Dubdobmoptop

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

http://tomewing.tumblr.com/post/70658547/sinker-on-beatles - it strikes me that I made a mistake extracting this (excellent) analysis of the Beatles' success and putting it on Tumblr, where you can't do post cuts, instead of here, where you can.

(The original context for the discussion is here.)

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i should really finish writing my book on music and technology, shouldn't i?

[epicharmus.livejournal.com]

YES

[koganbot]

Good stuff, Mark, especially on the Beatles' privilege in comparison to others. But the following doesn't seem right:

last but not least by the incredible bitterness of their divorce — i assume groups had broken up before, but the public ugliness was i suspect surprisingly traumatic for those in their generation who took them as a model

...

re the bitterness: i'm serious about this — the glue of early counterculture was the good feel vibe of the beatles, the sense of shared joy, and the group that did most to present this as a vast public communal option smashed it in a tantrum - i doubt the bitterness was worse than in eg cream, but the effect on the kids was just hugely more widespread; it cast a pall over the whole of pop culture, where any other group break-up just cast a pall over the relevant fans.

No, actually, it did not cast a pall over all of pop culture. Didn't cast a pall over Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, for instance, and more to the point it didn't cast a pall over me or anyone I knew, either, who actually were the kids this was supposedly having an effect on. If you take the counter culture - which is not all of pop culture, or close to it, but is the part that's most likely to have people whose sense of identity and social commitment might be affected by whether a Beatles breakup is ugly or whether someone gets stabbed to death at a Stones concert etc. - by 1968 the Beatles were getting superseded: for better or worse the vanguard was taken to be Cream, Hendrix, the Airplane, the Dead, the Doors, Joplin, Floyd, and on like that, with the Beatles being too much a part of the pop mainstream that these other groups were supposedly taking us well beyond. And Dylan and the Byrds and the Band seemed to be doing a potential end run around the whole enterprise. (And I was getting heavily into Simon & Garfunkel, but let's not go into that except to point out that in 1968 S&G were outselling the Beatles and everyone else but Cream; and for what it's worth, in my heart I was into the Stones, but afraid to bring them into the house.) Also I felt, and I wasn't the only one who felt this way, that beginning with Magical Mystery Tour, the Beatles were just plain getting worse, and that "Instant Karma" was better than anything being released around then by the Beatles anyway. But also - and maybe this was idiosyncratic to me, just what I was and wasn't paying attention to at the time, but I don't think so - I don't remember the details of the Beatles' breakup being particularly in the news a lot or even much at all. Certainly not in comparison to the way Britney's headshave got into the news recently, or the Tet Offensive and the King and Kennedy assassinations did back then, and it wasn't getting nearly as much attention as the successive deaths of Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison. And during this period, sales of rock albums were starting to go through the roof, and a lot of kids were joining into what they perceived as something happening (future fans of Tull and Uriah Heep), a half-generation behind the teens originally drawn to the Beatles in 1964. By the time of Let It Be, the Beatles were pretty much a nonevent. Well, that's an exaggeration, but they weren't a pre-eminent event. In fact, in the jumble of news and pop events of the time, the Beatles were only one sound (though a generally beloved one) in the cacophony, hadn't had a dominating moment since Sgt. Pepper's.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i think i should have said all of BRIT pop culture, which i think is far more defensible

Palling Around With Terrorists

[koganbot]

To the extent there was a pall - and you shouldn't take this for granted, but you can certainly make a case, e.g. by going from the generally energetic and pleasingly eruptive Monterey Pop and then watching how things get ever more desperate and deluded in Woodstock and Gimme Shelter, or listening to the difference between Jefferson Airplane's optimistic After Bathing At Baxter's out early in '68 and their ferocious and bitter Crown Of Creation later that year (though also note that Grace (dear Grace) manages to be ferocious and bitter on Baxter's too) - the pall was going to happen anyway whether the Beatles breakup was ugly or not or if the Beatles stayed together. As I said, I didn't particularly notice the Beatles' breakup, and when I was going though my own pall starting in late summer 1970 I was making sense of it by listening to Airplane records and old Dylan records (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde On Blonde). Which means the Beatles' good vibes - which were hardly the only thing or even necessarily the main thing going on with the Beatles, though those vibes did tend to be an official thing going on with them on such stuff as "All You Need Is Love" (whereas "Not A Second Time" and "You Can't Do That" and "You Really Got A Hold On Me" and "It's Only Love" and "Girl" and "Run For Your Life" and "A Day In The Life" and I'll get tired if I type them all weren't collectively titled "All You Need Is Hate" but were a complex and tormented evocation of what Lennon's love pieties were pretending to rescue him from, which doesn't mean to say that the good vibes were nonexistent) - were hardly the only element in the composite that glued together the counter culture.