September 2009 Archives

"The Beatles remasters have finally hit the street and all across the world, music fans are gorging themselves on the most fabled and revered repertoire in pop music history. This may well prove to be the last hurrah of the CD age and certainly the marketing gurus at Capital have been working overtime to make sure we've all very aware of the Beatles as we approach this holiday season. It's highly likely that the Fab Four will prove to be the best selling artists of this decade, an incredible feat for a group that disbanded nearly 40 years ago. So the question--the only question, for the Beatles are hardly an unknown quantity--is simply are these new versions worth it? Are they that much different? Should people who've already bought these albums umpteen times buy them again? I'll try to answer that question here for those of you who still might be on the fence...."
--Richard Metzger on Dangerous Minds

The Incredible Flying Earpiece
(Fraud's Deviant to Fudd's Law)
Beatles' Digital Remasters
Jim Lehrer Newshour on PBS
September 9, 2009

[cover: Chip Kidd, 1988]
Of the scores of Beatles books I've skimmed over the years, Tell Me Why: The Beatles: Album by Album, Song by Song, the Sixties and After , by Tim Riley, is one of the few I've taken the time to read because of its depth, insight and readability.

Written when the author was only 28, the 423-page book (first published by Random House in 1988) is by a Colorado native who attended the well-regarded Oberlin College and Conservatory and earned degrees in English and piano performance. With those dual degrees, he is able to provide a thoughtful and rarely pedantic look at the Beatles that reveals so much about them through their songs, rather than through personality analysis.

Riley took on the intimidating task of discussing each song the Beatles ever composed or performed. Although he is an unabashed fan, he isn't a fanatic, and is opinionated and frank about songs he thinks are "schmaltz" ("Michelle").

He has an eye for detail. For example, he notes that the Beatles bawdily sing "tit, tit, tit" during the bridge of "Girl," and that John and George sing "Frère Jacques" nonsensically during the second verse of Paul's "Paperback Writer."

At times, Riley can overwhelm the casual fan with verbosity. But his exhaustive research on the songs, including much of the Beatles' solo work, does what every book on the Beatles should do: explain how four boys from Liverpool revolutionized popular music.

- David Burger, Salt Lake City Tribune

Beatles' Remasters coverage in the pipeline...

Gary Kamiya on Ronald Reagan's 1964 campaign speech for that other Barry:

The Speech tapped into the primordial American myth: untrammeled individuality. There must be a territory for Huck Finn to light out to, a promised land where authority--or government--does not reach. In this always-beckoning frontier, all the hindrances that drag Americans down are left behind. Businessmen can run their businesses as they like, free from the plague of do-gooder bureaucrats. White people need not carry the spurious cross of racial guilt. Unruly and ungrateful minorities--pinkos and softies and degenerates and pointy-heads and uppity women-- are shown their place. Above all, the profoundly destabilizing specter of relativism, of compromise, of moral ambiguity, is banished. No longer need Americans accommodate themselves to evil. A divine certainty stretches from sea to shining sea.

This is as much a metaphysical wish as it is a political platform. It is a sermon as much as a speech. And it is in the gap between those two things--the space between the dream of absolute freedom and the reality of a fallen world--that America forever stumbles.

[Also, fine entries from Charles Taylor, Stephanie Zacharek, and one of the best Bob Dylan one-offs, from Joshua Clover.]

The Annotated Godfather Script, by Jenny M. Jones (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers)
Even better than it looks. How art is composed of freak accidents, near-misses and poor management, blow by blow.