So Thomas is overcompensating, right? But representing the Cleveland nonconformist (malcontent?) point of view, Thomas’ disquisition has a certain salience, n’est-ce pas?

For the sake of posterity, here’s the whole speech, which makes more sense if you know that he’s moving a styrofoam cup around and pointing at it through most of it.
 

You see, you look at that. You say, “That’s a cup. I’ll buy that cup, I recognize that cup.” But this cup is also this, and it’s that, and it’s looking at it this way and that way and all sorts of ways of looking at it. Now you wouldn’t buy that, you wouldn’t go to, they wouldn’t advertise a cup like this in a store and say “Buy this” ‘cause you’d say, “What’s that?” and you’d say, “Oh yeah, that’s a cup. Uhhhh, I don’t want to buy that. No, no.” But that’s the cup, too. All of this is the cup. So you have to see it from all different angles. You know, one album we do is gonna be like this, and you’re saying, “Well that’s not a… I’m not gonna buy that, that’s not a cup. That’s a… I don’t know what that is.” That’s the cup. This is the cup, that’s the cup, that’s the cup. So we set out to do a career in which you would see, you would look at something like this. You would look at Pere Ubu like this, you would look at what we’re talking about like this, and you would know what a cup was. If you only know a cup this way, you don’t know the cup. Thank you and good night.

 
If you want to hear some of the band’s early high points, you can’t miss with The Modern Dance or Dub Housing or you can get the essential early box set Datapanik in the Year Zero.