Read Online Night Beat by Mikal Gilmore - Free Book Online

It meant that not just the Beatles, but whole new styles and values had become big, and were upsetting prior styles and values. It meant that an increasingly bold and empowered generation had elected its own aesthetics, its own ideology, its own leaders—and that such pop artists as the Beatles (or Bob Dylan, or the Rolling Stones, or Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, or Janis Joplin) were the exemplars of this movement. In this context, to become “bigger than the Beatles” would have meant signifying a greater consensus. It would have meant to be not just more popular, but also more embodying, more centralizing, for an entire generation. Today, such a possibility no longer seems practical or desirable. Indeed, the notion of gigantism as consensus, as a sign of unifying agreement in the pop world, has now collapsed, for better or worse. In the years since the Beatles’ disunion, the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Frampton, Donna Summer, the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Lionel Richie, Madonna, the Grateful Dead, Whitney Houston, Nirvana, U2, Garth Brooks, Hootie and the Blowfish, and Alanis Morissette (among others) have all been “bigger than the Beatles”—that is, they have all sold more individual albums or played to greater numbers of people. But as often as not, the size of these artists’ successes has meant nothing more than just the triumph of size itself—or at least has meant nothing more outside the artist’s particular audience. Bruce Springsteen’s fans will attest to the meaning and worth of his music and popularity, but Prince’s audience (or Michael Jackson’s, or Madonna’s) might not agree—and whatever their merits, few if any of the performers mentioned in this sentence appeal to today’s younger progressive audience.
    The point is: There is no longer a center to popular music, no longer any one single, real mainstream. Instead, there are many diverse mainstreams and excluding factions, each representing its own perspective, its own concurrence. Snoop Doggy Dogg may reign over one mainstream, Whitney Houston or Hootie and the Blowfish over another, R.E.M., U2, Pearl Jam, and Smashing Pumpkins over yet others. But nothing unifies popular music’s broadest possible audience in the way that Elvis Presley or the Beatles once managed. Not even the idea of “popular” music binds that many of us—and maybe that’s not a bad thing. In any event, about the only thing today’s pop world might agree on is
not
to agree on too many shared tastes or tenets.
    The Beatles are still big—no question. They still sell millions of albums, and their legend probably remains unrivaled. But the Beatles—at least today’s Beatles—are not really “bigger” than the Beatles, because today’s Beatles can no longer change the world the way yesterday’s Beatles did.
    So the
final
real question is: What is it, then, that the Beatles can possibly say or mean to modern times?

    IF ONE IS TO judge that question solely by the band’s two new songs, the answer would be: Probably not that much.
    Never mind all the criticism that there’s something false or shameful about the surviving Beatles modifying the late John Lennon’s unfinished music. Harrison, McCartney, and Starr did not embarrass themselves or the Beatles’ reputation with these efforts. The final results sound as if everybody involved worked sincerely and meticulously, and with “Free as a Bird” in particular, they even created something rather moving. At one point, McCartney asks: Whatever happened to the time and life that the band once shared? How did they go on without one another? The song isn’t a statement about nostalgia, but rather a commentary on all the chances and hopes, all the immeasurable possibilities, that are lost when people who once loved each other cut themselves off from that communion. Not a bad or imprecise coda for what the Beatles did to themselves, and to their own history (and to their