The Beatles are overrated. That’s our fault, not theirs
Hot takes are boring, so forgive me
for serving up this sizzling fajita plate of an edict, but the Beatles are
overrated. It’s our fault, not theirs. This band made
profoundly beautiful music, and as a society and a species, we have a very hard
time saying goodbye to the things we love. So to make things easier on
everybody, our current pop culture leans toward rejecting the idea of finality
altogether. No Hollywood franchise shall go un-rebooted, no vintage Beatles
footage shall go unseen. Rich people get richer, our imaginations get poorer
and nothing is allowed to end.
Which is why so many people chose to
spend nearly eight hours of their wild and precious lives watching “The Beatles:
Get Back” over the
recent holiday weekend, a three-part documentary series on Disney Plus directed
by Peter Jackson in which the Beatles literally come quite close to fulfilling
the consensus expectation that they be everything to everyone. “Get Back” is
interesting, irritating, sweet, stultifying, illuminating, punishing,
satisfying, totally life-sucking, ultimately unnecessary and still pretty cool.
The footage 60 hours of film
originally shot by Michael Lindsay-Hogg that Jackson has edited down to eight was
gathered back in January 1969 as the Beatles aimed to write and record a new
album in a tight two weeks, then unveil it in a grand televised concert that
was eventually downsized to a nontelevised romp on a London rooftop that would
famously end up being their last public performance. Throughout the 22-day
process, various deadlines get blown, but the songs eventually get written, and
with the refreshing presence of guest keyboardist Billy Preston, the Beatles
find a way to run out of gas with smiles on their faces. Countless bands have
marked their respective declines in tears, fists or worse. It’s nice to
have proof that the Beatles didn’t go out
like that.
This much proof, though? “Get Back” offers
hours upon hours of rehearsal footage and all the rudderless noodling, joking,
bickering, dithering and guitar tuning that goes with it but try not to zone
out because, look, they just figured out how to play “Don’t Let Me
Down.” Enduring
this whole thing is not unlike hearing some of the greatest songs ever written
come together on the sales floor of a Guitar Center. “Maybe we’ll go on
rehearsing forever,” says George Harrison, 252 minutes
into the proceedings. “Back to the drudgery,” says Paul
McCartney at the 318-minute mark. John Lennon is prone to yawning, and
shouting, and singing in silly voices when he’s bored,
while Ringo Starr, as patient and economical in conversation as he is on the drums,
is never seen complaining.
Unless Jackson believes that nearly
every single thing the Beatles ever did is worth seeing (and he might), the
tacit suggestion here is that crisp, beautiful things must emerge from sloppy
tedium. Or maybe it’s that serious art can and should? be
goofballed into existence. Either way, collaborative creation required
patience, good humor and a sort of disciplined openness for these Beatles.
Much fuss has already been made
online over an early scene in which McCartney appears to stretch his mind open
and snatch the song “Get Back” out of thin
air, even though he’s long described his songwriting
process as an outside frequency he’s suddenly
able to tap into. And yes, it’s exciting to see the tune
materialize beneath his fingertips so quickly, but are people really that
surprised to learn that pop songs aren’t written at
big oak desks with quill pens over snifters of cognac? Like life, songs just
happen.
It’s a shame
Jackson doesn’t trust us to pick up on the potency of that
moment. As McCartney begins hashing out “Get Back” on his
bass, yellow letters appear on screen: “What is
about to emerge will become the Beatles’ next
single.” Oooh. There
are other tiny drabs of reality television pseudo-drama, too. Harrison quits
the band for a few days at the end of Act 1, but returns early in Act 2.
Tangentially, a chat between Lennon and McCartney, recorded by a microphone
hidden in a flowerpot, captures McCartney envisioning the band’s distant
future: “Probably,
when we’re all very
old, we’ll all agree
with each other, and I think we’ll all sing together.”
Which brings us back to those
fajitas, now silent and room-temperature. When McCartney foresees his bandmates
“very old,” we need not
mourn the 21st-century Beatles reunion album that nobody gets to hear. The
music these four managed to record between 1962 and 1970 is enough to sustain a
lifetime of enjoyment, easy. But there’s also an
entire world of new music being made at this very moment, and it’s already
passing us by. Yes, we have to make room for the past and the present to
coexist in our listening lives but if we’re more
excited about spending eight hours fly-on-the-walling with the Beatles than
opening our ears to what this world currently sounds like, imagine what we’ll be
grieving another 50 years from now. Source: washingtonpost