My 17-year-old daughter, who is herself a Beatles fan, gave me the new CD/DVD set Love, the mashup of Beatles music produced by Giles and George Martin for Cirque du Soleil, as a Christmas gift.
I am the original Beatlemaniac, yet for some reason the CD sat on my desk for th
ree or four weeks before I imported it into iTunes. (Maybe it’s a sign of the times that I had to wait until I had a few minutes to import it to my iPod before I got around to listening. Does this serve the Beatles right for waiting so long to join the digital music revolution?)
The album is fantastic. Beatles purists (mostly on discussion forums)Â who complain that it’s “messing around” with the originals must not remember what the Beatles did during their recording careers. They messed around all the time. John Lennon was one of the earliest proponents of reverse-tracking and using found sound.
On the other hand, many people criticized the CD for not being bold enough. And many reviewers seem to share my fascination with the combination of brilliant re-mastering and wild creativity from an authoritative source, the Martins. (Mercifully, the producers did not try to include any of “Revolution #9″ on this soundtrack. Wild creativity does have its limits.)
As a Baby Boomer, I will probably always have the feeling that the Beatles are somehow “cutting edge.” However, listening to and looking at the interviews with surviving Beatles and spouses reminds me that their music is now the music of really rather old people. Classic it may be, but cutting edge it’s not anymore.
But it is great music. I will go to my grave (hopefully several decades from now) maintaining that modern rock-and-roll owes an enormous debt of gratitude to the Fab Four and George Martin, for essentially inventing such things as massive multitracking and stadium rock shows. And the music remains fresh and strong. Why else would kids born in the 1990s be so into it?
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