Can't Buy Me Love

The four most eligible bachelors (although shhh John was married) did a lot of running and joking in the early years. Just watching them jump around is entertaining. Can't Buy Me Love is about matrimony and/or true love. Paul sings that he'll buy his girl a ring if it makes her feel alright, but he really wants her to like "the kind of things that money just can't buy". Here we have a balance to the cover of Barret Strong's Money, and also the line in I Feel Fine: "he buys her diamond rings, you know". The material basis of a happy marriage balanced against the promise of true love. The Beatles, at this point, were presenting themselves as ideals: playful, funny, good-looking and, most importantly, full of love. But Paul didn't quite want to walk down the aisle yet, let's leave the ring till later, he's suggesting.

What is love? For the early Beatles love was everything. It was the dream and the snare that they used to sell their records, and yet it was more than that, it was a door which led away from the hate unleashed by WWII and the strict moral code of the earlier generations towards a new place, new horizons. In the beginning love meant desire and the loss of control, tempered by the promise of faithful devotion. The Beatles seduced their audience but quickly it became much more than the Beatles, it was a youth movement, a cultural event and the Beatles, although instrumental in many ways, were also along for the ride. Their idea of love grew with their audience. The Fab Four got tired of singing simple love songs, and as they quit touring, their quest became more internalized. John's idea of love moved together with his naive hope for revolution and world peace. But one can't fault him for taking on the larger issues. George moved in a more spiritual direction. Love, he came to understand, is a cosmic force. Paul stayed the most pragmatic and canny. He was a performer and love was the product. Paul kept it simple, and so did Ringo, As in the clip from Hard Day's Night above, Ringo didn't jump quite so high as the other three, but in this way he was left alone to simply love as much as he could. Many Beatle's songs began dealing with escape from the pressures of stardom, and Ringo found, hopefully, his octopus' garden.

Can love be bought? Money buys us security and yet in every direction traps seem to lie in wait. To be a superstar or to be unknown, to marry and raise a family or stay single and live alone, each act wraps us in chains of a kind. Early in my marriage a so-called friend accused me of buying my wife's love through supporting her economically. As if relationships are purely economical, or like some sort of radical feminist critique of marriage, that all hetero-normative relationships are somehow predicated on prostituting the self. Such views, I believe, take a rather bleak and materialistic view of lived experience. Love and money, although forcibly entwined by social conditions, ultimately remain opposed. Love is the greater force of the two, but you can't buy anything with it. When it is given freely, in its true form, it expects nothing in return.

Please Please Me

"Last night I said these words to my girl" .. immediately we are thrust into the intimate space between young lovers, somewhere unchaperoned, the excitement of the moment underscored by the rising and falling melody and the repeated exaltation, "Come on". The undefined act between the pair, what he does for her but she won't do for him, ups the ante even farther. This honest song about repressed eroticism, veiled by its cheerful and energetic rhythm, is what made the Beatles dangerous to the status quo. John Lennon was a rebel and a punk with immense creative talent. Elvis Presley had set a precedent, the Beatles didn't just appear out of nowhere, but their unique immersal in the sex and drugs of Hamburg's Reeperbahn gave them a sophistication and continental edge on the competition. John, Paul, George and Ringo were raised in a harbor town, 3 of 4 of their fathers were absent for long periods of time, out to sea.They were all drawn to R&B, they idolized Little Richard. The American black experience was an exotic fetish, a totem of love and loss, of an embattled and downtrodden masculinity which refused to be enslaved.

 These cocky white boys from Liverpool playing an adopted African-American idiom in the rough and tumble streets of Hamburg, George Harrison just turned 18: this was adventure and the stuff of legend. It's easy to mythologize and project on to this legend, and this is another reason the Beatles became superstars. The Beatles adopted the boasting, confident masculinity of sure and untroubled sailors. "I wanna be your lover baby, I wanna be your man, love you like no other, baby, like no other can." It was an image, half true, perhaps, half in jest, and yet the theatre of it was what the girls wanted to believe, what the boys wanted to be. Beatlemania was a kind of sexual hysteria with four young troubadours at its center. They were cute, thoughtful, sensitive and somewhat dangerous. A recipe for success. In The Clash's London Calling, Joe Strummer throws out the great line, a line Lennon probably wished he had written, that "phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust," burying the Beatles and their fake commercialism. And yet there's a kind of nostalgia there as well. Strummer was in the same lineage as Lennon, clearly, one of the last to walk with that kind of swagger and cocksure rebellion. I would posit that something has been lost, as our relationship with image culture becomes jaded and broken, as digital culture pulls us deeper into a computerized vision of self, reflected in social networks as just one face among millions, something of our self belief, of our sexuality has sapped away. Is it just pure nostalgia on my part, or has the spectacle stolen something of our humanity? We are more human than a simulated Beatle, still at least, but somehow less so than the originals.

Love Me Do

Love Me Do, released 53 years ago today. The message was love and fidelity wrapped up in a two minute pop song. To us today it seems quite nice, maybe a little too clean cut.  At the time it caused an uproar and an outpouring of adulation. The Beatles managed to tear a hole in the cultural fabric and the old guard heard those cheerful voices and knew they were being swept away. The young were rising and they had their own bards, their own poets. The main force of early rock and roll was its unsettling of class distinctions. Four working class lads from Liverpool were soon playing for the Queen. "Rattle your jewelry", John quipped, and the world was never the same. My mom told me how her father threw away her Buddy Holly and Everly Bros records in the early 60s. It was a callous act, but its indicative of how threatened the old guard felt. They were being pushed off the stage.
Paul says in an interview that their early songs were like love letters to their fans, thanking them for buying the records. If the youth were taking over, love was their secret weapon.  But what is love?  What was it in 1962? And has our concept of love changed? For the post-WWII world pulling itself out of the ashes and trying to bury the Holocaust, love was what everybody needed. And yet the Beatles also used love to get rich; they were selling a dream. But it was wholesome and it was an incremental change towards a better world. We all needed someone to love, someone like you. Paul sang directly to his listeners. It was the anti-Bomb, and it exploded in hearts around the world. A media sensation, ready to sweep the memory of Hitler right under the carpet.

And yet like Hitler, the Beatles used the power of radio in their bid at global domination. Unlike Hitler, they succeeded because they were not merchants of death, they were selling a promise of love and hope and in this field they were early pioneers, forging the first trail into uncharted territory. If there is any major difference between our concept of love today and how it resonated with the public in 1962, its that we have become jaded and cynical about love, our reality is increasingly digital and a screen seems to lie between us and our feelings, whereas for the early Beatles and their generation, love was begging to be released. Love Me Do, with that emphatic and misplaced do at the end, rhyming with you and true, opened the floodgates. The first few buds of a new spring burst forth in an analogue soil not yet trampled by the millions who would soon come searching for more gold. Ironically by commodifying the dream of love, the Beatles changed it forever.

Back in the USSR

A new Beatles blog?  Do we really need a new one? The idea is to examine the Beatles from both east and west. From Prague with the Lennon Wall a constant reminder of the Fab Four, the Beatles seem to live on. The period of their eternal youth corresponds with the Prague Spring and all its hope for a thawing relationship between the superpowers. Something about the Beatles reminds us of the Cold War. They were ambassadors of globalization, ambassadors of Liverpool, ambassadors of a new beginning. Now the time seems right to approach them again, to see where and who we were in those distant, halcyon days, and to reflect on where and who we are today in a world the Beatles helped make, but a world which is moving quickly away from what the Beatles, if we dare speak for them, wanted it to be. And also to see the Beatles into the future, faded like Ozymandius on some desert plain.

Back in the USSR. Did we ever really leave? The 20th Century was rocked by war and revolution, but in many ways we were just running in place. The four lads from Liverpool become carriers of our dreams, they were a part of our lives and touched on something far greater than any individual usually obtains. And yet in another way they were Everymen, hapless figures in a drama on the global stage, swept along in the same currents of history like the rest of us. John Lennon paid a heavy price in the end, for his fame singled him out and made him a target. The Beatles became larger than life, and yet they were trapped by that image in the end. The Beatles were heralds of their generation, of post-WWII Britain, and their formula, and it was a very good one, was to sing of love and optimism. The USSR crumbled, and yet the West somehow swallowed something of the totalitarian spirit in 1989. Slowly we become global citizens and yet the USSR just won't go away  It may be gone, but it lurks offstage, waiting for a grand return. For every step forward, it seems we take two back. The Beatles broke up quite early on, in retrospect it looks like a very smart move.

Paul wrote Back in the USSR as a kind of throwback reference to their earlier sound. Referencing the Beach Boys and Hoagy Carmichael, the lyrical trick in the chorus of "Back in the US, back in the US, back in the USSR" slyly unites the two superpowers and jokingly infers that the USSR is a great place to be. Considering the global population is twice what it was when the song was written and the increasingly frightening spectre of global warming, to be on some peaceful collective farm along the Volga might not be so bad. We're not in any hurry to return to a totalitarian state, are we? The Cold War is over, isn't it? You don't know how lucky you are.