This is my weekly column for the Sunday, Aug. 30, 2009 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune. A version of this piece ran Aug. 29 on KAXE’s “Between You and Me.”
The Beatles behind us
By Aaron J. BrownOn Sept. 9, 2009, the complete audio catalogue of The Beatles will be re-released with digitally re-mastered sound. It’s another bucket of water in what has been a wave of recent nostalgia for the 1960s. This wave will not end until my largely inept Gen X/Gen Y boomlet generation manages to wrestle the remote control from the cold dead hands of the Baby Boomers. I am not optimistic. My people tend to emerge in public discourse only briefly, electing Barack Obama and then scurrying into the woods to mate.
The Beatles need not the praise of a regional writer from a mining town in one of the “M” states. This British rock band was a cultural force that shaped modern music trends and, with Hibbing’s hometown boy Bob Dylan, provided the soundtrack for a generation. Recently I listened to audio of their U.S. debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show” on my iPod. You’ve probably seen or heard what I’m talking about: young girls shrieking, weeping, cavorting and swooning all at the same time. Yes, today’s young girls also shriek at popular bands on TV or their tiny phones, but it seems increasingly likely that the objects of that shrieking are so large in number and short in shelf life that the swooning more closely resembles a bout of heartburn. Once it passes, they move on and so do we all.
In their time The Beatles so dominated the charts that even critics of their music had to acknowledge their effects on the industry and culture. Their popularity endures today, so much that knockoff groups still emerge four decades later. Even in the 21st century bands with more than or less than four members seem weird, don’t they? Well, that’s all worth mentioning but not what I’m here to talk about. It’s possible that all this nostalgia is not fully directed at The Beatles, their groundbreaking music and tumultuous era, but rather at the last time when the something like The Beatles could actually exist.
In today’s music industry more and more bands and singers are flooding the market, pouring through MySpace, Facebook and iTunes looking for a break, finding fewer outlets all run by fewer, but vastly more powerful people. Great examples of new music come out all the time, some become popular but none ever reach the stratosphere. In 2000, an album of Beatles #1 hits heard every day on the radio crushed a highly anticipated Garth Brooks country album like a cheap, overwrought cowboy hat. Even friends in low places have failed to vault the full framed Brooks past the Beatles in total record sales in the United States and, with the upcoming re-release of the refined Beatles albums, that’s probably how it’s going to stay.
There’s nothing as depressing as an unbreakable record, the sense that greatness stands behind us and all else is shadows. Maybe I just say that because I live on Minnesota’s Iron Range, where the past may never be released from our grip. Remember the ‘20s? ‘40s? Remember the ‘70s? Yeah, those were the days. Consider today’s wistful longing over The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Woodstock, Walter Cronkite, the Kennedy political dynasty, the mob, traditional family life and brightly colored, deeply impractical pants. These things do not represent infallible institutions, but rather they tell of a time when Americans and many around the world shared a story, even if they didn’t all agree with it. In our country today every shriek is followed by a loud boo and nothing is truly special, or sacred, even though we are all taught that everything is.
We are in the wilderness. We might be here a while. At least I’ve got the White Album to keep me company.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune. Contact him or read more at his blog MinnesotaBrown.com or in his recent book “Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range.”
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