Beatles overload

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Talk about flogging something to death -- another MOJO special edition, dedicated this time to the psychedelic years. Then there's the NME glossy telling the story "as it was". How much more can we take? Between Q and MOJO the Beatles must have had about 10 special editions devoted to them in recent years, not to mention the countless huge features in the regular editions. Interesting to note the pragmatic and unfussy writing of the 60s articles on The Beatles -- songs described in an almost Pathe news style. What would Lennon have thought of all the Beatles literature and analysis throughout the last 20 years. He sort of missed out on their true cultural significance as there wasn't 1% as much during the seventies -- retro writing was thin on the ground back then. He could never have imagined that by the time he reached 60 they would still take up more inches in rock mags than any other band.

(BTW nobody answered my Woodchildren thread - couldn't find much on the web. The Woodchildren: consigned to the Black Hole of rock history!!)

― David Gunnip, Friday, 1 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Well... they are The Beatles, aren't they?

― Andy, Friday, 1 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Somebody help me! I dunno what this thread is about!

― matthew m., Friday, 1 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

It is about his inability to believe in finality. Buying records is an attempt to prolong your life. Eternity is a lie. Throw out yer records. Dance naked to the silence.

― helenfordsdale, Friday, 1 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I don't think that will help very much helen, tho' it's quite poetical for sure. I'm six0r of brit mags necro-worshipping the beeeeaaatles as well. fukc the beatles for now.

― Norman Phay, Friday, 1 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Norman, read between the LINES! Snort the truth. heh

― helenfordsdale, Friday, 1 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

All that shite just makes me hate the Beatles MORE.

― DG, Friday, 1 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Dont worry, it's only a "limited edition" of 90,000...

― Ben Squircle, Friday, 1 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

"Interesting to note the pragmatic and unfussy writing of the 60s articles on The Beatles -- songs described in an almost Pathe news style."

It's always really depressing when I see this happen to a band I like. It shows that what I liked about them - which almost always came from their freshness and spontaneity - is about to harden into the bitter marble of "historical importance." I don't think I've seen any good writing on the Beatles since 1980 except for Philip Norman's Shout and Larkin's short but memorable piece:

"When you get to the top, there is nowhere to go but down, but the Beatles could not get down. There they remain, unreachable, frozen, fabulous."

This just says it all: the band is trapped inside its own myth like a mammoth in a glacier. Even with the Stones, there's some degree of contention, something to argue about, new things to say, but I honestly don't think there's anything original left to say about the Beatles. It's not even like Elvis where you've got the infinite cultural reinventions going on; no one ever reports seeing Stu Sutcliffe flipping burgers in Kalamazoo and Ringo collages don't do much business in the art world.

This is happening to punk too. Just compare the hard, blunt, exciting machine-gun-cadence pop journalism of '77 to the stale flavor of today's punk 'retrospectives' like the one Mojo did last year. The writing has just gotten too self-conscious. There's no imaginative grasp of the subject anymore. Sometimes I think popular music writing is in an even worse state than pop music itself.

― Justyn Dillingham, Saturday, 2 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

"Stu Sutcliffe flipping burgers in Kalamazoo" - HaHaHa. Good one!

― J Sutcliffe (no relation), Saturday, 2 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

You're all quite right of course, but the sad truth is Beatle specials sell, therefore emap will keep publishing them. It's a pity they don't use the profits to subsidise special one-offs on more interesting subjects, or even dull but different ones. Them Beatles were described as 'the best songwriters since Schubert' by an over excited music prof in the sixties- hardly a 'pragmatic and unfussy' approach. (And BTW I know I saw the Woodchildren in the eighties, but I have absolutely no recollection of what they were like. Hmmm.)

― Snotty Moore, Saturday, 2 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

philip norman's shout is terrible: he is a total fool

i agree with snotty moore that beatles writing was really generally no better in the 60s than subsequently: they have always been extremely hard to write about well, and far too easy to write about badly (aesthetics of rock is a lot about them, and smart about them, but as it is the worst written book of utter genius evah, many fail to even get to the main stuff abut them). lewisohn and ian macdonald are quite useful i suppose in terms of technological and cultural context, but lewishon is really just a lists-man, and macdonald is *so* much less smart than he believes he is, that you end up doing all the work all over again

who was it actually said "best songwriters since schubert" and was that actually what was said? (we did a thread on this before a million years back and i can't remember if it was resolved...)

― mark s, Saturday, 2 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I find a lot of the comments really interesting, especially Justyn's thoughts about punk retrospectives. Who do we blame for this? Greil Marcus? The fact that punk has become academic discourse, what with the emergence of media/cultural studies and the other intellectual fields that have embraced it? Why do punk and Beatles retrospectives still sell, if our culture seems so obsessed with the Next New Thing? And what's so interesting and/or enduring about punk, the Beatles, and so on, that makes these academics and music journalists continue? Will Mojo still be doing cover stories on Johnny Rotten and John Lennon in 2050?

― geeta, Saturday, 2 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

beatles partly came out of art-school background, punk partly came out of media- studies-ish background, so this circular lockdown was kind of inevitable. In both cases, there's a big element, isn't there, of "something's happening, but you don't know what it is, do you, mr [hack/professor/ whatevah]". Both are trying to domesticate and contain a turbulence, a discontent they sense but daren't face, but actually what they're doing is precisely the opposite, trying to muffle everything with predigested celebrations. I actually think there's lots to be written about both, but it clearly isn't *being* written. I have no problem with Marcus: it's not his fault so many academics are idiots. I've always hated Mojo.

― mark s, Saturday, 2 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

haha i didn't look at that link till after i posted geeta: that conference is stacked not only with idiots but with MY ENEMIES!! Real-life punk war is deep and forever. Sigh.

― mark s, Saturday, 2 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Fuck Philip Norman: he is after all a stalwart of the Daily Mail's op- ed page.

Lewisohn is as Sinker says: a statistician (or, if you like, an anorak), he knows it all, but he doesn't know *about* it all. MacDonald infuriates, overreaches himself, dismisses and overpraises by turns but despite myself, and him, I still sort of love Revolution In The Head.

The Schubert comment I think was made by William Mann, music critic of The Times in 1963 (context: it was still in its adverts-on-front- page era when it ran pictures of minor royals more often than it even acknowledged the existence of mainland Europe - William Rees-Mogg was actually a MODERNISER!!! when he became editor three years later). It's been misquoted though: what I believe he said was more a comparison of Lennon & McCartney's melodic structures to Schubert, rather than that they were the best since him.

― Robin Carmody, Saturday, 2 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

i had beatles overload last night because the oldies station is having a FAB FOUR WEEKEND.

― ethan, Saturday, 2 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I seem to remember the Schubert quote being credited to one Wilfred Mellers, but I may have confused him with a Test cricketer of the time. William Mann is quoted by Norman in the excruciating Shout on P204 of my edition (which doesn't feature an index- Hey, it's only 'pop') but doesn't mention Schub. (he mentions Mahler instead)

― Snotty Moore, Saturday, 2 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

one month passes...

I think Marcus's take on punk is a lot closer to the mark than say, Burchill and Parsons in "The Boy Looked At Johnny." (The problem with that book is that they were a little too punk themselves to be able to view it with any distance, so they end up dismissing everyone except the Pistols, Poly Styrene and er, Tom Robinson.) Despite his academic stance he has an almost insane amount of enthusiasm for the records - I remember he once called Germfree Adolescents the greatest album ever made - and ends up writing prose which is just as over-the- top as punk itself.

Is Shout really that bad? I haven't looked at it in about four years, but I seem to recall that there were about fifteen mistakes on every page and he had a serious loathing for McCartney that left it very skewed in the end, but for some reason it stuck with me. Norman aside from that book is absolutely awful, though. His obit for George was just nasty.

― Justyn Dillingham, Tuesday, 23 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

how is marcus an "academic"? this is a pitiful description of his style AND his stance (and don't get all meltzer on my ass, i uberheart meltzer, but the stuff on marcus in vinyl solution – yes yes highly entertaining – is pisspoor as actual description of how marcus writes or thinks... )

(not least cuz it lines meltzer up with complete no-brainers like derogatis: whose bangs book is basically as terrible and subliminally hostile as norman's shout)

― mark s, Tuesday, 23 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

one year passes...

If i remember right, William Mann said that the Aeolian cadences in Not a Second Tine recalled the closing pages of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde.

― pete s, Tuesday, 16 December 2003 02:52 (twenty-one years ago)

They are that important.

― Geir Hongro (GeirHong), Tuesday, 16 December 2003 03:14 (twenty-one years ago)

I've been getting high and listening to Abbey Road, Revolver and Rubber Soul all the time lately.

― Ian Johnson (orion), Tuesday, 16 December 2003 09:10 (twenty-one years ago)

I've been re-visiting a few beatles albums lately. I still don't see what the fuss is about ..

― Michael Dubsky, Tuesday, 16 December 2003 10:20 (twenty-one years ago)

one year passes...

The Wood Children play live in 2005!

Brighton 22nd September
London 23rd September
Bristol 24th September
www.thewoodchildren.co.uk

― , Saturday, 10 September 2005 06:44 (nineteen years ago)

four years pass...

This seems the right thread: BBC News pages..

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legend has it that, on thursday, a ray of light finally broke through the darkness and gave the people hope.

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