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The Beatles, Popular Music and Society: A Thousand Voices

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Sulpy & Shweighardt's "Get Back" chronicle and Everett's study of "the Beatles as Musicians" from Revolver onward, have established themselves as bookshelf references on a par with the Lewisohn books. This new collection of writings probably wasn't aiming for a similar comprehensiveness, but the topics are novel enough to make you smiile as you read: from a linguistic comparison of Lennon-McCartney and Jagger-Richards to a deconstruction of the Beatles as the "cutting-edge" of youth culture. Articles with titles like "The Postmodern White Album" are bound to alienate some casual readers, as might the academic language in which they're written -- at least in comparison to the usual hyper-excited tone of Beatle writing. As a graduate student I'm less bothered by this than some apparent albeit minor errors, from attributing the Butcher cover idea to Lennon (who has said in interviews that it was the photographer, Bob Whitaker, who suggested it) to ignoring Harrison's vocal contribution to "Free As A Bird." The book is a load of fun and gives fresh approaches to less-observed topics of Beatledom. But it does suffer from a problem also evident in the "Anthology" videos, where the living Beatles themselves seemed to be telling their story in "3rd person" -- as though they were reciting a compilation of other people's commentary. Befitting its scholarly approach, this book elevates well-known sound bites to citable references of academic research. This can be tricky, given the Clinton-esque obsessions of Lennon and McCartney for their own places in history when being interviewed. As many of the articles point out, all Beatle activity took place in specific contexts too often ignored by previous "research." The same goes for all kinds of writing on the Beatles.