Whenever I read about the Beatles, their world, the explosion of creation at that time and how exhausted and fragmented popular culture is now I always think of Tony soprano’s comment that “it's good to be in something from the ground floor….
lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end….”
I have often found it amusingly ironic that the decade when the Americans were at the peak of their civilizational self-confidence, economic dominance, and political stability, the 1960s, was also the decade when they briefly lost their status as lodestar for mass culture around the world which they gained around the time of World War 1.
In the 1960s, everything "cool" was European. Film brats explored the latest in French New Wave (not to mention Swedish sex films). Rock n Roll, which began in the 1950s as an American genre, was taken over by the British.
There were also an explosion of wildly successful films from Blighty or based there like the James Bond films or Mary Poppins.
Even Westerns, perhaps the most quintessentially American genre, were taken over by the Italians of all people! And they were one of the losers of WWII!
It often strikes me that the Beatles, who's music I cherish, played the part of Coleridge's Psyche in relation British Popular music - they served "to deform and kill the things whereon we feed".
They were fed, omnivorously and superabundently, on 1000 years of British songmaking and folk tradition - hymns, ballads, lyrics, nonsense, laments, ditties, lays, romances and so on. All amplified by a reflected and refracted, electrified, American youth culture to such a pitch of frenetic overproduction, that they exhausted the ground upon which they reaped.
Frankly, their genius was too fertile and unrestrained. All that has come after in British popular music, truth be told, has been mere footnotes.
They left nothing to-the -next-man and, like Fergusson or Burns in Scotland, what appeared ar the time to be a renaissance was really the last bright flash of a culture passing away for ever.
There is no question, to my mind, that they belong - in their own proper sphere - alongside Chaucer, Shakespeare and Eliot as a way-marker to the succeeding stages of Britjsh cultural life.
That's an excellent analysis which I read while I was watching "Eight Days a Week". This time it was the music of 1964 which sounds like it's on a different planet from 1963 (e.g. She Loves You). That first note of "I Feel Fine" which goes on like forever for a #1 Single. Contrast the abrupt start , chorus first, of "Can't Buy Me Love". I read a book a long tome ago (by Albert Goldman? - I might be remembering this wrong) that all Lennon songs went Do-Ra-Mi while McCartney's were much more melodically inventive and that formula generally works especially in the early songs which they genuinely co-wrote.
Shakespeare seemed to love jokes about “bare bodkins” which is pretty Tarbuckesque. The plays at The Globe - as I am sure you know - started out as rumbustious affairs, with lots of sword fights and sound effects, with the actors breaking into acrobatics for no obvious reason, and with much noisy interaction with the audience, most of whom had paid a penny or so to get in and weren’t interested in hifalutin stuff about the meaning of life - that came later.
Not totally sure about that - though there are indeed elements of slapstick in The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night's Dream
Apparently the big draw was an actor called Will something (not Shakespeare) who was like I describe, then there was a big bust-up and the actor Will was ousted, after which the plays became more cerebral.
'“Why is it always Bobby Kennedy or John Lennon? Why isn’t it Richard Nixon or Paul McCartney?”’ Grotesque, and unfair, but it took many decades for this narrative to shift' - This reminds me of a barb (with a dose more British tongue in cheek) in Private Eye about 20 years ago which stated that the Beatles were dying in descending order of popularity.
Ah, the good old "questions of value". I must admit it often disturbs me how much the Beatles are intertwined with sociology, because it's where, I think, all the faults of rock criticism come to light- ie the divorce from eternity and the work of art as a product of its time only. I really feel like I can't understand them artistically as much as I would like because of the mythological narrative around the Sixties. I know it sounds cruel, but we need even more distance in time, and less boomer ideological intrusiveness in our mind and ears to fully understand the Beatles and put them in the canon.
C.S Lewis once wrote of the poet Thomas Wyatt that we must always remember that all his verses were intended to be sung, after dinner, in mixed and courtly company and then when we approach his ouvre artificially and through the printed book we are misled and assailed by the monotony of it all.
Peter Seller's, still hilarious, send up of the essential siliness of so much of what the Beatles wrote is funny because it deliberately misses the point in the same way.
These are beautiful songs, precious stones, which cannot bear the sociological burdens placed on them by their well-intentioned critics. As a vehicle for a 'mythological narrative' as you put it so well, they will always be failures.
But allowed to stand, like the Songs of Burns or the Hesperides of Robert Herrick, they will endure.
I never liked the Beatles. To me they were a marketing creation who came to take their fame too seriously, thinking of themselves as genius artists and always posing as what they were not. Their music was AI before AI. The only record I ever owned was the White Album, mostly because it came across to me as a fair imitation of genuine artists, the Rolling Stones. I always equated the Beatles as the equivalent of synthesizers contrasted with orchestras, pale imitation of singers and musicians, sort of a bubblegum band mixed with disco. While McCarthy was plastic, John was pretense all the way.
The Beatles weren't a marketing creation; they came from a genuine club scene. Their earlier songs had a lovely Liverpudlian note to them, which very slowly faded away in 1965/6.
Then in 1967 they became part of the Cultural Revolution and something completely different, though still writing some good songs.
The Beatles had zero kinship with disco. Bubblegum began as a pale imitation of them.
The Stones, The Kinks, The Animals, The Small Faces, The Yardbirds WERE better than The Beatles - by far. The Beatles were a pop band liked by teenage girls and then by people destined to work in Personnel. They were acceptable to the BBC and they even got medals from the Queen. They didn’t sneer into the camera and smash up their instruments, like The Who did.
Thank goodness someone wrote this so I didn't have to. Also, the Zombies, the Allman Brothers, Led Zeplin. The main problem I had with the Beatles, is despite some very creative song writing, they were not great musicians. One you have heard Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page or Duane Allman playing the guitar, listening to the Beatles was just kind of blah.
Hey Jude!!! 🤮It’s a jingle! But sung to Prince Charles as he then was and on far too many other occasions. As much like a nursery rhyme as Mull of Kintyre.
Perhaps another interesting sign that things are reverting away from the wildness of the "cultural revolution" of the 1960s (as you call it) is a re-feminization of popular culture and especially of music. The Wikipedia entry for "British Invasion" gives an glimpse into the world that might have been without the Beatles and their contemporaries (the largely forgotten losers):
"In America, the Invasion arguably spelled the end of the popularity of instrumental surf music,[89] pre-Motown vocal girl groups, the folk revival (which adapted by evolving into folk rock), teenage tragedy songs, Nashville country music (which also faced its own crisis with the deaths of some of its biggest stars at the same time), and temporarily, the teen idols that had dominated the United States charts in the late 1950s and early 1960s."
Today, if one looks the best selling tunes, it seems that the "girl groups" and especially"girl singles" have very much returned. Even rap music is now basically a girl's genre!...with the likes of Nicki Minaj, Carbi B, and Megan Thee Stallion topping the charts (tell that to someone who heard early gangsta rap in the late 1980s and early 1990s).
For a story that you begin in Dublin I am suprised there is not a mention of Give Ireland, back to the Irish- Banned by the BBC and Lenon's Po IRA statements. A Hard day's night has Wilfred Bramble telling us he is a soldier of the republic-and being told by one of the beatles he was a fool to have gone to the UK rather the the USA
Ed it the master of dropping a droll zinger out of nowhere in the middle of an essay. Always my favorite part.
"Remarkably, this didn't make him feel better."
Yes, I had to read it out to my daughter. Brilliant.
Whenever I read about the Beatles, their world, the explosion of creation at that time and how exhausted and fragmented popular culture is now I always think of Tony soprano’s comment that “it's good to be in something from the ground floor….
lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end….”
Great observation. I feel the same way when I read David Kynaston's New Jerusalem series.
Beautifully written piece that I really enjoyed. Thank you!
I have often found it amusingly ironic that the decade when the Americans were at the peak of their civilizational self-confidence, economic dominance, and political stability, the 1960s, was also the decade when they briefly lost their status as lodestar for mass culture around the world which they gained around the time of World War 1.
In the 1960s, everything "cool" was European. Film brats explored the latest in French New Wave (not to mention Swedish sex films). Rock n Roll, which began in the 1950s as an American genre, was taken over by the British.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Invasion
There were also an explosion of wildly successful films from Blighty or based there like the James Bond films or Mary Poppins.
Even Westerns, perhaps the most quintessentially American genre, were taken over by the Italians of all people! And they were one of the losers of WWII!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_Western
😅🤣🤣… “Holidays are always hugely improved by having a book one looks forward to returning to, and I felt myself repeatedly escaping human company”
It often strikes me that the Beatles, who's music I cherish, played the part of Coleridge's Psyche in relation British Popular music - they served "to deform and kill the things whereon we feed".
They were fed, omnivorously and superabundently, on 1000 years of British songmaking and folk tradition - hymns, ballads, lyrics, nonsense, laments, ditties, lays, romances and so on. All amplified by a reflected and refracted, electrified, American youth culture to such a pitch of frenetic overproduction, that they exhausted the ground upon which they reaped.
Frankly, their genius was too fertile and unrestrained. All that has come after in British popular music, truth be told, has been mere footnotes.
They left nothing to-the -next-man and, like Fergusson or Burns in Scotland, what appeared ar the time to be a renaissance was really the last bright flash of a culture passing away for ever.
There is no question, to my mind, that they belong - in their own proper sphere - alongside Chaucer, Shakespeare and Eliot as a way-marker to the succeeding stages of Britjsh cultural life.
This seems right
That's an excellent analysis which I read while I was watching "Eight Days a Week". This time it was the music of 1964 which sounds like it's on a different planet from 1963 (e.g. She Loves You). That first note of "I Feel Fine" which goes on like forever for a #1 Single. Contrast the abrupt start , chorus first, of "Can't Buy Me Love". I read a book a long tome ago (by Albert Goldman? - I might be remembering this wrong) that all Lennon songs went Do-Ra-Mi while McCartney's were much more melodically inventive and that formula generally works especially in the early songs which they genuinely co-wrote.
Don’t doubt their influence upon cultural change in the 1960s - but it’s a tough ask for us to consider The Beatles the equals of Shakespeare.
Very tough.
Verdi, Puccini, Rossini or Wagner maybe……
……but She Loves You Yeah Yeah Yeah or We All Live in a Yellow Submarine or I Read the News Today oh Boy……
……I don’t think so.
I never understood the credo that Lennon was a cultural icon - to me he was a musical Jimmy Tarbuck, without Tarby’s good nature.
Shakespeare seemed to love jokes about “bare bodkins” which is pretty Tarbuckesque. The plays at The Globe - as I am sure you know - started out as rumbustious affairs, with lots of sword fights and sound effects, with the actors breaking into acrobatics for no obvious reason, and with much noisy interaction with the audience, most of whom had paid a penny or so to get in and weren’t interested in hifalutin stuff about the meaning of life - that came later.
Not totally sure about that - though there are indeed elements of slapstick in The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night's Dream
Apparently the big draw was an actor called Will something (not Shakespeare) who was like I describe, then there was a big bust-up and the actor Will was ousted, after which the plays became more cerebral.
Will Kempe.........the man who danced from London to Norwich.
That’s him!
'“Why is it always Bobby Kennedy or John Lennon? Why isn’t it Richard Nixon or Paul McCartney?”’ Grotesque, and unfair, but it took many decades for this narrative to shift' - This reminds me of a barb (with a dose more British tongue in cheek) in Private Eye about 20 years ago which stated that the Beatles were dying in descending order of popularity.
You might find this interesting.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article1959850.html
Ah, the good old "questions of value". I must admit it often disturbs me how much the Beatles are intertwined with sociology, because it's where, I think, all the faults of rock criticism come to light- ie the divorce from eternity and the work of art as a product of its time only. I really feel like I can't understand them artistically as much as I would like because of the mythological narrative around the Sixties. I know it sounds cruel, but we need even more distance in time, and less boomer ideological intrusiveness in our mind and ears to fully understand the Beatles and put them in the canon.
only time will tell!
An interesting point.
C.S Lewis once wrote of the poet Thomas Wyatt that we must always remember that all his verses were intended to be sung, after dinner, in mixed and courtly company and then when we approach his ouvre artificially and through the printed book we are misled and assailed by the monotony of it all.
Peter Seller's, still hilarious, send up of the essential siliness of so much of what the Beatles wrote is funny because it deliberately misses the point in the same way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLEMncv140s
These are beautiful songs, precious stones, which cannot bear the sociological burdens placed on them by their well-intentioned critics. As a vehicle for a 'mythological narrative' as you put it so well, they will always be failures.
But allowed to stand, like the Songs of Burns or the Hesperides of Robert Herrick, they will endure.
I never liked the Beatles. To me they were a marketing creation who came to take their fame too seriously, thinking of themselves as genius artists and always posing as what they were not. Their music was AI before AI. The only record I ever owned was the White Album, mostly because it came across to me as a fair imitation of genuine artists, the Rolling Stones. I always equated the Beatles as the equivalent of synthesizers contrasted with orchestras, pale imitation of singers and musicians, sort of a bubblegum band mixed with disco. While McCarthy was plastic, John was pretense all the way.
The Beatles weren't a marketing creation; they came from a genuine club scene. Their earlier songs had a lovely Liverpudlian note to them, which very slowly faded away in 1965/6.
Then in 1967 they became part of the Cultural Revolution and something completely different, though still writing some good songs.
The Beatles had zero kinship with disco. Bubblegum began as a pale imitation of them.
The Stones, The Kinks, The Animals, The Small Faces, The Yardbirds WERE better than The Beatles - by far. The Beatles were a pop band liked by teenage girls and then by people destined to work in Personnel. They were acceptable to the BBC and they even got medals from the Queen. They didn’t sneer into the camera and smash up their instruments, like The Who did.
Thank goodness someone wrote this so I didn't have to. Also, the Zombies, the Allman Brothers, Led Zeplin. The main problem I had with the Beatles, is despite some very creative song writing, they were not great musicians. One you have heard Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page or Duane Allman playing the guitar, listening to the Beatles was just kind of blah.
😁 TBF, I think a few of Paul’s ballads are beautiful, such as The Long and Winding Road, but he trod a very thin line between pop and schmalz
Hey Jude!!! 🤮It’s a jingle! But sung to Prince Charles as he then was and on far too many other occasions. As much like a nursery rhyme as Mull of Kintyre.
Perhaps another interesting sign that things are reverting away from the wildness of the "cultural revolution" of the 1960s (as you call it) is a re-feminization of popular culture and especially of music. The Wikipedia entry for "British Invasion" gives an glimpse into the world that might have been without the Beatles and their contemporaries (the largely forgotten losers):
"In America, the Invasion arguably spelled the end of the popularity of instrumental surf music,[89] pre-Motown vocal girl groups, the folk revival (which adapted by evolving into folk rock), teenage tragedy songs, Nashville country music (which also faced its own crisis with the deaths of some of its biggest stars at the same time), and temporarily, the teen idols that had dominated the United States charts in the late 1950s and early 1960s."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Invasion
Today, if one looks the best selling tunes, it seems that the "girl groups" and especially"girl singles" have very much returned. Even rap music is now basically a girl's genre!...with the likes of Nicki Minaj, Carbi B, and Megan Thee Stallion topping the charts (tell that to someone who heard early gangsta rap in the late 1980s and early 1990s).
“Coming straight outta Compton”!! 👊🏾
The Beetles were androgynous? See: David Bowie.
Maria Simma (1915-2004) was a Catholic mystic who saw many visions of Purgatory.
She was asked about John Lennon and Marilyn Monroe, having no idea whatever about who they were, were they in Purgatory ?
She said they both were, that God had managed to save their souls from Hell.
The birth of Lennon's second son seems to have had a good effect on him. He manned up and was a good and dedicated father.
For a story that you begin in Dublin I am suprised there is not a mention of Give Ireland, back to the Irish- Banned by the BBC and Lenon's Po IRA statements. A Hard day's night has Wilfred Bramble telling us he is a soldier of the republic-and being told by one of the beatles he was a fool to have gone to the UK rather the the USA
he does mention that, but I didn't have space. it was long enough already
"Give Ireland, back to the Irish- Banned by the BBC"
I expect it is banned in Ireland now.