Learning from the Beatles
Any close listening to musical groups soon establishes the fact that as composers and performers the Beatles repay attention altogether more than does any other group, American or English. They offer something for nearly everyone and respond to almost any kind of interest. (pp. 120-21)
More aloof from politics than the Stones, their topicality is of music, the social predicaments, and especially the sentiments traditional to folk songs and ballads. Maybe the most important service of the Beatles and similar groups is the restoration to good standing of the simplicities that have frightened us into irony and the search for irony; they locate the beauty and pathos of commonplace feelings even while they work havoc with fashionable or tiresome expressions of those feelings. (p. 124)
One of the Beatles' most appealing qualities is … their tendency more to self-parody than to parody of others. The two are of course very close for performers who empathize with all the characters in their songs and whose most conspicuous moments of self-parody occur when they're emulating someone whose style they'd like to master. At such moments their boyishness really does shine forth as a musical virtue: giving themselves almost wholly to an imitation of some performer they admire, their necessary exaggeration of his style makes fun of no one so much as themselves. It's a matter of trying on a style and then—as if embarrassed by their own riches, by a self-confident knowledge that no style, not even one of their own invention, is more than a temporary exercise of strength—of laughing themselves out of imitation. (p. 127)
Parody from the Beatles tends usually, and increasingly, to be directed toward musical tradition and their own musical efforts. This is at least one reason why "All You Need Is Love," recorded on the reverse side of "Baby You're a Rich Man," is one of their most revealing. Along with the Sgt. Pepper album, it indicates so sophisticated an awareness of their historical achievements in music as to make it evident that they could not continue much longer without still further changes of direction…. "All You Need Is Love" is decisive evidence that when the Beatles think together (or apart) about anything they think musically and that musical thinking dictates their response to other things: to "love," in this instance, to drugs and social manners in "Baby You're a Rich Man" and throughout the Sgt. Pepper album. (p. 128)
Lennon and McCartney's musical recognition that the "need" for love [in "All You Need Is Love"] is historical and recurrent is communicated less in the lyrics than by instrumental and vocal allusions to earlier material. The historical allusiveness is at the outset smart-alecky—the song opens with the French National Anthem—passes through the Chaplin echo, if that's what it is, to various echoes of the blues, and boogie-woogie, all of them in the mere shadings of background, until at the end the song itself seems to be swept up and dispersed within the musical history of which it is a part and of the electronics by which that history has been made available. The process begins by a recurrence of the "love, love, love" phrase, here repeated and doubled as on a stalled record. It then proceeds into a medley of sounds, fractured, mingled musical phrases drifting into a blur…. We can make out fragments of old love songs condemned to wander through the airways for all time…. Far from being in any way satiric, the song gathers into itself the musical expression of the "need" for love as it has accumulated through decades of popular music.
This historical feeling for music, including their own musical creations, explains I think, something centrally important about the Beatles: their fascination with the invented aspects of everything around them. They respond with a participatory tenderness and joy to styles and artifact, and it is what makes them so attractively responsive, for older as well as younger listeners, to the human and social landscape of contemporary England. It's as if they naturally see the world in the form of son et lumière: as they say in a beautiful neighborhood song about Liverpool, "Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes." Not everyone their age is capable of seeing the odd wonder of a meter maid—after all, a meter maid's a meter maid; fewer still would be moved to a song of praise like "Lovely Rita" ("When it gets dark I tow your heart away"); and only a Beatle could be expected, when seeing her with a bag across her shoulder, to have the historically enlivened vision that "made her look a little like a military man."
Now of course English boys out of Liverpool can be expected, it says here, to be more intimate than American boys from San Francisco with the residual social and cultural evidences from World War II and even from the First World War. In response to these and other traces of the past, however, the Beatles display an absolutely unique kind of involvement. It isn't simply that they have an instinctive nostalgia for period styles, as in "She's Leaving Home" or "When I'm Sixty-four," or that they absorb the past through the media of the popular arts, through music, cinema, theatrical conventions, bands like Sgt. Pepper's or music-hall performers. (pp. 130-31)
No, the Beatles have the distinction in their work both of knowing that this is how they see and feel things and of enjoying the knowledge. It could be said that they know what Beckett and Borges know but without any loss of simple enthusism or innocent expectation, and without any patronization of those who do not know. In the loving phrases of "Penny Lane," "A pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray, / And tho' she feels as if she's in a play, / She is anyway." (pp. 131-32)
Without even willing it, we picture ourselves much of the time anyway, see ourselves and the world in exotic images usually invented by someone else. This is the suggestion throughout the Sgt. Pepper album…. In "A Day in the Life," the last song and a work of great power and historical grasp, the hapless man whose role is sung by Lennon wants to "turn on" himself and his lover—maybe us too—as a relief from the multiple controls exerted over life and the imagination by various and competing media. (p. 133)
Lennon and McCartney in their songs seem as vulnerable as the man in "A Day in the Life" to the sights and sounds by which different media shape and then reshape reality, but their response isn't in any way as intimidated, and "turning on" isn't their only recourse. They can also tune in, literally to show how one shaped view of reality can be mocked out of existence by crossing it with another. They mix their media the way they mix musical sounds; lyrics in one tone are crossed with music of quite another; and they do so with a vengeance. It's unwise ever to assume that they're doing only one thing musically or expressing themselves in only one style. "She's Leaving Home" does have a persistent cello background to evoke genteel melodrama of an earlier decade, and "When I'm Sixty-four" is intentionally clichèd throughout, both in its ragtime rhythm and in its lyrics. The result is a satiric heightening of the love-nest sentimentality of old popular songs. (p. 136)
The Sgt. Pepper album and the singles released … just before and after it—"Penny Lane," "Strawberry Fields Forever," "All You Need Is Love" and "Baby You're a Rich Man"—constitute the Beatles' most audacious musical effort up to that point, works of such achieved ambitiousness as to give an entirely new retrospective shape of their whole career. Nothing less is being claimed by these songs than that the Beatles now exist not merely as a phenomenon of entertainment but as a force of historical consequence. They have placed themselves within a musical and historical environment more monumental in its surroundings and more significantly populated than was the environment of any of their early songs. Listening to the Sgt. Pepper album one thinks not simply of the history of popular music but of the history of this century. (pp 136-37)
Richard Poirier, "Learning from the Beatles" (originally published in a slightly different version in Partisan Review, Fall, 1967), in his The Performing Self (copyright © 1971 by Richard Poirier; reprinted by permission of the author), Oxford University Press, 1971, pp. 112-40.
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