http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/65094-the-beatles-white-album-40th-anniversary/
The Beatles' White Album 40th Anniversary
[17 November 2008]
by Zeth Lundy and Bill Gibron
If the Beatles were the Messiahs of Music, then their self-titled
follow-up to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was and is their
Bible, complete with contributing Gospels according to John,
Paul...George, and Ringo. Born out of an attempt to find a spiritual
center within their growing superstardom, the disenchanted lads from
Liverpool were growing upand growing restless. The death of manager
Brian Epstein still weighed on them, and a recent trip to India had
produced little in the way of enlightenment. What it did create was a
kind of aesthetic purge, a proto-punk decision to strip away the
artifice and 'get back' (to coin a future phrase) to their origins. A
mix of straight ahead rock, lo-fi acoustics, personal reflection,
rambling cockiness, and a minor amount of Lennon's newfound
avant-garde gumption, The Beatles was viewed as a direct retort to
their previous concept epic. But as with anything Beatles, it was
also more than that. Indeed, the so-called White Album also became
the last-act rebuttal to a Summer that was more socio-political lust
than love.
But what does it all mean some 40 years on? Can anything akin to
clarity come from something that, by all accounts, should have been
shaved down to the classic sonic clichéi.e., a single "good" album?
In many significant ways, The Beatles represents the end of the
counterculture. It signals the moment when the meaning was drained
out of flower power. It pissed on the predilection to "tune in, turn
on, and drop out" and provided the band with the first of many
catalysts for their eventual bad vibe breakup. Unlike everything else
in their astonishingly short career (they hit it big in '62, and were
a professional postscript a mere eight years later), there seemed to
be no purpose, no rhyme or reason to the album's existence. Like the
hit or miss compilations at the beginning, there was an absence of
theme, a lack of stylistic cohesion. Unless you want to consider
backwards glancing experimentalism a model, this was merely a
collection of tunes.
But what a brazen, ballsy anthology it is. Whenever someone suggests
that The Beatles be pared down to a stand-alone LP, the inevitable
debate ariseswhat to get rid of? Do we junk Ringo's two
contributions (the self-penned "Don't Pass Me By" and the closing
lullaby "Good Night"), or marginalize an already underappreciated
George (who, by this point, was backlogging an impressive list of
soon to be classics). Sure, "Wild Honey Pie" seems like a joke the
band forgot to let its fans in on, but in the context of the two
songs surrounding itthe reggae-fied "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" and "The
Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill"it makes fractured genius sense.
Naturally, there are many who point their still strident "no Yoko"
fingers and find nothing but noise in Lennon's self-indulgent sound
collage "Revolution 9", and yet what it represents (the zenith of the
boys attempt to grow beyond their mop-top merchandising) gets lost in
the lambasting.
Having retired from touring two years before, the Beatles were both
inspired and stifled by the studio. In that regard, The Beatles often
sounds like a set list for an abandoned tour, the rollercoaster
realities of a band that could handle almost any aural approach with
amazing skill and dexterity. As the aforementioned noise track
suggests, the material here feels raw and unfinished, few tunes
taking on the fully formed awe of "A Day in the Life" or "Penny
Lane". It's as if each member of the group, locked in his own little
world while exiled away in India, decided that there was nothing left
to fight forat least, not as pop culture icons. Instead, it was
going to be about the art from here on in, no matter what form or
figure it decided to take. Amidst all the quitting and complaining,
the studio session struggles and individual inspirations, it was time
to upend the untamed excesses of their Magical Mystery media image
and return to their roots.
It's no surprise then that, after this professional purgative, the
boys only had a couple dozen songs left in them. Yellow Submarine
would see a quartet of paisley plied outtakes, while Abbey Road and
Let It Be became the pro and con of the band's rekindled spirits.
After climbing the Everest that was international iconography, and
standing on the world's highest precipice in rapt determination on
what to do next, the Beatles decided to do something totally unheard
of. Instead of playing it safe, or retracing their steps into
retirement, they resolved to step up to the edge, and jump. It was
more than just a leap of faith though. It was, perhaps, an attempt to
leave their Earthly shells behind and finally find the spirituality
their journey to Rishikesh failed to provide. The Beatles does have
the aura of legends lost in a void of infinite variables. That they
decided to explore all of them before finally falling apart stands as
the reason the Beatles remain timeless. It's also why this record is
considered a classic.
Bill Gibron
--
Every time I listen to The Beatles, I regress. Although every Beatles
album will be forever linked to my childhood, their 1968
double-LPthe ninth official full-length studio album the group had
released within a five-year periodis especially conducive to sudden
bouts of youthful nostalgia. It's the one album where the band really
gets back, a motley patchwork of nursery-rhyme ditties and communal
sing-alongs; it is, on its surface, a collection of songs about
tigers, blackbirds, raccoons, monkeys, and piggies, songs that are
alternately fleeting and preoccupied, songs both abstract and
concrete, songs that turn gibberish into mantrathe stuff of pop
fantasy and digressive whimsy that is so appealing to the less
grown-up geography of our so-called sophisticated palate.
But The Beatles is, aesthetically, its own regression, a regression
into the tropes, truisms, and motifs of rock 'n' roll's creviced
shell. It's a chameleon of form, hollowing out the foundations of
Chuck Berry and the ghosts of British music hall, moving from faux
reggae to pastoral folk, from reductive blues jams and progressive
proto-metal vamps to whispered balladry and late-night lullabies. The
Beatles both summarized the splintered British music scene of the
late '60s, with tongue firmly in cheek, and served as a crib sheet
for its origins. Self-referential, perverse, and impishly
stock-taking, The Beatles is the first post-modern pop album: it
nestles into form and fractures it, making the familiar suddenly
fantastical, for the first time and for all time.
At this point, in late 1968, the Beatles had changed the course of
pop music countless times over, and now they were predicting the
paths it would follow in the future. The endearing mess that is The
Beatlesproducer George Martin has conceded that they "should have
made a very, very good single album rather than a double"forecasts
upcoming ego-driven sprawls of concept like the Rolling Stones' Exile
on Main St., Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life, Fleetwood
Mac's Tusk, and the Clash's London Calling, all of them sharing a
perfection wrought from a tapestry of imperfections. Albums could be
whatever they wanted to be, for better and for worse, self-editing
and artistic restraint be damned. (I would also argue that Lennon's
contributions to The Beatles, mostly disparagements of hypocrites and
authority figures, were the beginnings of punk, at least in attitude.)
The album's sprawl, dissociative and in search of a greater purpose,
also predicts the anything-goes, DIY methodology of late-20th century
indie rock and bedroom popindeed, a record like Guided by Voices'
fractured Bee Thousand (1994) is a direct descendent of The Beatles'
slackened tactic. The Beatles destroyed the notion that pop records
had to be made in one room of a professional recording studio by a
unified collective. In fact, the album was made in simultaneous
pieces, within different rooms at Abbey Road and nearby Trident
Studios; many songs were recorded by a fraction of the band, while
others were completed entirely by one Beatle alone. And so although
The Beatles is a perennial fan favorite (if you were bringing one
Beatles album to a desert island, why wouldn't it be the generous one
with 30 tracks?), it is actually the least Beatles-esque of all their
albums. As Bob Spitz wrote in his masterful 2005 biography of the
band, "The new repertoire, almost to a song, had lost its
collaborative aspect...the writing process would forgo the critical
feedbackthe suggestion of a phrase, a few bars, or a middle
eightthat helped shape a Lennon-McCartney song in the past." (It's
also important to note that by recording so many songs, the band was
effectively getting closer to the end of its contract with EMI. The
Beatles was the first of the group's albums to be released on its own
Apple label, rather than Parlophone/Capitolyet another connection
that can be drawn to the burgeoning indie trends of later decades.)
Formally, therefore, the songs on The Beatles aren't always up to
classicist snuff. The puzzle-piece functionality of a song like
"Happiness Is a Warm Gun" replaces the compositional neatness of a
past song like "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party", to pick an
arbitrary example (or even a more similar experiment like "A Day in
the Life", which still attempted to emulate the existence of a middle
eight with its pasting-together of separate sections), while tracks
like "Helter Skelter", "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?", and "Yer
Blues" eschew any sort of formal ingenuity in order to satisfy more
primal urges. This isn't to say that these songs are inferior
examples of the Beatles' genius, but for the first time (perhaps the
only time) Beatles songs were being dictated by mood, imagery, and/or
instinct rather than by compositional intellect.
To put it another way: The Beatles appeals to us on a gut level. It's
pop music that's unhinged and presumptive, excitable and unashamed,
blessed with the unpredictable acumen of a mood swing. This is an
incongruous menu of music, and our brains duly inform us that it
shouldn't make any sense, that it is all too much, a consequence of
our gluttonous desires for more. But it does work, against our better
judgment: it is a place where ambivalent political sentiment can rub
up against a sentimental showtune distraction, where declarations of
carnal and spiritual love can exist in close proximity. It works
because it wills itself to work, and because the child inside us deems it so.
Zeth Lundy
.
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