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.