Score: 9.0
I'm a huge Beatles fan. Gigantic, perhaps would be a better word. There is no doubt in my tiny little mind that they were simply the greatest band ever, bar none. Everything they touched reeked of quality, with only a few minor slip-ups in their short, bright career together. But such a band will never exist again, and the evidence of it is all in this one record.
For try as they might, none of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, or Ringo Starr ever achieved anything as solo artists on the same level as what they managed as a group. It was simply a miracle of human chemistry that such a gigantic amount of creativity deposited itself within Liverpool in the late 1950's, and that those creative endeavours would gel in such a way that they did not compete or outright destroy one another, but managed to complement each other and work harmoniously. The Beatles began before postmodernism, before absolute narcissism became the norm, before music became so fractured it required dashes in order to properly describe what you were listening to. It was only before all of those things that a group like the Beatles could form and write eyeball-to-eyeball some of the greatest pop songs ever.
This album, released in 1970, was Lennon's first after the Beatles, and it was released after all of those other things had happened. Racial barriers in the United States were eliminated (in theory at least), the middle class had blossomed even further, sexual liberation for an entire generation of teens had smoothly produced a mass of sexually active adults on the pill, and suddenly you could be whoever the hell you wanted to be. John Lennon, like the other Beatles, wanted to be himself suddenly. And the music suffered.
Which is not to say, in any way, that this is a bad album. Let's get that out of the way. It's a really, really good album, and don't let anything else I write here sway you otherwise. It's just bad by Beatles standards. Even the fractured, somewhat uninspired Let it Be is better by leaps and bounds. In place of the wide mosaic of abilities that each of the Beatles brought to the table, you have, you guessed it, John Lennon's wordplay and vocal inventiveness, along with some catchy basic melodies and an inventive spirit that underlies all of it. Which produces a lot, a fact which can be attested to by listening to the album today; but it does not produce music that stands the test of time quite as well as say, Revolver or The White Album.
In fact The White Album is a good place for comparison, as the sombre, stripped-down material Lennon produced in that period is similar in many ways to some of the work on Plastic Ono Band. "Hold On" and "I Found Out" could, with some lyrical reworking (you can't say "Fuck" on a Beatles track) have been reworked from the late 60's production of the band. "Look at Me" actually seems to be just that, a redone form of Lennon's own "Julia", complete with the same guitar-picking pattern and a musical and lyrical change of direction. That direction is much darker, much more minimalistic, and simply a more raw sound that puts Lennon's emotions and thoughts right in front of the listener, without McCartney's musical idealism or Harrison's mysticism getting in the way.
That rawness is featured in many tracks, uptempo and down, from "Mother", the opening to end all openings for a record of this type, through "Working Class Hero", a song so covered now it is refreshing to hear Lennon's originally simple, straightforward approach to the lyrical content, through to "Well Well Well" and most poignantly, "My Mummy's Dead", the audio quality of which actually aids in reproducing the simple suffering Lennon is evoking about his mother's death. That bareness of audio soul is refreshing to this day, but it can't pick up the mediocre song-writing (again, by Lennon's own standards) that spots up again and again in this record.
"I Found Out", for example, existed before punk, so even though it's trying to sound punk, Lennon's doing it solo, without the collage of influences that eventually helped form punk as it came to be. The result is a mixed effort that paws halfway between anger and loneliness, without really finding a home in either. "Love" too, is a fairly half-assed collection of phrases which, while poetical in their own right, don't really contribute much in co-ordination with the vocal melody, which is, once again, plain and self-serving.
In fact, it's only when, surprise surprise, Ringo enters on the drums, that these songs really pick up in terms of outright quality. From his steady time on "Mother" to his entrance on "Well Well Well" that set up that track as a perfect steadier on the album, it is his quite unique and identifiable sound on the drums that balance out Lennon's self-aggrandizement on the guitar and piano. Again, the album wouldn't have much positive about it at all without Lennon's self-focus, but it's stronger when a musical buffer, no matter how small, is placed in his way, and it is then that the full emotion of his songs can come out. "Isolation" for instance, is full of the soft, sweeping vocal progression and excellent timing that are Lennon's trademarks, but the killer technique is simply missing. Incipit Paul McCartney, and you have a classic, without him, it is merely a really good song.
All this talk of narcissism and self-focus inevitably brings me to the only place you can naturally end a review of this album, "God". Lennon claims he doesn't believe in Beatles or anything else, just himself (ironically enough always with the inclusion of Yoko Ono, an Other if ever there was one), and that the dream of what the Beatles stood for is over. But somewhere in that deep egotism and individuality that came to typify Lennon in this period, somewhere within the Freudian expression of desires and Primal Therapy, it seems like there is a need to believe in something else, besides himself. Because, let's face it, the quickest way to being an isolated, working-class hero, is to cut yourself off from believing in the closest three friends you might ever have. It's this sort of tension that makes "the line" so painful and confusing for us Beatles-freaks. The line has been talked about to death, and though there's no point adding anything to that discussion, I'm going to. The guy had no idea what the Beatles stood for. His understanding of "the dream" isn't what the Beatles turned out to be in hindsight. They turned out to be the prototype for every rock band since, the most influential group in pop music history, and the poets of an entire generation and movement of love and peace. To Lennon they were just a band. The Beatles will always be remembered as the band that said "All You Need is Love", perhaps above all else, and Lennon, even here (see "Love") still believed as much. It's not that he didn't believe in Beatles, it's that he didn't know what the hell they were yet. They were the last great hurrah for the western musical world before it dissolved into a pluralism it has yet to recover from. But when he wrote that, he was under the sway of that absolute relativity, and in his subjectivity, the Beatles weren't anything to believe in.
Boy, was he wrong.
The song, by the way, is golden, perfectly suited to the list of diatribes against which he is spitting, and augmented by some great piano work by Billy Preston.
Ok, so that's not how I can really end the review. I have to mention the last two tracks, "Power to the People" and "Do the Oz", each filled with enough post-hippie enthusiasm, and Yoko Ono weirdness respectively, to serve as anthemic standbys for... whatever it was they stood for. They clamor, they sway, they demand to be heard. Kind of how the Beatles used to do... but not quite.
No comments:
Post a Comment