Nothing you can say that can’t be sung
In the parlance of today’s youth, maybe it’s as John Lennon was famously misquoted as saying. Maybe the Beatles are bigger than Jesus Christ.
They certainly rack up more Google hits than the Son of Man (at least seven times more, apparently), and have infiltrated enough of popular culture to remain relevant.
This, more than half a century since the music started.
Consider how: each day, new music is churned out by old/new artists, a rehash of a rehash or, in that rare instance, something more. Our ears and airwaves are saturated, full to the brim with the lyrics, the beats, the melodies of now.
And yet, in an unassuming bar somewhere along Anonas, Quezon City, Beatles’ tribute nights are a yearly special. On those nights, The Jerks, one of the country’s pioneer alternative rock bands, plays a whole set of Beatles’ songs to an audience made up of the young and old. To be sure, they aren’t the only ones. Our local scene is awash with throwbacks to the Fab Four — from the ‘60s-inpired Bloomfields, to Mitoy Yonting’s rendition of Help! in The Voice-Philippines finale, to street kids singing Yesterday at a run-down karaoke joint.
For a country that Paul McCartney vowed never to return to again (1966; see Imelda Marcos throwing a fit over a Beatles snub), we sure know how to carry a torch.
If anything, we aren’t alone. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the Beatles are known here, there, and you-know-where; the fact that their music has cut across such a huge vista of time, geography, and race is something that conspiracy theorists and biographers alike have tried to answer for years.
That said, thank Lucy in the sky for Jonathan Gould.
A bit of contextualization: there are over 500 books written about the Beatles, some indispensable; many opportunistic and trite. Gould’s version isn’t the newest (2008), nor does it shed any blinding light on a story already known to many. But his book, Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America, belongs squarely in the former category.
A professional musician himself, Gould distinguishes the book as one that mainly focuses on the music. To cleave to this expectation, however, is a gross understatement. For while Gould doesn’t really delve into the juicy, gossipy bits — tactfully knowing when to sit out the over-told campfire tales about Pattie and George and John and Yoko, apart from a passing mention — the book offers way more than just insight into the music. A blend of biography, musicology, history, and pop sociology, Can’t Buy me Love covers a broad swath of earth, boldly venturing where few biographers dare to go. That is, outside the inner world of their subjects.
Gould parallels the Beatles’ rise and fall with the changing milieu in which they moved in, often interrupting the main narrative with mini-essays that illuminate a particular point in the four Liverpudlian’s lives.
Among others: How Hamburg of the 1960s served as the perfect place of apprenticeship for the Beatles; how the Liverpool working-class accent and vernacular (Scouse) contributed to much of the boys’ apparent wit and charm; how Max Weber, Sigmund Freud and Aldous Huxley helped justify their attraction to cannabis and cement their status as cultural heroes; how the differing political backgrounds of Britain and America gave birth to their own versions of Beatlemania; how the Fab Four, particularly John and Paul, were paradoxically self-referential yet imitative, factors which resulted in their unique style and songwriting partnership.
It’s a lot to take in, at 672 pages, and readers looking for the more intimate ambiance of a full-fledged biography are better off looking elsewhere. Still, Gould makes no pretensions about what the book is about, and his scholarly digressions — though sometimes reminiscent of encyclopedia entries (the commercial and maritime city of Hamburg with two million or so inhabitants? We’re looking at you) — are tempered with lucidity, humor, and a serviceable use of language.
Where the book really shines, however, is in Gould’s dissections of each of the Beatles’ albums. While the musicologist in him can’t help but comment on the progression of chords, or the number of bars in each verse, or how George Harrison’s Something is actually a very narrow range of five notes, but gives an illusion of being highly melodic due to the pining guitar riff and forcefully relaxed singing — the technicality lends an even greater air of myth to songs that have withstood the test of time. It complements the loving analysis of the lyrics, the transformation of the Beatles as showmen into poets and instrumentalists; it captures an aesthetic wholeness that listeners may have never even realized was there.
And speaking of aesthetic wholeness, the book itself follows a tight, symmetrical structure. The Beatles are treated as a more or less a singular entity for the majority of the book, but as it progresses towards the narrative’s bittersweet end, their end as a band, the more individual each member becomes. The biography frays and fades out in the same way that their subject does.
Thankfully though, the band lives on. With over 500 works out there, at long last: a book about the Beatles.
