My girlfriend asked me this week if I considered myself to be a nostalgic person and the only thing I have been able to think of since is The Beatles. Wedged deeply into America’s soundtrack, they are like a bad political bumper sticker on the back of a VW bus that is so dated that it is ironic and suddenly hipper than ever.
America wants to like The Beatles like a high school freshmen wants to like the taste of beer; it would just make it so much easier to be cool. Unfortunately numbers speak louder than empty cans of Natty Ice and Americans don’t actually buy many Beatles albums. In fact just over 19 million copies of The White Album (The Beatles’ best selling record to date) have been purchased in America, thus making it the ninth most popular album of all time. Behind The Eagles, Michael Jackson and yes, Shania Twain, sales of The White Album look a bit gray.
For years I have wanted desperately to like The Beatles. I wanted to identify with the different emotional elements their songwriting captured. I want to be able to say things like “God, I feel like Paul’s blues phase this week,” or “I need some Ravi Shankar John today.”
I tried to like the Beatles like a chubby kid trying to like karate, pretending I didn’t mind being slapped in the face with their overplayed anthems filled with cliché and pretense. I had to con myself into it. Initially I created activities that incorporated their music into my routine. It was a practice in systemic desensitization that involved a lot of dishonesty with my friends, lovers and most shamefully myself. My attempts consumed my Sunday mornings, my late night drives and destroyed a lot of good writing. In the end I have learned to love The Beatles the way old people have learned to love war.
I recently lost an estranged friend to breast cancer. We were contemporaries in a spoken word poetry scene. We were romantic and we were wildly competitive in our writing. Our relationship was often fodder for feeding our performances into intense emotional outbursts. Oh yeah, it was uncomfortable, often unkind, childish and unbelievably fun.
She was a true Beatles fan. Not to be measured by an accumulation of obscure first edition pressings of side projects of side projects. Not the kind of fan whose walls are a paper mache of “Let It Be” posters and framed album covers. Not even the kind of fan who prides themselves on knowing who sang, wrote or recorded what song. She was what I like to call second generation Beatles; her need/love was something delivered by lineage. An indelibly sincere dependency bestowed upon her at birth by a crazy hippy mother and a youth full of balding love children that honestly believed “all they needed was love.” Unfortunately rent is not paid in lyrics.
Some children are the best of their parent’s bad habits. Bronwynn was platinum 19 times over in her mother’s “Hey Jude” (she made it a point to play this song for me every opportunity she could in hopes that I would eventually get it; I didn’t). When Bronwynn met adversity, she faced it with a confidence and calmness that I have rarely seen, often not appearing to understand the true severity of situations and often times emasculating them with her cool.
Some children are raised on bible verses; they use their faith in rote memorization of psalms and allegory to bend the world into paradigms of good and bad, of right and wrong. When reality diverges from their terms of reason we get things like sin, guilt and doubt. She saw the world in terms of love, revolution, LSD and octopus’s gardens. When reality unfairly bent away from this matrix she bent it back (often with alcohol and self destruction unfortunately) and my, what a ride she had. This also was paramount in creating one of the most sincerely agreeable dispositions of any human being I have ever met. Forgiveness, compassion, humor and, as trite as it sounds, unquestioning, unconditional relentless love. America wishes we could like The Beatles like that but we can’t, that’s what made Bronwynn. I am trying so hard to like them, but it is just so much harder to convince myself without her.
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This is an experiment in post-hardcore journalism.
4 comments:
I'm still trying to make sense of it all. Thank you for this, Blake.
Jedi
dawg...the beatles is tight, im sure you'd atleast dig john once you found out how different he was than how pop culture makes him
You just did right by your friend, Blake.
Sorry for your loss. It is tough to lose good people too soon. I appreciate this tribute to your friend.
My children who are of your generation and younger are also huge Beatle fans like your friend, Bronwynn. But neither they nor their mother, who is British, can fathom how the Beatles affected United States inhabitants of my generation. No one who wasn't 5 years or older when John F. Kennedy was assassinated can "get it."
Think 9-11. With all the emotion that followed that tragedy, there was not a long mourning period like we had for JFK. (thoough Bush is trying to create one by having our children killed off in Iraq.) Those days were about black clothing and a closed down media.
Yeah, I know Leno and Letterman didn't broadcast, but there was still unlimited entertainment access after 9/11. In the 60's there was extremely limited access to music other than the top 40. The Beatles woke us up out of a national depression. They were a new sound during the cold war. The Beatles are Archetypal. And the fact that my children and your friend picked up on that inherited unconscious is not to dismiss your feelings and reality.
I think if I heard them for the first time today, I would dismiss their early stuff as pop. But I was around when their harmonic style, their weaving of lyric and instrumentation and ability to excite an audience was unique.
It's hard to define the workings of the non-digital studios of the era. They didn't even have 24 track recording, not to mention Protools. They had to invent techniques and deal with analogue hiss. It was a challenge to bring us their 'new sound.' Okay, I'm being preachy, sorry.
I don't know you Blake; I once had the pleasure of hearing you read poetry, which I appreciated. I am touched by your tribute. I don't need you to like the Beatles, but I wanted to tell you why they are who they are to so many of us.
And I thank you, because I have been trying to write a poem about this subject for 10 years; you have put them in perspective for me and given me a new conceit to work with.
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