The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [83]
I told you about the walrus and me-man
You know that we’re as close as can be-man.
Well here’s another clue for you all,
The walrus was Paul.
Standing on the cast iron shore-yeah,
Lady Madonna trying to make ends meet-yeah.
Looking through a glass onion.
One could think of this as a radical expansion of the vocabulary of rock music, or (as I prefer) a departure from it. In a Rolling Stone critics’ poll, “Yesterday” was listed as the greatest rock song of all times, a claim which might be refuted on the grounds that “Yesterday” can’t possibly be the best anything and that it involves a category mistake: if “Yesterday” is a rock song, I am the Walrus.
At any rate, The Beatles’ turn produced some charming moments and some lovely melodies, such as “Norwegian Wood” or “Across the Universe.” But it also featured rafts of meaningless hooha: much of their production from Revolver to Let it Be is absurdly overblown yet utterly trivial. Picasso’s Guernica or Joyce’s Ulysses, is one thing; Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite is something else again. And I propose that the shift was a disaster not only for the artistry of The Beatles, but for the whole genre of rock music. In one way or another, we must hold The Beatles partly responsible for the soulless anti-rock of, say, Elton John or Billy Joel, and for the pretentious yet empty art-rock of bands such as Yes or Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.
Here is something that is certainly a bad idea: Take a bunch of fairly average lads and their good pop band and abase yourself before them as though they are messiahs (Lennon: “We’re bigger than Jesus.” They were, but that wasn’t their fault, or Jesus’s; it was their audience’s.) Several things will occur to such lads: first that whatever they are, they cannot just be a slightly-better version of Gerry and the Pacemakers or the Dave Clark Five; they must be, in spite of all appearances or anything that could be revealed to honest self-reflection, world-changing artistes. So they had better get busy making art: something that in some way sustains the reception or makes it comprehensible. And such a reception invites an immense self-indulgence : the idea that virtually anything we think of, our merest whim, our littlest jingle or nursery-rhyme, must be world-shatteringly excellent. The shattered world has seemed to support this absurd assessment from 1965 right up to the present.
Now let me admit that there are elements of taste that are irremediably subjective, and I am not going to make you hate Sgt. Pepper merely by asserting that it sucks, though it does. And let me also admit that it’s bad to insist that an artist of any variety or quality must merely repeat himself or herself, that they must always do what you first liked them for doing. And of course, no one should be forced to do what some critic thinks they ought to do; The Beatles had a perfect right to make whatever music they wanted, and people have a perfect right to like it. But let me also point out that once you have heard a song a thousand times, it sounds like an inevitable classic. You may associate it with important moments in your life, for example. Once every documentary of the 1960s features Beatles songs, even people who hadn’t yet been born will associate the music with the era. We are stuck with The Beatles in a way that makes a real assessment of their achievement next to impossible. Nevertheless, the assessments that have actually been made of their late work have been absurd.
Let the Blues Be
Some of the observations made above apply as well to The Stones. It’s a familiar refrain that they stopped developing at a certain point (perhaps as early as Exile on Main Street), that they stayed too faithful to their roots in rock and soul, that they have repeated themselves too often for too long. Well, The Beatles played for less than a decade, but The