Beatleizing

I was born in '68 and "Cry Baby Cry," from the White Album was recorded on my birthday, and for a few years of my childhood I considered myself the world's biggest Beatle fan, and even wanted to play guitar left handed because Paul McCartney was left handed, never mind that he played bass. I took it upon myself to listen to every song they ever recorded, and would listen to their tapes to go to sleep at night, so you'd think I'd be more excited by the 50th anniversary of their appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, but I'm not. In fact, I barely care, and I realize this must label me as someone that's not a 'vinyl' collector (I hate that word), or something else that Gen X has made up to rationalize our existence as aesthetes, not that I have anything against vinyl collecting, or living for the Beatles, but I feel like their reign is truly over, and this anniversary mania makes that clear. I watched CBS's special to the Beatles tonight and I couldn't get through five minutes of it, and the child in me would've thought this was impossible, but the adult in me cheers me on.

It's not that I don't like the Beatles, or think they weren't great, but I question their relevance as a 'pop' act and wonder what their music really will mean to future generations, if it will mean anything at all and how much they were just a product our parents sold to us. In John and Yoko's famous Rolling Stone interview given to Jann Wenner right after the band broke up, Lennon said the Beatles would never be given bad press, because they were a cash cow, and too many people were making millions off them to ever bring them down, and unbelievably enough that trend seems to be going on to this day, and it's weird to watch men in their Sixties or Seventies talking about the Beatles appearance on Sullivan as if they were discussing D-Day, or the Tet Offensive. I know that the Beatles are an important pop culture moment, and might've changed the direction of rock music forever, and think that aspiring singer/songwriters should listen to their music, and yet they've come and gone, but they are still making people money, and as long as they keep doing this they'll never die.

I work with lots of 20 somethings at a pizzeria and I can tell you straight out that none of them care about the Beatles, or their influence, or anything they stood for, and in many ways this last hurrah is the kiss off of an entire generation as it is a band. At first, I was mortified that young people didn't like the Beatles like I did, or think their music sublime, but I think I was fearing my own mortality, because I don't listen to the Beatles anymore, either, and their music means very little to me, or who fucked who in India when they visited the Maharishi. They had a great legend and their music certainly evolved in almost unreal way that let you watch them grow from children ("Please Please Me") to men ("Let It Be") and very few artists are allowed this opportunity, since most are one or two hit wonders, put out a few albums, and etch themselves in the public imagination forever, frozen in a moment of time. But the Beatles defined a decade bewildered by J.F.K.'s assasination, and destroyed by R.F.K.'s assasination, cutting their hair short at first, and then letting it grow wildly long, and being the accidental inspiration to Manson. They went on a wild ride, no doubt, and one that our generation looked at the way our parents looked at their parent's war service, but conflating the two is insane, except for vinyl collectors, and people writing interminable term papers.

The Beatles grew and changed very quickly like our parents did, but they spent the rest of their lives remembering that change, rather than becoming the change they represented, and the political backlash against the 'Beatle' inspired Sixties was huge. I do think this backlash is finally ending, but it makes the Beatles look more obsolete than ever, just like I'll be obsolete one day too, or how a facebook post becomes obsolete almost a second after it is written. We all become obsolete but some art lasts and I'm not so sure the Beatles music will as much as what they stood for, or the political moment they represented, when the Beatniks were out, and the Hippies had yet to come into existence, but the Hippies didn't take over the world, and remembering them was weird in the Eighties, and almost impossible now.

I don't really blame the Beatles for any of this. They were musicians wanting to make it and didn't think of themselves as revolutionaries, or rather did in the Cavern, and then were talked out of it for their Ed Sullivan performance, and then rebelled agains their manager, Brian Epstein, making them wear silly suits and the same mop top. They became individuals more than anything, and in that way ushered in the 'Me' generation perfectly, but no one seems to be remembering this, or anything else about them for that matter, save how boring it is to remember them, or how great they were, or a mixture of the two. The truth is we're remembering the Boomer generation when we remember the Beatles, not the Vietnam war, or the march on Washington, and my repugnance with this generation is so great I can't really take it seriously.