Motherfucker finally makes sense. God, aren’t you sick to death of Derrick de Kerckhove?
Look, I don’t care how shitty your day has been: You simply cannot be unhappy at the sight of girls in beehive haircuts and tall boots standing on circular platforms flowing their arms up and down straight ahead of them in that classic go-go dance.
At any rate, on an episode of Telescope, 1967, entitled (inevitably) “McLuhan Is the Message,” McLuhan blithely sat around a fantabulous go-go bar decorated with 45 singles (not, sadly, of “Teenage Kicks”) tacked to a wall. As go-go girls and one go-go boy go-go danced onstage, he looked a bit put upon and declaimed:
They still think in the old patterns, 19th-century patterns, but they live mythically. They live surrounded by mythic monsters like go-go girls. [At the bar] Aren’t they going to turn that down? “Waiting for go-go.” “The medium is the message.” “Growing – growing up absurd.” The go-go girls ordinarily have a cage… [winces] while appearing to manifest their energies untrammelled, unconstrained, sound in this kind of world is not used as something to be listened to. It is a kind of foam rubber which you press against/it presses back against you, makes you feel kind of wanted. Sound, in the new world, of dance and song is not for listening. It’s for making. And so the go-go girls, locked up each in her little world, represents a kind of theatre of the absurd, in which all communication has broken down. In fact, no attempt is really made to communicate. Each puts on his own show in his own little straitjacket.
Rip, mix, burn, try on that miniskirt, &c.