AS I mentioned earlier today, Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) constructed an interesting and eccentric duality between the human eye and the human ear. In 1944, in an article he produced about Wyndham Lewis for St. Louis University, McLuhan claimed that

“modern man has long lost the use of his eyes. He only has ears and those for the Napoleonic and romantic thunder of Beethoven, the turgid and dionysiac megalomania of Wagner, the erotic day-dreaming of Tschaikowsky, or the tom-tom and African bottom-wagging of swing called to rut.”

More than seventy years on, of course, the majority of modern men have abandoned Classical music altogether and only managed to maintain interest in the latter, but McLuhan’s thoughts on the decline of the eye in favour of the ear have clearly been disproven by the poor standards of contemporary music and the current fascination for image and spectacle. Not to mention, either, the fact that whilst swing has gone out of fashion entirely, ‘bottom-wagging’ has – if you will excuse the pun – been elevated to such an extent that musical accompaniment is purely secondary in terms of having been displaced by the comparative visualisation of the activity itself.

This may sound like a very pompous and long-winded explanation for the decline of Western culture, or at least part of it, but there is always some value in making comparisons between the social observations of the past and the unimaginable, ill-conceived and unforeseen levels to which we have descended today. Civilisation has collapsed around our ears, our ears have collapsed completely (according to McLuhan) and the rear-end is nigh… bottoms up, everyone!