The other night I had to defend the Beatles — and in my own home!
I’ve been slowly watching the zillion-episode Anthology film via the magic of Netflix, and on Sunday night I was choogling through Episode IV when my wife joined me on the futon and sighed that I was *still* Beatle-ing. This particular episode found the Fabs well in the grips of their dippiest NKOTB period — matching outfits, mass-marketing, screaming bobby soxers, official “Beatle” wigs, and the doobie-fueled Technicolor cash-in known as Help! During a particularly mincing live clip, Catherine points out that the band looks all of about four years old. She then muses that she would have “been a Stones fan,” and questions what was wrong with people that they ever thought *this* was cool. (She also declared England to be the ugliest country on the planet — peoplewise — but we haven’t room for that issue in this entry.)
At first glance, she has a point. If you take a gander without the aid of rose-tinted boomer goggles, the Beatles hardly seem that cool or daring or exciting in a lot of Anthology’s official Beatle footage. (I believe Catherine’s phrase was “whiter than Sinatra.”) The wholesomeness of their Epstein-crafted schtick is cloying when you consider that the Kinks and the Who were already nipping at the Beatles’ heels in late ‘64 and early ‘65 with downright punky cuts like “You Really Got Me” and “Can’t Explain.” And in our very own USofA, Bob Dylan was writing and releasing exponentially more sophisticated songs (e.g. The Freewheeling Bob Dylan) before the Beatles stuck chord one on Sullivan. And there simply isn’t room to chronicle all the R&B acts, girl groups, and surf rock bands whose catchiness and excitement factor were at the very least on par with the sometimes-tepid Beatlemainia-era Beatles. Basically, the Beatles were peddling weaksauce by the gallon.
Why then are the Beatles so damn great? Why are they untouchable? Why are they the Shakespeare of rock criticism?
A typical defense against anti-Beatlist propaganda is usually a loud “Ack!” followed by a litany of all the ways in which the Beatles changed music, ended the Vietnam War, profoundly changed Western consciousness, and traveled through time to prevent the Kennedy assassination. This defense is wrong and makes Beatlemaniacs and the Beatles in general kind of wearisome. The very worst example of pro-Beatle rhetoric is the St. John of Lennon bullshit perpetuated by any number of acid casualties, dweebish undergrads, stoned highschoolers, and soft-serve lefties. (If you ever get the chance, visit the John Lennon Museum outside of Tokyo. Its enough to make you wanna puke in the big white “Imagine” piano.)
However, I ain’t saying that the Beatles deserved to be dumped on. On the contrary, I dig me some Beatles — for both their historical significance and their sheer listenability. I am saying that you have to put all the Beatle business in perspective and not get carried away by all of the glossy “Voice of a Generation” hoopla that the Beatle brand crams down the maw of every living animal.
First, I’ll address the historical significance thing –
The Beatles both did and didn’t change rock and roll. The Beatles began as a rockabilly and R&B covers act and much of their pre-Revolver material is rooted in these styles. Many of the rock-oriented recordings from the first half of their career essentially sound like the Everly Brothers covering Little Richard and/or the Ronnettes. The Beatles also made plenty of room amongst their singles and full-length releases for lovelorn pop songs (often with a slight latin feel). Essentially, the Beatles took a handful of American pop styles and combined them to create a melodic, upbeat hybrid rock sound that’s part country, part R&B, and part Top 40 pop.
As the Beatles grew in popularity and songwriting prowess, they expanded their sound to include elements of folk revival, “world” music, classical, psychedelia, heavy rock, and so forth. Essentially, if something was popular or potentially cutting edge, the Beatles found a way to squeeze it into a pop rock song before everyone else caught on. For instance after catching an early Hendrix set it London, Paul McCartney slathered a mess of faux-Jimi guitar on Harrison’s “Taxman.” Much Beatle boosting lauds the boys from Liverpool for their innovation and their experimentalism. Phooey. The Beatles were tastemakers and synthesizers. They didn’t create and drive the ’60s counterculture so much as they channeled it, filtering it down to the vast public audience that Epstein’s marketing savvy had provided them.
In this Interwebz-addled age, it’s easy to write off the process turning “edgy” fringe styles into something with mass appeal as mere Pat Booneism. In the years since the Beatles, rock has become an ever-splintering niche game where all comers are constantly on the lookout for “authentic” rock experiences. Our instant info culture allows folks to sift through mountains of “lesser” material within minutes of hearing about a band or genre — quickly getting to the sweet meat of the real deal. Expertise is available to all Googlers great and small.
Once upon a time, rock and roll was neither mainstream nor readily accessible in every market. Bands traded in regional sounds. Small labels served smallish regional tastes. When rock and roll emerged in the 1950s, it started as a southern thing, and it brought along a lot of racial baggage — in addition to class concerns and worries about teen horniness and delinquency. Early rock smacks of newness. It’s raw and a little weird and delightfully brash. It’s product for a long-gone youth boomlet. It’s like space candy for the nuclear panic years. I’m guessing that it was early rock’s zing and unrelenting Americanness that sealed its appeal for dirty kids in England where the empire was shrinking and everything was Blitz pocked and war rationing continued well into the 1950s.
What the Beatles did was retool 1950s American rock and pop for the European market, and eventually for the American market that had kind of gotten over it like they’d gotten over hoola hoops and seafoam green Cadillacs. Essentially, the Beatles provided a first-hand rock experience for behind-the-time England (where Elvis never played) and a second, less-threatening (white? cute? matching-suit-wearing?) act for the American kids who’d been too young the first time around. So does that make the Fabs inauthentic usurpers? Yes and no. In the early 1960s, there wasn’t much rock and roll on television.
The squeaky clean Beatles weren’t revolutionaries so much as they were a gateway drug. They provided younger audiences and regionalized audiences with a big worldwide conception of rock and roll as a globe-spanning pop music. Their great innovation was not musical or even sonic. Their innovation was instituting a worldwide pop sensibility. They made it possible for pop/rock musicians to be a special kind of famous. They helped establish a pop universe where everything could be included provided it had a strong backbeat. The Beatles’ lack of authenticity led them to try anything once as they tried to stay on the “toppermost of the poppermost.” That they were and at least publicly affable with just a hint of cheekiness didn’t hurt.
Sure, the Beatles were fairly unhip to start — many American freaky types (Dylan, the Merry Pranksters, etc.) were reportedly disappointed when they learned the band were naive schoolboys and not dope mad loonies. And I have doubts about the Beatles as human beings. Several decades of tell-alls and mythbustings have revealed John, Paul, George, and Ringo to be 100% human. However, the Beatles serve as a handy guide to 1960s pop styles, and therefore have earned
Beyond historical significance –
Like all things deemed “classic” or “important,” the Beatles are often treated like vegetables or vitamins. In other words, you’re supposed to listen because it’s good for you. Rock and roll as a pastime — because most rock musicians and fans are pretty much extra-dumb about non-pop music history and music theory — largely lacks standards and critical rigor. The Beatles are the closest thing to certified rock and roll genius. They are mostly unassailable. They are perfection with Liverpudlian accents. Poppycock.
To treat the Beatles catalogue like a prescription for proper musical taste renders it dead and (worse) boring.
The Beatles began as an “act” specializing in “entertainment” — therein lies their goodness and some of their less good bits. Help! (the record) is a perfect example of the band doing cranking out fresh entertaining pop as well as schmaltzy dreck.
“Ticket to Ride” is one of my very favorite songs. The main lick is the first thing I ever learned to play on guitar. It’s got that Phil Spector beat going on beneath a ringing guitar churn. The lyric, while it’s wrapped around the Ride/Ryde pun, has a sinister, obsessive edge. It’s a tense number that only lets up when you hit the double-time rave-up that takes the song out on an up note — even though John’s “baby don’t care.”
“Help!” is another one — it’s all clang and angst. It’s got all the same twisted-up existential yelp as another of my favorite pop songs, the Who’s “Can’t Explain.” It’s such a straightforward declaration of exhaustion and beatenness. And it just drives relentlessly forward.
On the flip side, Help! is home to some faux Simon and Garfunkel filler “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and some typical Beatle toss-offs “The Night Before.” But the great crime against rock on this bugger is “Yesterday.” That’s right, I’ve got a beef with the most covered song of all time. In the Anthology episode we watched, Beatle Paul waxes Beatletastic about how he dreamed the melody (”like an old jazz standard”) and performed it solo to great applause and so on. That song is a turd. The lyric is pretentious and presumptuous for 25-yr-old Macca. It also doesn’t make a whole lotta sense. The melody gets caught in your teeth. It’s the “Glycerine” of its day. Thank goodness they followed it up with a “Dizzy Miss Lizzie” so you can quickly get the taste outta your mouth. “Yesterday” is obviously a crowd-pleaser — it’s a mom rocking snuggle-time sugarfest that feigns wistfulness and heavy sentiment. In short, it’s entertainment. Afterall, the Beatles didn’t just rip through Chuck Berry songs in Hamburg; they also belted out “Besa Me Mucho.”
If anything, the Beatles seem a bit awkward now because they come from a time when entertainment wasn’t required to masquerade as art. They soon learned the pose — just check Sgt. Pepper’s. We live in profoundly inauthentic times. Everything is mediated through entertainment and infotainment and spin-doctors and mission statements. As a result, we’ve developed a bit of an authenticity fetish. Something as breezy as the just-on-the-verge-of-going-hip Beatle music looks clumsy now that we totally know everything or can look it up without putting down the Cheetos. I’m not saying that the Beatles didn’t sometimes suck. I’m just saying that it wasn’t always as easy to know that they sucked.
