Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Massage” resonates stronger than ever, a free-form, jazz-infused, cacophony of spoken word and appropriated collage of sonic sampling: a 1960s meditation on the effect of media culture and its power to transform the sensorial, as Arthur Rimbaud described it, the “disorientation of the senses.”
The original vinyl LP is simply the mother of all remixes.
The recording has also been re-released on CD by Five Day Weekend, but I suspect that anyone truly interested in the work, will use methods of appropriation in order to steal it blind from multiple locations around the web. It is the nature of this obscure audio work to hack your way into it’s gold mine of poetic musings.
The Medium is the Message is nothing less than an “electric information retrieval, a simultaneous happening, the tribalizing process” made visceral.
As McLuhan says (spoken in a child’s voice):
It is the business of the future to be dangerous.
Proper guidance for every young artist today!