Last week I had the misfortune to read a true journalistic atrocity. [1]Here are but two paragraphs, awful enough to make a baby die were you to read this tripe within earshot of the aforementioned innocent:
Luckily Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with the widows of George Harrison and John Lennon, seem to understand that the Beatles are not a museum piece, that the band and its message ought never be encased in amber.
The Beatles: Rock Band is nothing less than a cultural watershed, one that may prove only slightly less influential than the band’s famous appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964. By reinterpreting an essential symbol of one generation in the medium and technology of another, The Beatles: Rock Band provides a transformative entertainment experience. In that sense it may be the most important video game yet made. Never before has a video game had such intergenerational cultural resonance.
And this piece of awesome awfulness appeared in the supposedly quality the New York Times. I know they’re in financial trouble over there, but have they no money to pay even one editor to stop this drivel from seeing print? Read the whole article and weep. For lo, it truly is an awful piece of writing, awful in every aspect of its essence, awful with that special pompous, self-regarding and yet lacking in any kind of self-awareness awfulness that the New York Times excels at. It literally caused me to bleed internally over its awfulness. It is quite possibly the worst article ever written in this universe or any other. And yet still the folks at the NYT blame the Internet for why they are losing money hand over fist! Oh you naïve children….
Of course although this is the worst article ever written, the demented sentiment that lurks behind it is not all that rare. The Beatles cult is one of the truly baffling phenomena of our times. I mean it’s not that the Beatles are bad, they’re just not very important — they wrote some pretty melodies, wore stupid haircuts, descended into a howling maelstrom of pretentiousness and then died in order of quality (Paul will go last). And that’s all that needs to be said. Future generations will look back in astonishment that so much energy and attention was lavished on something so modest — that is if they look back on the Fab Four at all. After all nobody is much interested today in why the Dutch went crazy for tulips [2]in the 17th century or why audiences in the 1950s believed Jerry Lewis was funny. It’s just what one author of times past referred to as an Extraordinary Popular Delusion [3].
And yet just when you think you have surely fulfilled your quota of egregious Beatles lunacy for the year, somebody comes along and tops it with a new absurdity. Mere weeks after the New York Times committed that particular crime against humanity I stumbled upon this [4] in the London Times — apparently a researcher named Kevin Roach recently discovered a fifty year old essay written by the band’s most untalented member while still a schoolboy. It was about the Queen. According to Roach this is interesting because:
It shows his handwriting at that age and shows how Paul was thinking at the time. His handwriting is well advanced — you would say it was written by someone who was older than a ten-year-old, more like 14 or 15.
More amazing still:
‘McCartney was marked down for his grammar in the project, using the word “but” at the start of a sentence. Instead of joining the examiner in criticism, however, Roach believes that the decorative “B” hints at the musician’s future.
“The interesting thing is that it is the same ‘B’ as on the early Beatles drum-kit logo in 1961 and 1962,” he said.’
Of course newspapers and researchers only plumb such depths of triviality when the topic in hand is beyond exhausted and reached that state a very long time ago. That anyone should care about this kind of detail is truly beyond the realm of the ‘rational’, we have now entered the world of pseudo-religious quests — the tracking down of holy relics, the veneration of a saint’s toenail or a piece of the True Cross.
If it brings Mr. Roach happiness, then Paul bless him, although I can’t help thinking his no doubt prodigious energies could be channelled more fruitfully elsewhere. But for a major newspaper to give this nothingness prominent coverage in its arts section shows a total loss of perspective, a form of derangement as bad as the NYT hacks, only more subtle.
Repeat after me world: the Beatles are just a pop group. There, there. Now turn out the light and go to sleep. You’re safe now.
Hat tip: Alex Massie [5]
- Author Bio [6]
- Latest Posts [7]
Daniel Kalder [8]
Latest posts by Daniel Kalder (Posts [9])
- Book Review: Retroworld (plus, why I hate Star Trek) [10] - April 3, 2014
- A very expensive fungus [11] - October 16, 2013
- The secret rituals of history’s most creative minds [12] - October 9, 2013
- Apparently we are all getting very old [13] - October 3, 2013
- Vasily Grossman: from Stalingrad to toilet trouble [14] - August 28, 2013