Now It Can Be Told: The Beatles Were Better Than Matt Munro Mel Torme and My Middle School Music Teacher PUT TOGETHER

discus

lennon & macca = a more topical rodgers & hammerstein in TT's view

teachout must be around 50 yo but he affects this whole "old school" pre-rock&roll/preww2 sensibility: not so much "it was all better before you were born" but "it was all better before I was born!"

however he's sort of right-on abt the Beatles & recording process

Yeah, it reads...well, oddly enough, it's weirdly kind of *refreshing* compared to so much of the other hagiographies.

Probably because it doesn't seem to presuppose sanctity & ubiquity -- the tone is more like "hey, I'll tell you about these guys who were doing stuff 40 yrs ago".

I dunno. Seems as banal a take on the Fabs as a writer for Commentary can muster. (Makes me wonder just how banal his take is on all the stuff I *don't* know about.) They used the recording studio as an instrument and thought in terms of records, not songs and sometimes went modal OMG WTF.

This is one of the best brief overviews of the Beatles that I've read. I'm in a band now with kids six and seven years younger than I am who don't know the first thing about the Beatles -- Bowie, Joy Division, indie, they know that, but not the Beatles. These kids would benefit from a succinct synopsis that hits the major points. I mean, if you're at all interested in popular music made anytime in the last fifty years, you should at least know how the Beatles fit into the grand scheme of things, even if you don't listen to or like them.

I think that's what's buggin' me -- folks not knowing when or where their own silly selves are in the continuum of human culture.

This piece eerily re-stated a common discussion of the late 60s as if it was breaking news. Your parents would hear "Yesterday" or "Eleanor Rigby" and declare "hey this stuff is actually MUSIC."

Terry Teachout is a fine writer technically but he's running this old fogey routine into the ground. He doesn't presuppose the Beatles' sanctity or ubiquity but he proceeds from a pre not post-baby boom perspective. Who on earth is reading this in 2006*

Maybe Commentary's readers are in their 70s? Like Michael said, it's a fairly banal POV and probably wasn't worth linking.

*besides me hahaha. sometimes I get bored on saturday mornings.

Wasn't worth linking to? You're talking about ILx here.

I do keep an eye out for the aesthete wing of the right's take on rock culture, so it *is* interesting insofar as it's taken Commentary four decades to be where Leo Bernstein was while the shit was goin' down. (Unless there was some nice words about John or Paul that I've missed in the last decade, which is entirely likely given the fact I don't read Commentary or The New Criterion for pleasure.)

(Leo = Lenny, argh.)