My two cents: avant- garde music still exists and is being recorded and released, it’s just impossible to encounter other than by pure random chance due to the sheer volume of recordings being generated on a daily basis
I still stumble across things that make my jaw drop sometimes but it’s usually at the bottom of a very long rabbit hole
While true, and I say this as someone who thinks Einstürzende Neubauten may truly be one of the greatest bands of all time, I’m not sure the existence of the avant-garde negates its spectral qualities in this context.
You mentioned you only find it at the end of a long rabbit hole, so I know you wouldn’t dispute that.
But the inclusion of Fisher in the article, I think, speaks to the main difference here being that the Beatles were a major band, even as they went into the avant-grade. If Taylor Swift locked herself in a mansion with Death Grips and Yoko Mizuno to come out with something new, we might approach on what happened with the Beatles, but even then, I’m not sure it’s exactly possible.
Such a move wouldn’t be endorsed by record companies, of course, but I suspect that they still couldn’t come up with anything new as it’s difficult to imagine anything new. And I do, honestly, think that comes from a form of Capitalist Realism to go back to Fisher. I think very few people, and that includes me, are primed to understand or accept anything truly new or revolutionary. Let alone create it.
And you can argue that the same was true for the Beatles, but I think that window was closing. This is a pop-culture example I recently used as an example, but Deep Space Nine set out to deliberately close the window on an old sci-fi and Trek trope of highly evolved humans living in a utopia. It succeeded. But more interestingly, even with the showrunners, writers, and actors saying this was the goal and making a documentary about it, the show’s fans will still maintain it was always consistent with the more revolutionary Utopianism of previous iterations of the show.
And I use this as an example that even as I think of my corners of weird music as being revolutionary, I don’t think it really is in the same way, say, early Soviet experimentation with electronics and favorites for music was. The insidious thing is that I think I am blind to see what is obvious, and I think the article nods at this too, our retroactive understanding of the world is altered by what Fisher called Capitalist Realism.
Scott Walker’s last album, Bish Bosh, just out in his corner of the universe not sounding like anyone else. It’s 14 years old now so not current but it’s the one that I immediately think of
You deserve a better response than this, but I listened to the first two tracks and can't see how they break any new ground beyond what Revolution #9 broke.
Aw man I just found out about them too. Absolutely amazing, the guitarist guy dialling foot pedals with his toes ffs. I never wanted a loop pedal until I saw what he could do with them
There is always going to be a backlash against the hip. The movie “Easy Rider” understood this, as did the Nixon campaign’s theme of “The Silent Majority.” The Beatles popularity never declined. Both the White Album and Abbey Road were major sellers. It’s just that the revolution in music that they set off soon created a lot of others producing amazing new sounds so that the competition was more serious. But the fact that these moments when the youth shine don’t last is no more reason to dismiss their significance than to dismiss those moments in our individual youth when possibilities lay before us.
It’s just inconceivable to me to live in a world where as a 14 year old I’m hearing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” for first time and same person three and half years later is listening to Sgt Pepper and I Am the Walrus for the first time. Reading reviews from the time, I can’t understand how so many people were underwhelmed.
The Beatles really did sell a large amount of records, though. Maybe not as many The Sound of Music, but still a lot. Since this seems to be from a British perspective - 18 UK Number Ones even if the Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane single was not one of them. (Penny Lane was a U.S. number one, with the two sides of the single counted separately.)
I was not alive then, but there must have been a significant number, maybe a plurality at least among the young, of people who liked the music even if disdaining drugs. Albeit there were also the really countercultural bands like the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa (even though he was professedly anti-drug) that did not sell well.
Also the pro-divorce Release Me is more subversive then it might seems. Recently Peter Hitchens devoted part of a column to criticizing it. Hitchens unsurprisingly is usually anti-Beatles, but he mentioned the Number One story and seemed to imply that he would have preferred the Beatles. Better openly rebellious than wrapped in syrup, I guess.
There is the extra twist that Release Me was originally a country song. A genre that has often included divorce-centered songs (sometimes pro, sometimes con) even though from the most conservative part of the Anglosophere.
After Porridge,Clement and Le Frenais wrote a follow up series about Fletcher and Lennys life after prison. It never took off and only one six episode series was made. BUT in the first episode when Ingrid visits her Dad in prison,that's Fletcher prior to him coming to live at home he (Ronnie Barker delivers a brilliant speech) written by Clement + Le Frenais of course,an insightful speech telling Ingrid all the swinging,liberal ideas she reads in The Sun,The Mail,The Mirror are only applicable and appropriate in certain areas of London and in most provincial British areas it's still in reality the 1950s! I can confirm this. It's a brilliant speech,written and delivered and it tells a truth about life then,the life we saw on tv was not the life we lived in our suburbs. If you can find it,do watch it abd see what you think.
The first LP I asked my parents to buy me for my birthday was Abbey Road. That would be 1971 when I turned 12. I still have it and play it: it didn't sound like anything they'd done before and yet it only sounded like them. (I think, btw way, that Dark Side of the Moon is essentially a Beatles album, a son of Abbey Road.) Also, it's worth remembering re McCartney and tapeloops that George Martin was on the fringes of the Radiophonic Workshop and even had a minor hit in 1962 with Waltz in Orbit as one half of Ray Cathode with Maddalena Fagandini.
More broadly, it is too easily forgotten just how eclectic the music played on the radio was in the early 70s, and not just by John Peel. Even daytime radio would move seamlessly between Alvin Stardust, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Procul Harum, TRex, Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell. As a schoolboy at the time I was exposed to everything from the radio and by friends' big brother's record collections. That's how I heard Tangerine Dream and Dory Previn as well as Black Sabbath, Edgar Broughton, Hawkwind and Gong. Its a cliche now, but all of us stayed up to watch OGWT. There was loads of good jazz and folk music around too on radio and TV. And then one of my school friends introduced me to Zappa and the Mothers...
But then came the sneering cool kids at Sounds and NME, rewriting history to suit their own delusions. If you look, though, just as Englebert trumped the Beatles, Abba , Bony M and the Grease and Saturday Night fever soundtracks trumped the Clash, the Pistols and all the rest.
Revisionism and fiction are everywhere in this world where everything has to be classified into increasingly baroque hierarchies of genres and sub-genres and most popular histories of popular music are nonsense. And six decades later the Beatles still shine.
Martin’s influence is – even in the context of all the recognition he got in creating the most famous band of all time – still really understated, I think.
You’re totally right about the revisionism and the fake hierarchies. I could easily have written this piece about how everyone actually hated the Sex Pistols in the England of 1977.
I was a young teenager when the Beatles arrived on the scene. I suppose I liked some of their early songs well enough, but not enough to stop spending my allowance money on plastic model airplanes instead of their 45s.
The way the lyrics were written, using certain keywords, mainly love, the way they were marketed, the timing of Yoko Ono coming into John’s life, John was murdered shortly after his Playboy interview.
Both Keith Moon and Pete Townsend noticed something was off, they even said so.
It’s hard to change the way you think about things, sometimes.
No. I would have liked the Beatles. And there is still a massive ton of great music. You encounter it the same way you always have. You go to shows. You get involved in a scene. At no point in history has great, counter cultural music just walked up to normies.
It takes years for it to work it's way out. People were going to modest mouse or Wilco shows 10 years before they were on the radio. Thousands of people (like me) saw Nirvana in dive bars or VFW's.
There are still local punk and indie scenes and the next great bands will arise from them because it's impossible to make a great band without great bandmates and you only meet them at 2am at some miserable dive bar where you're both watching some band nobody but you guys have heard of.
The Beatles just kept getting better and better. Not for everyone, of course, just for people who knew what was good. It was a time of confluence of a lot of factors, the biggest of which was the awakening of the white majority to some of the most brilliant music any culture ever produced. Not everyone got it of course, and those who did were mostly young. The Beatles got it big time and were able to lay it out there and combine it with a lot of other things, such as English music hall tunes and folk music of Britain and America. George was largely responsible for the Indian influence, which was quite profound on a number of their songs.
This sort of fusion was only going to happen for the first time once. European classical music seems to have proceeded in a similar way, altho i cant cite the influences there. But it clearly peaked around the nineteenth century sometime, after which there wasnt so much new to come up with.
Of course theres a lot of other reasons the rock era is waning. We dont all listen to the same few sources. Commercial pressures have resulted in pop music being reduced to formulas which work(make money) and are just recombined in different ways to meet the demands of the market. Taylor Swift isnt any good, according to my daughter, and I don't believe people will ever compare notes over where they were when they first heard a tune of hers.
Many of us were there to appreciate the Beatles when they were happenjng, and not just them but Dylan, Hendrix and many others. We know how lucky we were to have been part of a special time in our culture's history. If something like that were to happen now, it probably wouldnt be centered around music. Might even be something MORE meaningful. Then maybe I'd regret not being young for it. But it'll be good if something does come along, because altogether what happened with the Beatles gave us hope
Interesting post with some very good points. Being a boomer and having lived through the 60s, I am always amazed how so many of the dissident community may understand all the official narratives are a lie, then buy all the stereotypes of the 60s.
By 1970 my suburban, California highschool had a total of one boy with long hair and he was an immigrant. My classmates were largely working class and sought to have a car, girlfriend and job in that order. None of them wanted revolution in politics, culture or fashion.
When I went to university, few kids cared about politics and the vast majority of the girls went home on the weekend to spend time with their boyfriends and families.
However, it means a lot to the right to believe every nonsensical claim about the boomers
I really liked this piece, as soon as you started in on the Beatles I put on Sgt Pepper and got blissed out on the strange mix of sounds once again. I wanted to confess my wildness aged 18 when an art student in Dublin's college of art. The student body had copied the Hornsey occupation and taken over the building which at that time formed a wing of the National parliament building Leinster House. It was all very genteel, most of the students came from the Irish middle class with an upper crust of Ascendancy Protestant establishment families' offspring. Unfortunately I came from a stratum of Irish society, very socially conservative, pious Catholic folk, just beginning to burgeon into the precursor of the Celtic Tiger era. My family was definitely suspicious of my artistic leanings but somehow I had inveigled myself onto a place on the Foundation course in spite of the parents' misgivings. I went from a repressive Christian Brothers school straight into the art college just at the moment of greatest danger for a headstrong impressionable teenager. The occupation upended my Foundation course, most new students kept their heads down but the heady atmosphere of freedom I was experiencing brought out the wildness in me. Long story short, the destruction of Victorian vintage plaster casts in the college as the occupation began to lose momentum ended the rebellion and my art education, being the only fucken eejit expelled as a consequence. Oh, there were cute hoors who escaped punishment despite their involvement but the gurrier - Dublin term for low class youth - walked the plank. Still, all these years later, I'm still making pickchers, so maybe twas meant to be. A day in the life, indeed.
As a US preteen the I liked the early Beatles but was inspired by the Beach Boys.
I dreamed of learning to surf, moving to California and marrying a California girl, all of which I did.
The first time I heard Sweet Child of Mine was on the beach getting ready to surf with my brother, and it inspired me to jump in NOW and get those first turns! I still love to crank it before working out.
Dreary shit like the Grateful Dead's "I will get by" just inspires me to change the streaming channel.
The Sound of Music and South Pacific allowed people to dream of visiting the Alps and distant tropical islands.
Most people enjoy being inspired. Taylor Swift is another proof point. I don't remember anyone actively disliking the Beatles after the switch. They just thought the new stuff was kind of boring and didn't really care.
I was 23 when Kanye West released Yeezus, and distinctly remember saying to my then-boyfriend: "If this is the future of music, I want nothing to do with it."
In 2013 Kanye occupied a place of influence and importance in popular culture roughly analogous (I would argue) to David Bowie's c. 1975. (Yes, right around the Thin White Duke) Yeezus, in retrospect, is the creative apex of his career. And I freely admit at the time I wanted nothing to do with it. Culture can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards, as it were.
I would say some of the most interesting contemporary musical phenomena are old forms taking root in new soil. Hip Hop, to keep the analysis there for a moment, is functionally dead in North America. Nothing interesting has happened since Kendrick Lamar. But artists from entirely different cultures, like Kneecap, Saint Levant, Stromae, etc. are doing the really interesting, jarring, shocking work. And, as you say, being publicly crucified for it at every turn.
I think that Injury Reserve (now named By Storm), Earl Sweatshirt, billy woods, and clipping are pretty interesting American hip hop, although clipping are the only ones on that list who I actually enjoy. And Tyler the Creator is no less innovative than Kendrick imo.
Id rebuttal with Kiing Gizzard and the lizard wizard. They are unbelievable. They do every genre well, and shine with very long composed songs, marathon sets, jams, whatever. And they are decently popular. Not mainstream, but their following is very passionate. They just did a tour using modular synth boards, and id argue the music is something never done before, at least to the extent they did it. They "recycle" music that has done before, but are shape shifting sauvants, and barely keep the same style across their 30 something albums
I like them a lot, and have listened to them loads too, though it seems like there's always more to uncover... They are very unique in many ways and not a bad shout, though I think you're right that ultimately they're recycling 70s prog in some (very clever) way. Maybe? I dunno, I'm certainly open to the argument.
I saw them open for Tropical Fuck Storm, then a year later Tropical Fuck Storm open for them. I prefer TFS but both are out there! Oh and I loved The Beatles as an 11 year old in 1963 and thought Sgt Peppers was great a couple of years later.
I enjoyed this synopsis very much. I do have to mention that ”The Rest Is History” is aptly named. What, too often, isn’t history is what’s on the podcast. I gave up on them when they tried to re-re-re-debunk the Kennedy Assassination, and in the most inept manner. That simply has no purpose anymore except to embarrass the people who still believe the Warren Report. The idea that Jack Ruby shot Oswald in order to save Jackie Kennedy from the horrors of a trial wouldn’t have made it past a table read on SNL.
I'd forgotten the way he just doesn't really care for it, and the moment I rewatched it I was convinced that the whole premise for this piece had legs. It's a great scene.
Given their weird and incomprehensible lives, they were absolutely fine, probably better than you’d expect because they had humour and intelligence. I reckon I would have liked them and I think they would have liked me too.
in fact it’s a shame we aren’t best friends.
Maybe I can still hit it off with Ringo.
You got me with the clickbait headline. Well played.
I'm 73 so I lived through most the 1960s as a music fan, specifically a Beatles fan. I can recall the sheer sizzle that went through my body when I heard "Hey Jude" for the first time. The Beatles' sound was not only different from other kinds of pop music at that time (and since), their music just got better and better. How could these geniuses produce such extraordinary music year after year?
Of course I didn't ask that question at the time - I was far too young. I just lapped it all up, then and for many years afterwards. Then I came across Mike Williams on YouTube. He is younger than me but also a Beatles fan. In his video, Did the Beatles Write All Their Own Music?, he proved (to my satisfaction) that whoever wrote those amazing songs on Rubber Soul, it wasn't Lennon and McCartney (or George Harrison). His arguments are forensic and ultimately irrefutable. The implications are truly staggering.
I'd prefer to carry on believing the official narrative as recounted in this (very well written) article. But I can't because it's not true.
I've heard of the Psyop -Tavistock theory but not read up on it. I'm deep enough down a rabbit hole now and I dont really care. I don't want to take the credit away from John + Paul or even George (and Ringo was a very good drummer they now say,he never minded being the butt of a joke) but that their music was part of an agenda,drugs,mind control or mind guiding at least. I can buy that. Fifty years later we experience the music be that Blackbird,Dear Prudence,Rocky Racoon or A Day In The Life as a Standalone but in its day it interwove with a web of issues and personalities.
My two cents: avant- garde music still exists and is being recorded and released, it’s just impossible to encounter other than by pure random chance due to the sheer volume of recordings being generated on a daily basis
I still stumble across things that make my jaw drop sometimes but it’s usually at the bottom of a very long rabbit hole
Angine de Poitrine does fun microtonal mathrock. I finfld that nifty
Agreed; and I just heard them for the first time today. On the radio.
I, too, discovered Angine du Poitrine yesterday. I like them, but they aren't breaking anh ground that wasnt tilled by KGLW and their ilk
Funnily I just discovered them a day or so ago.
While true, and I say this as someone who thinks Einstürzende Neubauten may truly be one of the greatest bands of all time, I’m not sure the existence of the avant-garde negates its spectral qualities in this context.
You mentioned you only find it at the end of a long rabbit hole, so I know you wouldn’t dispute that.
But the inclusion of Fisher in the article, I think, speaks to the main difference here being that the Beatles were a major band, even as they went into the avant-grade. If Taylor Swift locked herself in a mansion with Death Grips and Yoko Mizuno to come out with something new, we might approach on what happened with the Beatles, but even then, I’m not sure it’s exactly possible.
Such a move wouldn’t be endorsed by record companies, of course, but I suspect that they still couldn’t come up with anything new as it’s difficult to imagine anything new. And I do, honestly, think that comes from a form of Capitalist Realism to go back to Fisher. I think very few people, and that includes me, are primed to understand or accept anything truly new or revolutionary. Let alone create it.
And you can argue that the same was true for the Beatles, but I think that window was closing. This is a pop-culture example I recently used as an example, but Deep Space Nine set out to deliberately close the window on an old sci-fi and Trek trope of highly evolved humans living in a utopia. It succeeded. But more interestingly, even with the showrunners, writers, and actors saying this was the goal and making a documentary about it, the show’s fans will still maintain it was always consistent with the more revolutionary Utopianism of previous iterations of the show.
And I use this as an example that even as I think of my corners of weird music as being revolutionary, I don’t think it really is in the same way, say, early Soviet experimentation with electronics and favorites for music was. The insidious thing is that I think I am blind to see what is obvious, and I think the article nods at this too, our retroactive understanding of the world is altered by what Fisher called Capitalist Realism.
I, too, would like to know what avant garde track made your jaw drop
Itchycoo Park
I like this song (and this vibe in general), but it hasn't been avant-garde for maybe 60 years
But that is the track that made my jaw drop!
could you recommend anything
Scott Walker’s last album, Bish Bosh, just out in his corner of the universe not sounding like anyone else. It’s 14 years old now so not current but it’s the one that I immediately think of
You deserve a better response than this, but I listened to the first two tracks and can't see how they break any new ground beyond what Revolution #9 broke.
I completely agree with this (obviously)
Aw man I just found out about them too. Absolutely amazing, the guitarist guy dialling foot pedals with his toes ffs. I never wanted a loop pedal until I saw what he could do with them
There is always going to be a backlash against the hip. The movie “Easy Rider” understood this, as did the Nixon campaign’s theme of “The Silent Majority.” The Beatles popularity never declined. Both the White Album and Abbey Road were major sellers. It’s just that the revolution in music that they set off soon created a lot of others producing amazing new sounds so that the competition was more serious. But the fact that these moments when the youth shine don’t last is no more reason to dismiss their significance than to dismiss those moments in our individual youth when possibilities lay before us.
Dominic Sandbrook loooooves to cite both Nixon and the Silent Majority all the time on his pod.
The Beatles are groundbreaking innovative artists. Huge band. They inspired so many musicians and artists.
It’s just inconceivable to me to live in a world where as a 14 year old I’m hearing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” for first time and same person three and half years later is listening to Sgt Pepper and I Am the Walrus for the first time. Reading reviews from the time, I can’t understand how so many people were underwhelmed.
The Beatles really did sell a large amount of records, though. Maybe not as many The Sound of Music, but still a lot. Since this seems to be from a British perspective - 18 UK Number Ones even if the Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane single was not one of them. (Penny Lane was a U.S. number one, with the two sides of the single counted separately.)
I was not alive then, but there must have been a significant number, maybe a plurality at least among the young, of people who liked the music even if disdaining drugs. Albeit there were also the really countercultural bands like the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa (even though he was professedly anti-drug) that did not sell well.
Also the pro-divorce Release Me is more subversive then it might seems. Recently Peter Hitchens devoted part of a column to criticizing it. Hitchens unsurprisingly is usually anti-Beatles, but he mentioned the Number One story and seemed to imply that he would have preferred the Beatles. Better openly rebellious than wrapped in syrup, I guess.
There is the extra twist that Release Me was originally a country song. A genre that has often included divorce-centered songs (sometimes pro, sometimes con) even though from the most conservative part of the Anglosophere.
Sgt Pepper was the best-selling album of the 1960s in the UK, beating out The Sound of Music.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20071217020421/http://www.theofficialcharts.com/album_chart_history_1969.php
After Porridge,Clement and Le Frenais wrote a follow up series about Fletcher and Lennys life after prison. It never took off and only one six episode series was made. BUT in the first episode when Ingrid visits her Dad in prison,that's Fletcher prior to him coming to live at home he (Ronnie Barker delivers a brilliant speech) written by Clement + Le Frenais of course,an insightful speech telling Ingrid all the swinging,liberal ideas she reads in The Sun,The Mail,The Mirror are only applicable and appropriate in certain areas of London and in most provincial British areas it's still in reality the 1950s! I can confirm this. It's a brilliant speech,written and delivered and it tells a truth about life then,the life we saw on tv was not the life we lived in our suburbs. If you can find it,do watch it abd see what you think.
The first LP I asked my parents to buy me for my birthday was Abbey Road. That would be 1971 when I turned 12. I still have it and play it: it didn't sound like anything they'd done before and yet it only sounded like them. (I think, btw way, that Dark Side of the Moon is essentially a Beatles album, a son of Abbey Road.) Also, it's worth remembering re McCartney and tapeloops that George Martin was on the fringes of the Radiophonic Workshop and even had a minor hit in 1962 with Waltz in Orbit as one half of Ray Cathode with Maddalena Fagandini.
More broadly, it is too easily forgotten just how eclectic the music played on the radio was in the early 70s, and not just by John Peel. Even daytime radio would move seamlessly between Alvin Stardust, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Procul Harum, TRex, Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell. As a schoolboy at the time I was exposed to everything from the radio and by friends' big brother's record collections. That's how I heard Tangerine Dream and Dory Previn as well as Black Sabbath, Edgar Broughton, Hawkwind and Gong. Its a cliche now, but all of us stayed up to watch OGWT. There was loads of good jazz and folk music around too on radio and TV. And then one of my school friends introduced me to Zappa and the Mothers...
But then came the sneering cool kids at Sounds and NME, rewriting history to suit their own delusions. If you look, though, just as Englebert trumped the Beatles, Abba , Bony M and the Grease and Saturday Night fever soundtracks trumped the Clash, the Pistols and all the rest.
Revisionism and fiction are everywhere in this world where everything has to be classified into increasingly baroque hierarchies of genres and sub-genres and most popular histories of popular music are nonsense. And six decades later the Beatles still shine.
Martin’s influence is – even in the context of all the recognition he got in creating the most famous band of all time – still really understated, I think.
You’re totally right about the revisionism and the fake hierarchies. I could easily have written this piece about how everyone actually hated the Sex Pistols in the England of 1977.
I actually still wonder what really happened to the earlier (Brian) Epstein...
I was a young teenager when the Beatles arrived on the scene. I suppose I liked some of their early songs well enough, but not enough to stop spending my allowance money on plastic model airplanes instead of their 45s.
You got way more out of model airplanes.
Their music is ok, for a psy-op.
The way the lyrics were written, using certain keywords, mainly love, the way they were marketed, the timing of Yoko Ono coming into John’s life, John was murdered shortly after his Playboy interview.
Both Keith Moon and Pete Townsend noticed something was off, they even said so.
It’s hard to change the way you think about things, sometimes.
Brilliant
No. I would have liked the Beatles. And there is still a massive ton of great music. You encounter it the same way you always have. You go to shows. You get involved in a scene. At no point in history has great, counter cultural music just walked up to normies.
It takes years for it to work it's way out. People were going to modest mouse or Wilco shows 10 years before they were on the radio. Thousands of people (like me) saw Nirvana in dive bars or VFW's.
There are still local punk and indie scenes and the next great bands will arise from them because it's impossible to make a great band without great bandmates and you only meet them at 2am at some miserable dive bar where you're both watching some band nobody but you guys have heard of.
The Beatles just kept getting better and better. Not for everyone, of course, just for people who knew what was good. It was a time of confluence of a lot of factors, the biggest of which was the awakening of the white majority to some of the most brilliant music any culture ever produced. Not everyone got it of course, and those who did were mostly young. The Beatles got it big time and were able to lay it out there and combine it with a lot of other things, such as English music hall tunes and folk music of Britain and America. George was largely responsible for the Indian influence, which was quite profound on a number of their songs.
This sort of fusion was only going to happen for the first time once. European classical music seems to have proceeded in a similar way, altho i cant cite the influences there. But it clearly peaked around the nineteenth century sometime, after which there wasnt so much new to come up with.
Of course theres a lot of other reasons the rock era is waning. We dont all listen to the same few sources. Commercial pressures have resulted in pop music being reduced to formulas which work(make money) and are just recombined in different ways to meet the demands of the market. Taylor Swift isnt any good, according to my daughter, and I don't believe people will ever compare notes over where they were when they first heard a tune of hers.
Many of us were there to appreciate the Beatles when they were happenjng, and not just them but Dylan, Hendrix and many others. We know how lucky we were to have been part of a special time in our culture's history. If something like that were to happen now, it probably wouldnt be centered around music. Might even be something MORE meaningful. Then maybe I'd regret not being young for it. But it'll be good if something does come along, because altogether what happened with the Beatles gave us hope
Interesting post with some very good points. Being a boomer and having lived through the 60s, I am always amazed how so many of the dissident community may understand all the official narratives are a lie, then buy all the stereotypes of the 60s.
By 1970 my suburban, California highschool had a total of one boy with long hair and he was an immigrant. My classmates were largely working class and sought to have a car, girlfriend and job in that order. None of them wanted revolution in politics, culture or fashion.
When I went to university, few kids cared about politics and the vast majority of the girls went home on the weekend to spend time with their boyfriends and families.
However, it means a lot to the right to believe every nonsensical claim about the boomers
I really liked this piece, as soon as you started in on the Beatles I put on Sgt Pepper and got blissed out on the strange mix of sounds once again. I wanted to confess my wildness aged 18 when an art student in Dublin's college of art. The student body had copied the Hornsey occupation and taken over the building which at that time formed a wing of the National parliament building Leinster House. It was all very genteel, most of the students came from the Irish middle class with an upper crust of Ascendancy Protestant establishment families' offspring. Unfortunately I came from a stratum of Irish society, very socially conservative, pious Catholic folk, just beginning to burgeon into the precursor of the Celtic Tiger era. My family was definitely suspicious of my artistic leanings but somehow I had inveigled myself onto a place on the Foundation course in spite of the parents' misgivings. I went from a repressive Christian Brothers school straight into the art college just at the moment of greatest danger for a headstrong impressionable teenager. The occupation upended my Foundation course, most new students kept their heads down but the heady atmosphere of freedom I was experiencing brought out the wildness in me. Long story short, the destruction of Victorian vintage plaster casts in the college as the occupation began to lose momentum ended the rebellion and my art education, being the only fucken eejit expelled as a consequence. Oh, there were cute hoors who escaped punishment despite their involvement but the gurrier - Dublin term for low class youth - walked the plank. Still, all these years later, I'm still making pickchers, so maybe twas meant to be. A day in the life, indeed.
If you don’t get kicked out, you’re not trying hard enough!
I must have been a natural so, it all came too easily for me back then
As a US preteen the I liked the early Beatles but was inspired by the Beach Boys.
I dreamed of learning to surf, moving to California and marrying a California girl, all of which I did.
The first time I heard Sweet Child of Mine was on the beach getting ready to surf with my brother, and it inspired me to jump in NOW and get those first turns! I still love to crank it before working out.
Dreary shit like the Grateful Dead's "I will get by" just inspires me to change the streaming channel.
The Sound of Music and South Pacific allowed people to dream of visiting the Alps and distant tropical islands.
Most people enjoy being inspired. Taylor Swift is another proof point. I don't remember anyone actively disliking the Beatles after the switch. They just thought the new stuff was kind of boring and didn't really care.
I was 23 when Kanye West released Yeezus, and distinctly remember saying to my then-boyfriend: "If this is the future of music, I want nothing to do with it."
In 2013 Kanye occupied a place of influence and importance in popular culture roughly analogous (I would argue) to David Bowie's c. 1975. (Yes, right around the Thin White Duke) Yeezus, in retrospect, is the creative apex of his career. And I freely admit at the time I wanted nothing to do with it. Culture can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards, as it were.
I would say some of the most interesting contemporary musical phenomena are old forms taking root in new soil. Hip Hop, to keep the analysis there for a moment, is functionally dead in North America. Nothing interesting has happened since Kendrick Lamar. But artists from entirely different cultures, like Kneecap, Saint Levant, Stromae, etc. are doing the really interesting, jarring, shocking work. And, as you say, being publicly crucified for it at every turn.
Thanks for this. Brilliant.
I think that Injury Reserve (now named By Storm), Earl Sweatshirt, billy woods, and clipping are pretty interesting American hip hop, although clipping are the only ones on that list who I actually enjoy. And Tyler the Creator is no less innovative than Kendrick imo.
I’ve actually since gotten pretty into Vince Staples.
And yeah I shouldn’t disrespect Tyler, the Creator.
Id rebuttal with Kiing Gizzard and the lizard wizard. They are unbelievable. They do every genre well, and shine with very long composed songs, marathon sets, jams, whatever. And they are decently popular. Not mainstream, but their following is very passionate. They just did a tour using modular synth boards, and id argue the music is something never done before, at least to the extent they did it. They "recycle" music that has done before, but are shape shifting sauvants, and barely keep the same style across their 30 something albums
I like them a lot, and have listened to them loads too, though it seems like there's always more to uncover... They are very unique in many ways and not a bad shout, though I think you're right that ultimately they're recycling 70s prog in some (very clever) way. Maybe? I dunno, I'm certainly open to the argument.
I saw them open for Tropical Fuck Storm, then a year later Tropical Fuck Storm open for them. I prefer TFS but both are out there! Oh and I loved The Beatles as an 11 year old in 1963 and thought Sgt Peppers was great a couple of years later.
I enjoyed this synopsis very much. I do have to mention that ”The Rest Is History” is aptly named. What, too often, isn’t history is what’s on the podcast. I gave up on them when they tried to re-re-re-debunk the Kennedy Assassination, and in the most inept manner. That simply has no purpose anymore except to embarrass the people who still believe the Warren Report. The idea that Jack Ruby shot Oswald in order to save Jackie Kennedy from the horrors of a trial wouldn’t have made it past a table read on SNL.
That $250k was worth it. I think of that scene with Don Draper frequently. A real stand out moment, brilliantly done.
I'd forgotten the way he just doesn't really care for it, and the moment I rewatched it I was convinced that the whole premise for this piece had legs. It's a great scene.
Given their weird and incomprehensible lives, they were absolutely fine, probably better than you’d expect because they had humour and intelligence. I reckon I would have liked them and I think they would have liked me too.
in fact it’s a shame we aren’t best friends.
Maybe I can still hit it off with Ringo.
You got me with the clickbait headline. Well played.
All about creating that curiosity gap in the headline…
I'm 73 so I lived through most the 1960s as a music fan, specifically a Beatles fan. I can recall the sheer sizzle that went through my body when I heard "Hey Jude" for the first time. The Beatles' sound was not only different from other kinds of pop music at that time (and since), their music just got better and better. How could these geniuses produce such extraordinary music year after year?
Of course I didn't ask that question at the time - I was far too young. I just lapped it all up, then and for many years afterwards. Then I came across Mike Williams on YouTube. He is younger than me but also a Beatles fan. In his video, Did the Beatles Write All Their Own Music?, he proved (to my satisfaction) that whoever wrote those amazing songs on Rubber Soul, it wasn't Lennon and McCartney (or George Harrison). His arguments are forensic and ultimately irrefutable. The implications are truly staggering.
I'd prefer to carry on believing the official narrative as recounted in this (very well written) article. But I can't because it's not true.
It was Ringo all along!
I've heard of the Psyop -Tavistock theory but not read up on it. I'm deep enough down a rabbit hole now and I dont really care. I don't want to take the credit away from John + Paul or even George (and Ringo was a very good drummer they now say,he never minded being the butt of a joke) but that their music was part of an agenda,drugs,mind control or mind guiding at least. I can buy that. Fifty years later we experience the music be that Blackbird,Dear Prudence,Rocky Racoon or A Day In The Life as a Standalone but in its day it interwove with a web of issues and personalities.