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 hadnt 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 Harrisons "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 wasnt an old fogey, as witness his excruciating recording of "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.")
Its not that I hate the Beatles; Ive 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 didnt quite understand at the time. The main reason was that the enthusiasm was so synthetic. My generation didnt 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 mans 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 wasnt 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 wouldnt even allow them to be heard, werent 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 wasnt the Beatles fault. Their fans neither knew nor cared who was engineering the mass emotions that swamped the music. Even as a kid, I didnt 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 cant 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 todays "democratic process" (eerie phrase!). You have a choice of which mass to join, thats all. Either way, youll 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 didnt originate this condition, but in its own way it was an intimation.
January 12, 2002
Carmine Appice, who really brought the bottom-heavy pound-and-club style and miking to hard rock via the early Vanilla Fudge recordings a couple of years before Led Zeppelin's premiere.
You explain the Bonham sound exactly. By the time he got to the fourth one, with "When The Levee Breaks", he had cemented it as the Zep sound. He pretty much stole the credit away from Carmine Appice.
East West by Butterfield/Bloomfield and company was a ground breaker with blues and psychedelic tinged tunes.
It was on their first album... (I believe 1967.)
And I was pretty young. In fact, my childhood memories of that first album are limited to "Break on Through," "Twentieth Century Fox," and "Light My Fire." "The Crystal Ship" didn't even register on my consciousness until I was an adult and was going out with a woman who was a little bit of a female version of Jim Morrison...
(As to my youth back then, I had an interesting path through the 60s. My brother was born in 1950. He is one of those musical genius types who can play anything. By 1967, he was in a couple of bands -- he played trumpet in a working polka band (!) and he played rock guitar in a working club band... I was born in 1960, so by 1967 I was still too young to actually be part of the 60s revolution, but I was old enough to see everything that was going on, and I was able to hang out around my brother, his friends, and the various groupies who got off being with the neighborhood band...)
I always thank God for this sort of schizo view of the 60s I got -- I was too young to participate in the drug scene when people actually thought it was cool. And, by the time I got old enough, 99.9% of my brothers friends had already paid the price for the life style and I was able to see, first hand, the dangers and tribulations such stuff inflicts on a person (some flat out dead, some in foreign prisons, some in insane asylums, some walking veggies, some just disappeared...). Though I was too young to take part in the drug scene, I was just old enough to appreciate the great music, to sit around at parties and stuff, to meet the former beats who had survived, to talk to the freaks who were around, and to see the emptiness of the "hippies" when the mass media tried to _market_ the left overs of the beat generation with some kind of marketable version of the freak generation...
Mark W.
I was born in 1953 so I was right in the middle of all that. I must admit to a little experimentation, the only thing I came away liking was pot. I don't smoke anymore, but I think it should be legal. Luckily no one I knew ended up dead or in prison, one guy I met in the 1970s ended up in an insane asylm, I'm not sure it was do to drugs though. I spent a couple of years as a bartender and came away with the impression that hard liquor is much worse than pot. I'm glad I don't do that anymore, but it was fun for awhile.
Do you prefer what American pop music was before they arrived? Frankie Avalon? Fabian?
I prefer what American rock and blues music was before they arrived. Little Richard, James Brown.
Little Richard’s stuff was charmingly primitive. Rock was bound to evolve beyond three chord stomps. James Brown didn’t even hit his stride till after the Beatles arrived. What they did was push crooners like Paul Anka off the pop charts for the most part.
But they did it with crappy prefabricated cookie cutter crap music.
It was actually fairly complex harmonically and melodically. They were like The Beach Boys at their best in that they made complex music sound simple. And also, they stopped writing the Boy-Girl love songs in 1965.
I don’t know why you resurrected a 7 year old thread and of the 300+ posts on it picked mine. But here’s the simple reality. I hate pop music, and the reason I hate pop music is because it’s primarily moronic simplistic music designed to make 12 year-old girls horny. And the Beatles are the guys that perfected that and created the template that keeps the top 40 a haven of the worst the music industry has to offer.
If you like it great, your ears, your time, not my problem. I loathe it. It makes me want to puke.
Nothing against you personally I just saw your post and responded naturally. Little Richard and James Brown are pop music as well btw.
Like most guys that hung around awhile they’ve dabbled in pop, they’ve dabbled in just about everything. But primarily they’re rhythm and blues.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.