Posted on 01/13/2002 9:55:09 AM PST by UnBlinkingEye
Curse of Beatlemania
by Joseph Sobran
A few weeks ago I wrote some mild criticisms of the Beatles and the sky fell. Angry readers called me "ignorant," "vicious," and various other things displaying blindness to my finer qualities. I hadn’t realized there was a militant Beatle Taliban, and I was an infidel. I was lucky to escape a fatwa.
Some of the Beatles’ fans did make civil and reasonable arguments; they defended George Harrison as a guitarist and reminded me that such musical luminaries as Leonard Bernstein and Frank Sinatra had praised them.
But Bernstein was surely over the top when he called Lennon and McCartney the greatest composers of the twentieth century. What about – sticking to pop music –
Johnny Mercer, Harold Arlen, Harry Warren, Richard Rodgers, and Frank Loesser? And when Sinatra called Harrison’s "Something" one of the greatest songs of its era, I think it did more credit to his generosity than to his judgment. (Sinatra went to unfortunate lengths to prove he wasn’t an old fogey, as witness his excruciating recording of "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.")
It’s not that I hate the Beatles; I’ve always liked them well enough. I used to play their tapes on long drives with my kids, and we all enjoyed them.
What I did hate from the beginning was Beatlemania. It made me uneasy for reasons I didn’t quite understand at the time. The main reason was that the enthusiasm was so synthetic. My generation didn’t discover the Beatles in the normal way; the Beatles were imposed on us by publicists and marketers.
Once upon a time, fame was slowly acquired. A man’s reputation spread gradually, and his good name was so hard-won that he might fight a duel over an insult or a libel. Abraham Lincoln nearly had to cross swords (literally) with a man he had ridiculed in a newspaper.
Even in the world of pop music, a singer used to have to perform for years, making contact with small audiences from town to town, before he "hit the big time." He had to earn appreciation. It was hard work, but local fame necessarily preceded national fame.
With the Beatles something new was happening. National fame (at least on this side of the Atlantic) was created instantly. It wasn’t due to their music; it was due to their promoters. Millions of kids allowed themselves to be manipulated into an enthusiasm few of them would have arrived at on their own. Pop music was no longer really "pop" – the result of interaction between music and listener.
As soon as they got off the plane, the Beatles were mobbed. This was not a phenomenon of musical taste. Their screaming fans wouldn’t even allow them to be heard, weren’t interested in listening.
It was weird. I felt a pang of sympathy for the boys, because they obviously wanted to perform; they wanted to be musicians, and their own fans were making it hard. Could they be enjoying that kind of attention, which ruled out any real connection with the audience?
To me it all smacked of the "two-minute hate" in Nineteen Eighty-Four – far more benign, but equally mindless. It wasn’t the Beatles’ fault. Their fans neither knew nor cared who was engineering the mass emotions that swamped the music. Even as a kid, I didn’t want to be part of that, the submergence of the self in the mass.
Since then, what we call "pop" culture has become uncomfortably close to totalitarian politics. Even our aesthetic tastes are increasingly formed by forces of which we know little. It can’t be good for the soul to be subject to so much calculating hype and promotion.
Democracy too has come to mean mass manipulation, with lots of focus groups, demographic studies, and advertising techniques replacing rational persuasion. The individual who prefers to make up his own mind knows he counts for nothing in today’s "democratic process" (eerie phrase!). You have a choice of which mass to join, that’s all. Either way, you’ll make no difference to the outcome.
On the other hand, some people find it thrilling to be part of a stampeding herd, without asking what started the commotion. They should feel right at home in these times.
We live in a world in which the passive and malleable mass has become prior to the individual and the community. Beatlemania didn’t originate this condition, but in its own way it was an intimation.
January 12, 2002
yah, why not? beats looking at patti smith/smyth
i saw them once at winterland!
I agree on Ms. Nicks ... great songwriter, great singer but she's definitely way, way, WAY out in the ozone.
That is very true so many times writers, not just in music, but all writers say things with hidden undertones only they understand.
A listener is free to take from the lyrics and interpret them to his or her own life experiences. When I think of a girl I used to know, a whole different set of circumstances from that relationship emerges, but the basic overt expression is the common point - we both lost something we had and now miss it.
"More Than a Feeling" is a great song, I could never get tired of it.
I've never done that and will try the technique right away.
Hey? How many of you have to fight off a teenage son, or daughter, to continue a discussion?
I've found that really light gauge strings lacked the sustain I like.
This was Lennon's song. He claimed it was inspired by a drawing by his son Julian.
Thanks my friend, I've never tried that approach.
But yeah, he did bring out his Flying V at the end of the Isle Of Wight show. Another concert that he used it in was the 7/30/70 Maui Rainbow Bridge towards the end.
Johnny got his start in music as a roadie for Hawkwind. There's a classic photo of him with long hair, matched up with his later phrase "never trust a hippie".
If you were 5 when the Beatles broke up, I'm not much older than you because I was only 9. But even though I think the seventies had the best music overall, with the sheer number of quality bands, I try not to be totally stuck in a time warp.
I'm a great U2 fan, they're still out there making new music, and Rush, Genesis, and Dire Straits did excellent work in the eighties. "Brothers In Arms" is THE best of that decade in my opinion.
New music for me now is Eric Clapton's "Money and Cigarettes". Great work by "God" himself. The man never loses his touch. And Santana's "Supernatural" rocks a bit. There's music out there, it's just not as much as it used to be.
By the time it got to the 60's all that was left was noise, novelty and hype calling itself Rock 'n Roll. Entertaining enough for the teen market maybe, but Rock 'n Roll is to music as MacDonald's is to food.
The key ingredient is 'the special sauce' - to disguise the taste of the crap.
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