THE BEATLES AND WE'RE WORKING ON IT

Therein: Life begins and ends with the Beatles.

And is carried throughout as well.

I believe I've written briefly about the first band you fall in love with. This is the band that you are always in love with, and I am unfortunately unable to come up with a decent analogy for these guys at all, whether it be according to people you love like the first band first crush thing, or anything at all you love because The Beatles to me will always be too big to wrap my head around. Loving them is like loving big things in big letters like MUSIC, ART, LIFE, and LOVE ITSELF. And you do too. Tautological truth is if you like pop music, then you like Beatles.***** This however, must all be said with due caveats. This will be a long and meandering un. Due warning.

Due caveats. A good deal of me hated the Beatles' legacy for a few years somewhere in between some other things. Music started for me at 5 years old with the Beatles on records, vinyl records, from my Grandmother's country house in Goldensbridge, NY. At one point in time, my family had a house in the country to go to, before my brother Chris was born. So during those rare couple o years, it was just my brother Luke and I in one of those four-person families, and for what it's worth I think everyone kinda got along (which is what you do in those families. There's something about the equality in the four person structure that I've anecdotally observed to work as a happy family. BUT that being said I wouldn't have it any other way with my two brothers). That or Luke and I hadn't crossed over into ye olde age of heavy competition, which has pretty much characterized the rest o' our lives. But in this fucking rare time in life, four- person family, had a country house, had two living grandmothers, had actually one grandfather, and my brother Luke and I got along and spun around to Beatles records. That was it. That was pastime. Have Mom and Dad put on a Beatles record and we spun around and fell down, skipping the records which probably made my Dad flip out for a split second, and then everything righted itself as the music went on, and we kept spinning. I of course don't want to ax my bruv Chris out of this memory, because he would have loved doing this maybe more than Luke or I did if he were around at the time, as he's grown to be the real talented musician in our fam, but it is what it is and it's nice on its own.


Alright, so yar the beginning. The middle is quicker. The middle is fucking middle school and listening to whatever the shit was top 40 and Smashmouth (secret), seeing Seal in concert (bigger secret), and I picked up Oasis when I was 12 (first CD), and THEN I finally took it upon myself to buy all the Beatles albums on CD, as my family hadn't upgraded the catalog from vinyl since we were kiddies. I listened to those albums just over and over, and my life from 12-16ish was the Beatles and Oasis over and over again. And then came the Smiths, and the Stone Roses, and all thems Britishes. Through this time, and after the world of indie rock came knocking I listened to them at least less religiously save for those spots in college in the secret room or attic on Avon Road when Laura, Jake, Mark, and I would get stoned and listen to alllll the records. But I mean, of course, ne'er inhaled, right? College kids don't do drugs. Right. Right.

Ah ha and then there's the important period of damnation, which leads us to today. I'm not sure when this started, and I don't believe this is ovah, but I developed a vehement hatred for the baby boomer generation at some point during my senior year. The self-righteous, pat ourselves on the back for culturally revolting, the grammy- monopolizing, $80 Rolling Stones charging, my soapbox forever, music industry fuck- uppery of the huge generation that is working on ways to spend social security till it's gone, GONE, just lit a spark in my almost BA- earned head and I went on a raging. It is quite possible that I never properly got my reee-belll on during the formative teenage years (c'mon, we know I listened to the Smiths and by proxy wrote saddo poetry in my 16 year old room when I should have been making my folks mad), but there is a second half to this. I am mad at my parents' generation, as any young un is, for thrusting their own culture onto my generation, but I am pretty pissed at myself and my own generation for coming up with fuck all that is culturally important or meaningful. Hipsters, apparently of some kind of avant-garde, have done a good job of imitating the (shitty) fashionable parts of past generations, but have added little in the way of style at least, and not running up much else when it comes to all the other important stuff. And you know what else happened? John died before I was born, and George died when I was in high school, and Paul is a dancing fuckwit who wants to run his dyed hair and legacy into the ground and lift his face out yonder while Ringo minds his business but not before becoming Mr. Conductor on Shining Time Station, acting opposite Thomas the fucking Tank Engine. Way to age gracefully guys.

But back to the idears of relevance. They came up with 12 (12!!) albums in less than ten years, give or take the songs on the early ones that they didn't write, and the fact that the White album is a double album. Now a lot of people have come up with a lot more albums, but most likely in a longer period of time. And hate me for the next example but Sonic Youth's 16 albums, or whatever the fuck Bob Dylan is churning out these days, just sounds the same in different ways. There will be no other band able to write concise, beautiful pop songs in the way John Lennon and Paul McCartney did (I'd throw George in here, but I think he had a few great ones, more good ones, but overall wrote a bunch of skips on some albums. Easy to dispute though, depending upon my mood).

As artists, they got to exactly what life should be - life is love. When I was 6 I actually asked my parents if all songs were about love because I only knew the Beatles and all of their songs that I understood, were about love. I thought, before I listened to the serious shit, the Smiths, Radiohead, all of punk rock, all saddo English bands for that matter, Elliot Smith, and all my other bands that only exist to exude cool (admitted self-aggrandizer you in the black denim), I only knew that music was supposed to be about love. Life, is meant to be about love. For some reason I studied medieval theology in college, be-writing about the changes in the Franciscan Order in the early thirteenth century under St. Bonaventure but why? Because for some brief period in Christianity, someone actually reiterated the importance of God being love. One day I'll try and catalog it - dare and figure out how many times the Beatles sang the word "love" in their songs. Think of all them songs, and how one song always fits for a moment in time. One album fits for a moment in time. I'm stuck on "With the Beatles" and "All My Loving" right now, but am kind of leaning on "Revolver" too. This is going to be there for my kids, and I hope it sticks. Hope it sticks for my grandkids too. So in a roundabout way, my Mom and Dad didn't raise me with any religion, but in this second of thought (which seconds later might be, will be, complete bullshit) I got some sort of secular musical gospel with some kind of good message (already regretting spelling out that analogy).

Thus this, is what I am working on getting back to. Thus this, I believe is what specifically missing from my life. I think in some way that lack of love is what is missing from my generation's contributions to overall art and society. Donc - nous travaillons. Therefore we are working on it, mes amis. Nous essayons pour l'amour et les autres grands trucs de la vie.


**** Exempt from liking the Beatles are those kiddums who daren't touch the top 40 rock and roll ever - the punk rockers, the hip hop kids, and the metalheads.