Teapots, Weeds and Geniuses

When will people learn? I am grieved to see still more innocent, well-intentioned contributors, armed with logic, hurl themselves on to the rocky beaches of 'Bunker Island',  that logic-free fastness.  These are pointless suicide missions. I beg them not to continue. The rest of us have to watch in horror as they are needlessly cut to pieces by Mr Bunker's awful little jokes about Goblins and Santa Claus, or prostrated by his amazing power to bore, which causes seagulls to drop out of the sky round his shores, stunned into insensibility by the repetitive tedium of his latest imaginary triumph. 

They really must grasp that within range of Mr 'Bunker' a mysterious force field operates which renders logic inoperable. I suspect that Mr 'Bunker' keeps this force-field going with an enormous solipsism machine deep in his, er, bunker. This itself is powered by a combination of vanity and of the corpses of the many logical arguments which have died, fallen to the ground and decayed on this inhospitable shore. I suspect that without the outside stimulation, it wouldn't be able to sustain itself.

I note that (having been de-bunked yet again without noticing it) Mr Bunker is now bizarrely changing the subject , trying to construct an inconsistency in my critical view of Bertrand Russell's Victorian Cambridge scorn for religion (a position developed, and common among intellectual snobs,  in the days of the paddle steamer) and of my favourable citation of Albert Einstein's non-specific views on Theism. He says the two men were of a similar age.

This is perfectly true, but so what? Russell was a mathematician and philosopher. Einstein was a physicist. Russell's views were formed in late-Victorian Cambridge, well before the discoveries which made Einstein famous and which make his observations on cosmology interesting. Mr 'Bunker' also says (I'll take him on trust, solely  for the purpose of this argument, lacking time to look up the details) that 'Russell, the leading logician, mathematician and philosopher, was agnostic in the sense that he "couldn't know", but was just as atheistic as I in the sense that he was devoid of any belief in supernatural beings'.

Thus Mr 'Bunker', who defies logic for every waking hour of every waking day by inventing an inexplicable and unsustainable  'impossibility' to justify a certainty he otherwise cannot support,  has such a hilarious lack of self-knowledge that he actually equates himself with Bertrand Russell.

Now, Russell and Einstein were undoubtedly geniuses. But is Paul McCartney one? Daniel McKean thinks he is. He says :' The band that brought us 'She's Leaving Home', 'Here, There and Everywhere', 'Something', 'Penny Lane', 'Tomorrow Never Knows', 'In My Life' and so on are certainly not 'trivial'. McCartney himself is undoubtedly a genius; a deeply gifted songbird whose melodies have been recycled by hundreds of thousands across the globe and studied by classical musicians as well as 'pop' musicians. If the Beatles music is so trivial, why is it that each time their music is released on the latest technological format, their sales increase and break more records, decades later?

There are several points here. What is about these songs that Mr McKean thinks is so marvellous? Can he cite the particular elements of them that rise to the level of 'genius'? Can he explain why they are works of 'genius'?. Also, does he really believe that mass sales are themselves a sign of quality?  Many trivial things, pitched to appeal to a mass market, sell plenty. Does that make them good, let alone works of genius?

 

I am well aware that many people like the Beatles. If it were not so, then they would not have become rich and famous. The question is whether their renown is based on a lasting quality, or on that fickle and evanescent thing, well-marketed popularity. People get angry, rather than argue reasonably, when I raise the possibility that the Beatles are forgettable and will be forgotten (except in the way that famous stars of the past are remembered for being famous in their time, though their appeal is now incomprehensible). Merely to hold the view that the Beatles may not last is a sort of dissident position. What's more , neither side can be certain of the outcome.

Now, as one who remembers his first sight of the Beatles (and what an odd name that is, if you think about it) in their neat uniforms on some early-evening TV show in the early sixties, and can recall such works as 'Love me Do' .Twist and Shout' and 'I wanna hold your ha-a-a-and' when they were freshly-pressed 45-rpm records in rough paper sleeves,  retailing at seven shillings and fourpence a go, I have always been puzzled by the way they never went away again afterwards.  And I am also puzzled by the way they became intellectually respectable, pretentiously praised by critics who, it seemed to me, saw which way the wind was blowing. There were scores of such groups at that time. They are almost all forgotten.

The thing that seemed to distinguish the Beatles from the others was that they had the power to produce a worrying hysteria in girls aged about 14 or 15. These girls, screaming, often made it quite impossible for anyone to hear the Beatles at their live concerts (but as they dominated the audiences nobody seemed to mind). It was on that strange, unexamined hysteria, that –in my view -  their exceptional success was based.