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!
'“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 about how the Beatles were dying in descending order of popularity.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
The Beatles grew up in the American satellite-nation "Britain", a dead-and-alive lukewarm bath, bearing the same name as the proud and very distinctive nation that gave its life to defeat the satanist mage, Adolphus Nepomuk Hitler.
In the days when the Beatles were growing up in "Britain", it was at first a desperately conformist place that, despite the constant hymning of science, tech and the future, wanted desperately to live in the past.
Then in 1956/7, it started to swing, and this was when the Youthquake in fact happened, although the good folk of Britain pretended it wasn't doing so and everything was OK really and as it always had been. Though a few inhabitants, possessed of human intelligence, were beginning to worry.
Then came the Pill, and in its train the joyful songs of the Beatles, announcing the End of the Prussian epoch (of short hair, fake-puritanism, military obedience, toeing the line, going off to be slaughtered for the nation) that Bismarck and his army had begun almost exactly a century earlier.
Shakespeare and The Beatles do indeed make acceptable bed-fellows. Shakespeare was the court playwright who copied better writers work and blandified it, may it pleaseth the court. James I for some reason liked faux olde worlde language as found in his bible, and so Shakespeare did the same with his scripts, making them impenetrable to school children to this day! No one spoke like that in the 1600s! Example of his pilfering: Marlowe wrote a play about a merchant who was Jewish called The Jew of Malta. A few weeks later, Will got an audience with the king. “I have penned a new play sire” he said, bowing low. “What I prithee is the name of this play, Will?” “Er, The Merchant of Venice, your majesty”.
Fair play. I was being a bit tongue in cheek. People who studied Eng Lit, and who later went on to work in a coffee-serving role, tell me that Will was a top poet and got some of that into the plays as soliloquies and such like, but all the same the plays themselves were not all that. The one I know fairly well is Hamlet (and Henry V from school) and the plot is bollocks. The feel of a young man on the horns of a dilemma is great, To Be Or Not To Be of course, but otherwise…Widowed queens really did marry their brother-in-law and more so - look at Emma of Normandy! Woody Allen put it well with his response to “He didst pour foul poison in meinst ear as I lay sleeping in yonder orchard”: Why?
I don't like Hamlet either.......much too long - it's so long that I can't concentrate on what is going on in his head, because he's not a very sympathetic character and I am not concerned about what happens to him.
King Lear is quite long too, but offers much more. I think that Othello is probably is best tragedy.........especially if one considers Macbeth an 'action-thriller'!
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.
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."
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”
'“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 about how the Beatles were dying in descending order of popularity.
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!
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The Beatles grew up in the American satellite-nation "Britain", a dead-and-alive lukewarm bath, bearing the same name as the proud and very distinctive nation that gave its life to defeat the satanist mage, Adolphus Nepomuk Hitler.
In the days when the Beatles were growing up in "Britain", it was at first a desperately conformist place that, despite the constant hymning of science, tech and the future, wanted desperately to live in the past.
Then in 1956/7, it started to swing, and this was when the Youthquake in fact happened, although the good folk of Britain pretended it wasn't doing so and everything was OK really and as it always had been. Though a few inhabitants, possessed of human intelligence, were beginning to worry.
Then came the Pill, and in its train the joyful songs of the Beatles, announcing the End of the Prussian epoch (of short hair, fake-puritanism, military obedience, toeing the line, going off to be slaughtered for the nation) that Bismarck and his army had begun almost exactly a century earlier.
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.
You might find this interesting.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article1959850.html
Shakespeare and The Beatles do indeed make acceptable bed-fellows. Shakespeare was the court playwright who copied better writers work and blandified it, may it pleaseth the court. James I for some reason liked faux olde worlde language as found in his bible, and so Shakespeare did the same with his scripts, making them impenetrable to school children to this day! No one spoke like that in the 1600s! Example of his pilfering: Marlowe wrote a play about a merchant who was Jewish called The Jew of Malta. A few weeks later, Will got an audience with the king. “I have penned a new play sire” he said, bowing low. “What I prithee is the name of this play, Will?” “Er, The Merchant of Venice, your majesty”.
You don’t half talk some bilge.
For a start, at least 70% of his plays were written when Elizabeth I was on the throne.
Shakespeare may have borrowed many of his plot-lines - so what? Further, his 9 histories (more if one counts JC and A&C) had to reflect true events.
We know for certain though that Shakespeare was popular and highly-regarded by his colleagues……and is no way some cheap hack as you imply.
Stop trolling.
Fair play. I was being a bit tongue in cheek. People who studied Eng Lit, and who later went on to work in a coffee-serving role, tell me that Will was a top poet and got some of that into the plays as soliloquies and such like, but all the same the plays themselves were not all that. The one I know fairly well is Hamlet (and Henry V from school) and the plot is bollocks. The feel of a young man on the horns of a dilemma is great, To Be Or Not To Be of course, but otherwise…Widowed queens really did marry their brother-in-law and more so - look at Emma of Normandy! Woody Allen put it well with his response to “He didst pour foul poison in meinst ear as I lay sleeping in yonder orchard”: Why?
I don't like Hamlet either.......much too long - it's so long that I can't concentrate on what is going on in his head, because he's not a very sympathetic character and I am not concerned about what happens to him.
King Lear is quite long too, but offers much more. I think that Othello is probably is best tragedy.........especially if one considers Macbeth an 'action-thriller'!
I’ll try and get into Othello then.
I like to watch a film version first