The Beatles To Know Her Is To Love Her
Lourdes Horace
The 1960s counter-culturalists (i.e., the hippies, as opposed to the more explicitly political activists of the New Left) seemed interested in, or unconsciously inclined to, blending several of these loves together. They welcomed a confusion of them, or we might say, an emphasis on their common element. The fact that Love became the watchword of their movement, the sunniest face of hippie-dom, means that these confusions had a real cultural significance. They directly influenced how people lived.
The lyrics are not complex. Indeed, there is a degree of ineptness to them, which I am obliged to discuss since Lennon later said so himself. The biggest problem is that while the first verse suggests the song is primarily about the delectable and shy discomfort of a new love (cc. I Wonder by the largely forgotten, and very Beatle-imitating, Gants), the second verse reveals, by means of the too-obvious rhyme line is it right that you and I should fight, every night? that the affair has been going on for some time. Read most charitably, the lyrics mean to bridge these two states of love, to convey that the narrator still feels those newly-in-love feelings for his beloved. Closely considered, this isnt entirely pulled off.
Still, one does not initially embrace a song because one has closely considered it. The lyrics do convey the intense feelings of love, the butterflies and the j ust the sight of you makes night-time bright feelings that the lover feels for his beloved, perhaps even after they have been seeing one another long enough to get into arguments every night , and for him to have done her wrong in some way that causes him to claim the right to make it up, girl . And given the music, they convey these feelings with no little power.
And then theres the chorus: Its only love, and that is all. Why do I feel, the way I do? Apparently, the lovers head has a more rational explanation for all this. Plato says somewhere that you want to be very careful about letting a beautiful young thing whom might you love kiss you, comparing the kiss to a spider bite, and the love it will stir to a poison spreading through your body. (Overall, Plato teaches that while the philosopher might learn from the way eros both points to a higher contemplation of the Beautiful and a radical human intuition of incompleteness, and while like Socrates he might use it to better direct his and others psychic energies, his teaching prefers the less-intense and more mutual love of friendship, and regularly stresses the dangers and non-logical content of eros .)
Or, she and he may turn out, in happier retrospect after their difficulties, to have seemed destined for one another. Their fitting one another in certain ways may prove far more important than their chafing against one another in others. And some of the chafing may even be part of the fit that develops: as the Beatles will later sing in Hey, Jude, some lovers must remember, to let her under your skin in order to make it better . But we dont knowthe negative possibility for this couples affair, and of its misery being drawn out for far too long due to his believing too much in his love, is also there. Only one thing is clear: if the narrator chooses to believe that his love is only an irrational force, the positive possibility is entirely foreclosed.
Thus, these simple and in some ways half-baked lyrics walk us right on the edge of belief in love, and a philosophic distance from it. The assumption that one can regard ones love as merely an irrational force is rejected as an unworkable approach, but the idea that any particular love may be irrational and unsuitable all the way down is not necessarily dismissed. One does not have to have read a page of Plato to understand any of this.
All the material we do is about love. A love affair or loving people. Songs about love. Our songs all have something to say, they all have an identification with an age group and, I think, an identification with love affairs, past, beginning, or wanting . . . finding something in life . . . explaining who you are.
Case in point: Synth-Pop, which I actively loathed, dismissed and downright railed against back in the 1980s. This did not mean that I hated the skinny British and German guys with acrobatic haircuts who made the music; I was just firmly (and rather delusionally) convinced that guitars and drums conveyed real human emotions, maaaan, and that synthesizers and electronic percussion were cold, sterile and generally devoid of humanity.
I'm not claiming any moral high ground here--there are still a couple of songs that make me reflexively annoyed--but I'm much more open to hearing a song/style I used to shut out. And if a track moves someone (or makes 'em move), that's a good thing.
Before we get down to bidness, I\u2019d like to thank all the new subscribers, free and paid, who\u2019ve joined up in the last week or so. Just wanted to let you all know that the voluminous JTL archives can be found HERE, and that most of the stuff in there is pretty \u201Cevergreen\u201D \u2014 so if you\u2019re in need of some good music reading beyond the latest newsletters that I lob into your inbox a few times a week, please go on in and have a look around.
While I generally do try to keep Jagged Time Lapse more focused on the middle and far distance than on current events \u2014 one of the things I\u2019ve really come to hate about music journalism in the internet age is the apparent need for every new release to be immediately met with a hot take proclaiming it either THE BEST THING EVAR or worthless trash \u2014 and I also tend to focus on one topic per newsletter, a number of people have asked me for my thoughts/opinions on a couple of music-related things that happened this week. So I\u2019m gonna go ahead and get those appetizers outta the way before we move on to the main course...
So yeah, the Fab Four (or the Fab 2+2, depending on how you feel about living musicians making records with deceased ones) released a new single this week, and a lot of people have really passionate opinions about it, pro and con. Some folks I know love it and have even been moved to tears by it, while I\u2019ve seen others scream bloody murder about everything from cash grabs to necrophilia.
After about a half-dozen listens, I\u2019m finding \u201CNow and Then\u201D to be charming but slight. I love the song\u2019s melancholy mood and feel \u2014 especially those mournful piano chords \u2014 and it\u2019s nice to hear John singing something new (or new to me, at least). The production is fine, the strings are nice, Ringo is wonderfully Ringo, and I have no issue at all with Paul trying to \u201Cdo a George\u201D on the slide guitar solo (even if it doesn\u2019t pack the emotional bite of George\u2019s instantly-recognizable slide playing). But only the verse melody really sticks with me, and what the hell is up with those backing vocals on the chorus? Even though they\u2019re mixed low, they sound really weird to me, and not in a good way; I could swear I hear Paul gargling pop rocks into the mic at certain points\u2026
As posthumous Beatles songs go, I really liked \u201CReal Love\u201D and pretty much hated \u201CFree As a Bird\u201D (Paul\u2019s trying-way-too-hard bridge really killed that one for me), though I did buy the latter for its previously-unreleased B-side \u201CChristmas Time (is Here Again)\u201D. For me, \u201CNow and Then\u201D lands somewhere between them; it\u2019s pleasant enough, I\u2019m glad it exists, and if Paul and Ringo wish to commune with their missing mates in this manner, then more power to them \u2014 they sure as hell don\u2019t owe me (or you) anything at this point. But I just don\u2019t dig the song enough to actually buy a vinyl copy, especially since its b-side is a new stereo remaster of \u201CLove Me Do,\u201D which is one of my all-time least favorite Beatles songs. For me, the best, most interesting and most emotionally affecting part of all of this \u201Cnew\u201D Beatle action is this mini-doc that was released a few days ago about the (re-)making of the track:
Speaking of documentaries, PBS aired one this week called The War on Disco, which takes yet another look at the cultural divide raging over disco back in the summer of \u201879, using the Chicago White Sox and WLUP\u2019s Disco Demolition Night promotion as its focal point. Several friends recommended it to me; I tried to watch it, but was completely turned off by its repeated claims that US radio stations immediately ditched disco following Disco Demolition Night, claims which perpetuate the pernicious myth that WLUP deejay Steve Dahl and his anti-disco forces somehow \u201Ckilled\u201D disco.
I\u2019m sorry \u2014 speaking as someone who was actually there and paying attention, I can attest that disco remained a big part of mainstream US culture well into 1980. Three months after Disco Demolition, the Pittsburgh Pirates celebrated their 1979 World Series championship to the tune of their theme song, Sister Sledge\u2019s disco smash \u201CWe Are Family\u201D; and Lipps Inc.\u2019s \u201CFunkytown,\u201D a disco jam if I\u2019ve ever heard one, topped the Billboard charts in May and June of 1980. These are just two examples that are easy enough to look up, but if you\u2019re going to pretend they didn\u2019t happen \u2014 and let\u2019s not even get into the film\u2019s comparing Disco Demolition to the January 6 riot \u2014 I\u2019m just not going to waste my time with your doc.
I loved a lot of \u201870s disco back then, and I still love it now. But there were a lot of factors involved in both Disco Demolition Night and disco\u2019s commercial decline, and it really grinds my gears when people reduce the story to broad black-and-white strokes. I still stand by what I most recently wrote about it all:
As we get further and further away from July 1979\u2019s Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park, the late-\u201970s disco backlash has been painted in increasingly stark terms, with disco lovers on one side and racists and homophobes on the other. Which was partly the truth, but there was a lot more nuance to it as well\u2026 what was once a vibrant underground cultural movement had been fully transformed into a disposable commodity in just a few years, by an entertainment industry seeking to squeeze every last egg from its golden goose before consumers lost interest. And consumers lost interest a lot earlier than they might have, thanks to all the crappy disco they were force-fed. Ultimately, disco\u2019s greatest enemies were not the troglodytes who sought to destroy it, but the greedheads who sought to exploit it.
c80f0f1006