Love... or "remasturbation"?

[imomus]

Here at Click Opera we like to keep you up with the biggest cultural developments of the noughties. How, then, could we pass over the exciting news that The Beatles have a new album out this month?

It's called Love, and it's a sort of self-sampling remix project, a piece of creative re-interpretation with a practical application: it's also the soundtrack for a Cirque du Soleil show called "Love".

"My brief," says mash-up remixer George Martin, 80, "was that I could use any sound I wanted, that I'd made with The Beatles since 1962".

"We took all the Beatles catalogue from tape," says his son Giles "2ManyMartins" Martin, who's been roped in as a fresh pair of ears, "from the original Beatles 4 tracks and the 8 tracks and the 2 tracks, and had this sort of palette of sounds and music to create a sound bed where people were sort of reliving the whole Beatles lifespan in a very condensed period".

And so this Frankenstein's monster of a record puts the bassline from "I Want You / She's So Heavy" under the backing vocals from "Oh Darling" and the lead vocal from, you know, some other famous Beatles song. "They just match because it's all the same voices," says Giles.

It gets better; not only is the old music in new places, with lots of new sound effects and stuff, it all sounds so much better than it did first time around. Digital technology, you see. Now The Beatles have access to the kind of studio effects that previously only Coldplay and Oasis did.

"Set to a noisy dawn chorus, complete with fluttering wings, the three-part vocal harmonies of 'Because' arrive with the clarity of an ice blue sky," raves Neil Spencer in The Guardian. "The chugging introduction to 'Get Back' hurtles out of the mix like a train. The pumping fairground organs of 'Mr Kite' reek of steam and sawdust. ...Ever notice the pizzicato violins on the middle 8 of 'Something'? You will now".

Personally, what I noticed about the song "Something" was that it was about sexual longing, about love, about being attracted to the specificity of someone's body. "Something in the way she moves attracts me like no other lover." I listened to it in Greece, when I lived there in the actual 1960s, so it's drenched, for me, in Greek sunshine. It's of its time, totally embodied. Who knows -- and who cares -- whether I heard the pizzicato violins, and whether they were even there? What I heard was love. And nota bene, the song didn't say "Something about the way she moves makes me think that if you cut off her head and stuck it on Twiggy's body, Anna Karina would be an even more gorgeous woman, not to mention a great circus show." That's because it was a song about love, not remasturbation.

Yes, if there was a word that summed up the music industry in the 60s, it was love. And if there's a word that sums up the same business this decade, it's remasturbation. Paul McCartney thinks it's great, though.

"I would liken it to great people like Churchill, or, you know, great writers like Tolstoy. Their original papers are in museums, they're only getting browner and more crinkly. But the Beatles tapes are getting shinier and newer and cleaner. It's like magic."

The thing is, you'd think the people who used all those backwards guitar and piano effects would understand that narrative goes backwards too. There will be kids who now hear "Tomorrow Never Knows" and think it samples the beat from "Within You Without You". Love's generic crappy sleeve looks like the poster for a production of some nightmare spectacle entitled "The Beatles on Ice!" at the National Exhibition Centre, Manchester. And now, if you put "Beatles" into a record search engine on a store site like Barnes and Noble's, its "View by popularity" default shows you the ugly digipak 5:1 audio DVD of Love as the first hit, the ugly CD of Love as the second, and only then actual records released in the 60s by the actual Beatles, the young, cool Beatles.

And they were cool. Cool enough to commission the beautiful sleeves which are next on the Barnes and Noble list from the leading avant garde artists of the day. The White Album sleeve is by conceptualist Richard Hamilton, the Sgt. Pepper sleeve by pop artist Peter Blake.

Old Beatles (the ones who survive, anyway), to be that cool, would have to have commissioned Martin Creed or someone to do the sleeve for Love. They haven't. But they do pack lots of promo punch, so whatever they do release will obscure what they released when they were cool. At least for a while. Old Beatles might have come full circle back to an appreciation of 2-, 4- and 8-track recording via the basic realization that Ariel Pink is much, much cooler than Coldplay. But they're not that avant garde, so for them being daring is simply delighting in the fact that today's digital soup makes everything infinitely fluid, plunging us into "the mire of options", allowing us to sample ourselves and put on a big show with computerized lighting in an arena where the crew are all old blokes with grey hair, and the audience is too, and nobody remembers Mark Boyle and his exploding lava lamps with insects inside them.

But, like I say, it's these old blokes, with their notably worse skin, hair, bodies and taste than the young blokes who were also called "The Beatles", who are cluttering up the catalogue with Frankenstein stuff, and with remasturbation.

Why is the music biz so bad at telling you when an album was made? If it weren't for small print legal agreements, we'd have no way of knowing what year any given album came from. I think it's because the music biz has a vested interest in "timelessness". It's almost a metaphysical belief -- the idea that some songs and records become "evergreen" and can keep selling forever, and "transcend" the time and conditions of their making. The problem with timelessness is that it's an argument against embodiment -- physical embodiment, technological embodiment, cultural embodiment, temporal embodiment. If records are still records despite losing all association with the young bodies that made them, and their own "flesh" in the form of the sleeves they were given at the time, and their cultural "flesh" in terms of the context of the year and nation they were released in, then you can rehash everything forever. You can be Dr Frankenstein. You can be a remasturbator rather than a lover.

The thing about love is that it's specific, and embodied. "Something in the way she moves..." Young Beatles knew that. But they were into love, not remasturbation.

Comments

[riotdorrrk.livejournal.com]

i was hoping this was going to be a big-budget 'Liverpool Sound Collage' courtesy of Sir Paul... sadly, let itnot to be.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I want to add: the reason the music industry is so into the idea of the "evergreen" is that it fits so well with the high-Gini, winner-takes-it-all worldview of the major labels. The whole industry, backed up by a radio system run on the principles of recognition and repetition, is geared to the "hits that transcend their time and the conditions of their making". (The profits often "transcend" the artists who made them too, assuming they're still alive.) These "evergreen, timeless classics" are the spike on the power laws graph (http://www.kottke.org/plus/misc/images/technorati_quadratic.gif), not the long tail. It's all about inequality.

Of course, you might think that just making everything available and letting the public decide was a good sales strategy. But record execs don't want to be sociologists -- for whom any record from the 1960s would presumably say as much about the decade as any other, and would have a legitimate place in a pluralistic spectrum. No, they want to be Machiavels, to control. And so, even though record shops have expanded, in my lifetime, from little rooms to vast warehouses, the music biz hasn't (except in Japan) used that space to stock as many different titles as possible. Instead, they've used it to display the same selected, promoted titles -- often remixes of sure-fire hits from yesteryear -- over and over again, until they fill the whole shelf. This obviously ties in with a certain conformity in the record-buying public, who seem to want a guarantee that there are big promo bucks behind an artist before they buy. And we wonder why music doesn't seem to mean as much in culture as it once did...

[nickink.livejournal.com]

Interesting, as always - thanks.

Also, have you seen this? ~ http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/3256

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ah, I hadn't seen that, no. What a refreshingly intelligent and well-written review! I wonder who "Brendon Bussolini" is? The last review of Ocky (http://playlouder.com/review/+ocky-milk/) I read turns out to have been written, pseudonymously, by Simon Bookish. Sorry for blowing your cover, Simon!

[nickink.livejournal.com]

Yes, Dusted is quite an interesting site. As well as generally being well-written, it reviews a rather unpredictable range of fringe and niche albums. I had the feeling while reading the Ocky Milk piece that the writer was also a click opera reader.

love lost

[(Anonymous)]

Cool sleeve design and Martin Creed? I think they woudl have to try harder than that!

Paint a vulgar picture

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I've never really been a Beatles fan. That is, I tend to enjoy their music, but I've never really felt it was mine. If I ever had, I'm sure this would really upset me. As it is, it just makes me a little sad.

To win, is, in fact, to lose.

(That McCartney quote strikes me as typically inane, too.)

[mini-snape.livejournal.com]

Hahaha, yes, exciting.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not convinced this is anything more than "it were better in my day". First, your love versus remasturbation binary is not very far from the authenticity/inauthenticity binary that you've criticised before. Secondly, it's sentimental and inaccurate. The Beatles and George Martin always had a hard commercial nose. They may have been about love, but they also knew that "your lovin' don't pay my bill". As soon as they were a success, the Beatles licensed their songs out to easy-listening orchestras and for gloopy cover versions (some of them produced by George Martin only months after he'd done the Beatles versions). They were instantly rehashing their material even then.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, if the Beatles can't be "better in my day" -- ie the 60s -- what can be? I think embodiment is a better angle to make this comment from than authenticity.

Take a look at this photo:



The reason U2 look so awful, and the Beatles so good, is all about bodies, and embodiment, not authenticity.

[mini-snape.livejournal.com]

Yes, but God, it's U2, they hardly count as a band, they're more of an organisation.

Great point about embodiment, but it's a shame it's about the Beatles since a lot of people here (like me) appear to have an odd aversion to them.

[akabe.livejournal.com]

after just having spent an hour in 'pronto' coffee chain listening to buddy holly and shit: i think rock is the new classical music and what they're doing is the exact equivalent of playing bach as if it was richard strauss a century ago. soon a nicholas harnocourt of commercial rock will come asking for authentic instruments/studios.

[bikerbar.livejournal.com]

Theres a cafe I go to for Czech lessons that plays nonstop Beatles/techno muzak. Its this terrible screen of regurgitated Sixties soundbites with the same relentless backbeat. I despise this use of music as social wallpaper, alas it is ubiquitous.

I've just decided never to set foot in that cafe again ...

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

You say you want postmodernizashun, well, you know...

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

the other side of this beatles gluttony: demos, alternate takes and half-finished songs. but i like a lot of those weirders, maybe for the embodiment, specificity reasons.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

naughty naughty george martin. i reckon old eno should have had a go at it with the telly horizontal. nearly got run over once on that zebra crossing picking up my bird from work. 4 cunts in a van washed by stevie wonder going: 'nice suit, my son !!' i didn't ansa. anyroad i can remix circus maximus for ya..drill a few more holes in it..he he he

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, I think George Martin, or hell, even Ringo, is preferable to Paul nowadays, the magic touch Paul had is long gone

[pixelmist.livejournal.com]

My first year in New York, I attended the Strawberry Fields Lennon memorial on the 20th anniversary of his death. Yoko made an appearance, said how nice it was that we remembered her husband, and disappeared. The crowd was maily old New York hippies with acoustic guitars and broad smiles: the only "mash-up" was our voices singing songs that, for whatever personal reason, meant a great deal to us. I liked that; sure, it may have been silly and nostalgic, but it was organic nostalgia. And it had nothing at all to do with fucking Las Vegas.

The most heinous turnabout is Yoko's involvement in this debacle. What could possibly motivate her to give the Lennon Family blessing to this atrocious betrayal? I expect this sort of thing out McCartney - who, to be fair, only became a wanker sometime between Ram and the first Wings album - but Yoko Ono? I scratch my head, I wait for a theory. I haven't a clue.

[pixelmist.livejournal.com]

And Whimsy, with an effortless flip of his limp rapier, cuts to the proverbial quick!

[tim-ellison.livejournal.com]

The slagging of McCartney seems gratuitous to me. Blaming this thing on "Old Beatles?" McCartney and Ringo weren't involved. As for the Macca quote, I've also seen a quote where he said he wished it had been more adventurous.

Momus, have you read Barry Miles' McCartney bio? That book changed my thinking about him.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, it could be that John was a lot less happy with the Beatles mixes that did emerge on the original records than Paul was. He hated the edit in Strawberry Fields and thought there was some sort of conspiracy to make his songs sound too "experimental", whereas Paul's were polished to prim perfection. So perhaps Yoko felt that alternative versions of Lennon songs might be 30% better than the originals, as John had said he believed they could be.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

No, I haven't. I've only read Lennon biographies. Reading McCartney biographies isn't really "me". I would just be gritting my teeth the whole time, waiting for some half-hearted, semi-serious rehabilitation effort for atrocities like "Ebony and Ivory" (http://imomus.livejournal.com/137145.html) and "Mull of Kintyre" and "Silly Love Songs".

But I know very serious composers -- Nathan Michel, for one -- who love Macca.

[tim-ellison.livejournal.com]

This book only focuses on his childhood, adolescence, and the sixties. I wonder what you would think of it. Miles, of course, was one of the International Times editors (and ran the Indica book shop) in the sixties.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Miles

[(Anonymous)]

Sen. George Allen is also fond of Maccaca. Though I don't think he's a composer.

Wallpaper

[(Anonymous)]

Whilst I'm reading this on my local free library wifi, another patron's mobile has gone off with a love-me-do ringtone...PRS, ker-ching!

I won't be investing in this outrage, but then again, if it funnels
I few pennies out of self-absorbed hippies pockets and into whatever charities the rights owners participate in...I've no right to complain.

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

I was thinking the same thing!

use of music as social wallpaper

[akabe.livejournal.com]

brian eno would turn in his grave if he had one.

[(Anonymous)]

I have your blog here hooked up to my Custom Google Homepage, and I must say, it's always fun to read the title of your newest article, even if I don't have time to read the entire article itself.

[akabe.livejournal.com]

he seems rather cool when talking about the experimental stuff like the mash-up in 'a day in the life' etc, or on top of that building.

a japanese photographer friend, a pretty cool person, whose favourite photographer is linda mccartney changed my thinking about everything.

[telephoneface.livejournal.com]

you should listen to McCartney II, his second solo album, which has a very camped-out-in-the-home-studio-with-synthesizers-and-drum-machines feel to it, particularly "Temporary Secretary"

this new rehash thing coming out doesnt affect me in any way other than possibly taking up 70 mb of my hard-disk space just cos im curious. i fell in love with the sounds and songs of their albums and by the first time i heard the end of "Long Long Long" they had already earned a place in 'timeless' land. right in my heart, alongside the first Plastic Ono Band record.

until they release "carnival of light" i vow not to buy any 'new beatles' release..

[beketaten.livejournal.com]

I still have yet to hear very many people acknowledge publicly just how brilliant Yoko is.

Beatle brow

[(Anonymous)]

Great literary praise for the phrase "this Frankenstein's monster of a record". Mary Shelley smiles.

[alphacomp.livejournal.com]

Simon Bookish is so Momus-esque!

[(Anonymous)]

I dont think the 'slagging' of Mccartney is gratuitous at all and I agree with Momus that Paul has just gotten worse and worse since the Beatles. John Lennon slowed down a little after the Beatles broke up, but the music he did release remained passionate and amazing right up til his death. To me it seems like Paul has recorded alot of stuff since the Beatles just to have a product to sell and most of it is just very boring and uninspired.

Your journal has been deleted. You can't post messages.

[(Anonymous)]

I couldn't be less interested in the Beatles. When I was 16 I fantasized that I had been deathly injured while saving the world, and the Beatles showed up to sing in my hospital room. Specifically John Lennon. But I sorta burnt out on the Beatles, and in this case, Momus, I stopped reading after the second paragraph. Boring.

[rroland.livejournal.com]

that first plastic ono album is great, well, well, well

Re: Beatle brow

[telephoneface.livejournal.com]

indeed! its akin to going to a wax museum or something. its almost like the real thing, but not quite right. disembodied is a good word, so is 'remasturbation'!

i just listened to it; there are bits, usually near the ends of songs, that kind of remind me of the residents or bobby conn beatles mixes, which tap into the kind of spooky vibe they had peppered in the old records ("can you take me back?" and all that). but mostly its one long supermix that is more like the old Stars On 45 record than anything, and less fun to boot...

[wingedwhale.livejournal.com]

Paul is a fantastic songwriter, but one golden thread I'm getting out of this is how fucking Asian you are, Momus. In a good way. "Fuck that timeless shit! I want transience, and I want it now and not later!" And the cherry petals fall~~

[(Anonymous)]

Artistic brotherly love is such a rare thing these days it has to have it's dna scraped up and re-animated.

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

Interesting. It was Macca, not Lennon, who was into Stockhausen, I believe. And when the Beatles signed modern classical composer John Tavener to Apple Records, it was Ringo who took charge of getting his music ("The Whale" and the "Celtic Requiem") recorded. I'm not very familiar with Lennon or McCartney's music after the Beatles, but the songs I do know from the 70s revert to a much safer, blander, meat-and-two-veg instrumentation - more like Oasis.

[sm255.livejournal.com]

momus = grumpy old curmudgeon.

cute though, for a curmudgeon.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

This entry isn't based on hate. It's based on the utopian vision of a world where everyone goes out and buys Ariel Pink records instead of some undignified attempt on the part of the remaining Beatles to do a 2ManyDJs job on their young selves.

[(Anonymous)]

<< This entry isn't based on hate. It's based on the utopian vision of a world >>

Awww Momus you don't have an ounce of hate in your soul, we all know that. Am I stalking you yet? Hahahahahah sorrry amusing myself at everyone else's expense. Trapeze

[saruryujin.livejournal.com]

Sorry but what is that "carnival of light" you mention?

[telephoneface.livejournal.com]

Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_of_Light)

"The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave (which is sometimes referred to as The Carnival of Light Rave) was an art festival which was organised by Binder, Edwards & Vaughan as a showcase for electronic music and light shows. It was held at the Chalk Farm Road Roundhouse Theatre and featured on the bill not only a public playing of 'Carnival of Light' but performances by Unit Delta Plus, whose members included early electronic music pioneers Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and fellow electronic artist Peter Zinovieff."

"undignified attempt on the part of the remaining Beatles"

[tim-ellison.livejournal.com]

You characterize it this way again! Don't think this was a Paul and Ringo project.

I can relate to your general take on the thing, though.

Your New Favourite Band

[thisisnota.livejournal.com]

I've recently gotten into The Beatles after a lifelong aversion to them. I think I've been avoiding them all this time because they were always in my face, y'know? They were never allowed to die, to rest in peace, and I find myself unable, or struggling, to experience them as something different, something from yesterday, because they've been remastered and repackaged for today.

I agree...

[dedismo.livejournal.com]

The cover art looks like a bad ipod commercial. They could've done something more innovative... I think it was left to some kid with no passion for what he was doing...

Carolin.a

[(Anonymous)]

The graphics n this post please me. Who am I. Who gives a shit