That’s not how it is anymore. Now it seems impossible to shake work loose from biography. We swim in biography; we are sick with biography. This is a modus vivendi for contemporary artists—an artist like, say, Harry Styles must maintain whatever mystery he can in the avalanche of information that has been shared about him over the past decade. Indeed, what mystery he possesses comes from our knowledge of the wondrous fact that there’s an actual person, a soul, hidden somewhere in the midst of all this information. This biographical reach extends to older artists as well. Now my Beatles-mad
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