Why The Beatles Will Always Give Us a Lump In Our Throats
I have lived with, made love to and created babies with two different women whose souls I’ve never seen as clearly as George Harrison’s
Can we just say that the internet, for all intents and purposes, is a drag? The other day, I made the blind mistake of commenting on Instagram about a news story that seemed as relevant as, say, the annual report of bank robberies in Dodge City, and before long, I felt as if I had been launched into the Twilight Zone. The replies that I kept getting on my comment went beyond rude into threatening. Like most confrontations that happen anonymously and behind a screen, the things that were being said would never have made it past most people’s filters if we were in a room together. People just don’t interact that way in three dimensions. If they did, Dateline could have its own 24/7 channel like MTV used to have. One story after another of cantankerous middle aged men, complete with Facebook profile pictures culled from ancient Hanna Barbera cartoons, murdering complete strangers with differing opinions.
To descend from the general to the specific, it was an article about the “recording industry” re-writing their contracts to prevent artists from rerecording their masters the way Taylor Swift did. An attempt by the industry to prevent themselves from being outsmarted in the future.
The article is…interesting, but do you have any idea how many platinum records came out last year? Five. When was the last time you bought an album? I know, for me, it’s been a long time. Couple that with the fact that revenues for recordings are in the neighborhood of $.008 per stream, and my point is made clearer.
To give you another perspective, if you were to record something incredibly wonderful and three million people listened to it, Spotify would be into you for $24,000. Now, of course, there are other revenue streams that can be capitalized on, but needless to say, I just don’t see the importance or newsworthiness of the story.
The responses I got were, “You might be missing an important aspect of this argument. DM me to discuss,” and “I wholeheartedly disagree. Let me point a few things out to you…”
Actually, I’m totally kidding. The responses I got were, “You have no f*cking idea what you’re talking about,” “You know nothing about the recording industry, so why don’t you shut up…” and “I love listening to the opinions of idiots…”
The part that made me feel like I was in the Twilight Zone was that I attempted to delete my comment numerous times and it would not delete. Even when I blocked the account that I made the comment on, I was still receiving the profanity laden comments about this oh so controversial take on the music industry. None of it matters, though.
The things I have seen on Instagram are appalling. People referring to Eminem’s work as trash, Jay-Z’s catalog as garbage and Biggie Small’s as plagiarized and shitty. All of this noise coming from people who haven’t created a damn thing and never will.
I kind of feel like, as long as I’ve made myself the pariah of contemporary music criticism, I think I need to take it one step further and talk about this “new single” from The Beatles. I was scrolling through social media this morning and I saw that it was trending, so I watched the video. Magically, they were able to mesh the ghosts of George Harrison and John Lennon with the real likenesses of Paul and Ringo and it did exactly what it set out to do: it made me very emotional.
I imagine this is what the reading of scripture probably did for all of my old Italian ancestors in Brooklyn in the days of yore. Music has always been the way that I commune with God. Not only that, but I will take it one step further and admit that I have always felt that Paul, Ringo, John and George were messengers of that entity. Their music made it onto our world specifically to illustrate what joy and love and loss and…well, God looks and feels like. For Crissakes, if you don’t believe me, listen to Tom T Hall sing “I Like Beer” and then follow it immediately with “Happiness is a Warm Gun.” It doesn’t even seem like it’s the same medium. And even though Malcolm Gladwell insists that the magic of The Beatles can be attributed to 10,000 hours of hard work, he–nor anyone else for that matter–can change my mind about the unique and Godlike energy that those four guys possess. There are artists who have been banging away for 20, 30, 40,000 hours that will never move people to tears the way The Beatles can.
I have lived with, made love to and created babies with two different women whose souls I’ve never seen as clearly as George Harrison’s when I watch him play or listen to the demo version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Isn’t It A Pity?” Or John Lennon’s when I watched “Then and Now.” And even though neither of them were perfect and infallible, they were able to achieve perfection in 3 ½ minute bursts.
Regardless of how Tim Watson from Kalamazoo feels about it.
I still buy albums 😎
Now I want to listen to songs by the Beatles. Thanks Billy. And yes, social media can be a violent place.