Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground

Out of much of the music I have been listening to in the last month or so, Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground's "Bowie the Desert Pea" is one of my favorites. There is something very 70s pop rock about this particularly song. And given the promotional photos of them, this sound is very much on purpose. The song "Birds (On A Day Like Today)" has a Paul McCartney feel to it, but not so much his work with the Beatles as his later band, Wings. Their songs are often very lush, especially in "Oh Lord, I Hate You California," and they employ a large number of musicians in their live shows to achieve that sound.
Kay Kay is associated with Gatsby's American Dream (they share a member), another band that is polyretro, drawing from a wide variety of genres for inspiration.

One of the other fascinating things about this band is how often they release their work on non-modern forms, like cassette tapes and vinyl records. Given their retro sound, this is all too fitting and is evocative of McLuhan's ideas of "the medium is the message" mantra, though in a way McLuhan may not have anticipated.

McLuhan's Religion and the Influence of Media

Carrying on from yesterday's post, Wired magazine has an article discussing McLuhan and a recent documentary on him. The article mentions that McLuhan converted to Catholicism but that why isn't made clear. But if you read the Wikipedia article, you know it's because of G.K. Chesterton, the English writer.

Most of us don't consider how media effects us, but obviously McLuhan was hyper-aware of it. Moreover, we are even less likely to think about how books affect us, especially if we're not the kind of people to see books as media because of how old they are. McLuhan, even at a young age, saw the effect that Chesterton had on him, because it changed him into a religious man. Given McLuhan's own account of what made him convert, it seems obvious he would one day turn around and see other forms of media as having large influence on people, even if they were converting to a very different form of religion.