Category: Music

It’s a truism that the millennial generation is a whole lot more earnest than the Gen-Xers who preceded them. Certainly they don’t seem to be mired in the crippling irony that we all seemed to struggle against, and they don’t have the combination of seething anger and helpless despair that fueled the whole alternative movement.

There are two relics of the Gen-X period that to me sum up what stood out about our generation and why. The first is a line from “Smells Like Teen Spirit”: “Our little group has always been/And always will until the end.” There just aren’t a lot of us, and I think that made a difference. The boomers were marketed to relentlessly, and still are. The same is true of the millennials: movies like Look Who’s Talking and Three Men and a Baby, came out when they were born, and the music industry was creating pop stars for them when they were still tweens. But for Generation X, the marketing juggernaut never really got ginned up. I think we never fully bought into corporate America because corporate America never really bought into us. The resources weren’t invested, so we went our own way and listened to weird bands and wore weird clothes that were difficult to sell in any organized way. I’d like to imagine that the alternative scene was about something deeper, but I suspect that we felt like we had no real place in contemporary America simply because no one was trying hard enough to sell us things.

The other Gen-X artifact that I think of is the movie Slackers. Its various characters are all struggling in one way or another to gather and communicate information: the guy who collects TVs, the guy who keeps shouting about how people need to read the newspaper, the Kennedy assassination buff, the girl trying to sell Madonna’s pubes are all trapped by their inability to connect with anyone who shares their enthusiasms. And what’s remarkable about this movie is that every one of those problems is solved by the Internet. With YouTube, political blogs, social networks, eBay, you no longer need to be alone with your obsession. That devastating feeling of isolation and powerlessness that the alternative scene was meant to assuage is simply not a problem in the way that it was. Millennials have come of age knowing that they can make a difference, that they can have an impact on the wider world, whether through serious political engagement or through participation in a flashmob.

But so here’s where the whole situation with pop music starts to get interesting. For Gen-X, there were two kinds of popular music: pop that was manufactured by people who didn’t seem to understand us that well, and who were definitely not us; and alternatives to that pop, whether gangsta rap or grunge or what have you, that had to define itself musically against the slicked-up sounds of more traditional pop. To be authentic, music had to be uncomfortable, at least a little.

But for the millennials, that’s just not true anymore. They voted for their American Idols, so it’s OK to like them. And they watched Justin Timberlake grow up, so it’s OK to like him. And now, there’s the emerging and fascinating phenomenon of the ironically self-aware pop star. Lady Gaga is the obvious queen of this new phenomenon, but you see it in Lily Allen and in Timberlake, and I noticed in in Ke$ha on SNL this weekend. (Sudden thought: was it Eminem who bridged the gap between alternative rage and abrasiveness, and self-parodying pop stars?) They’re pop stars, and they know they’re pop stars, and they seem to think that the whole thing is a zany lark, akin to a YouTube video that blows up for no apparent reason. You get the sense that they genuinely realize the whole thing is a crap shoot, and that there’s nothing all that special about them as people.

It used to be alternative that was the realm of DIY, where you went to see bands that made you feel like you could be in a band just like them. You could never be a New Kid on the Block, but you and your friends could totally pull off a Beasties punk number, and any schmuck could dress that badly. But now it’s the guitar bands that seem kind of remote and obscure, while anyone with a sequencer and a webcam can make a video and maybe turn into a pop star. It’s like Toto pulled back the curtain, and the millennials decided that Oz was totally great and they wanted a turn at the levers.

What does it mean to remember an experience? Sitting with my parents recently, listening to the Beatles remasters that just came out, it became clear that what my parents remembered about the Beatles — the order things came out, which songs were on which albums — was a kind of visceral memory, often inaccurate when measured against the archival record. My father compared it to the way people of his parents’ generation remembered World War II versus the way he grew up learning about it: they knew better what it was like, while he knew better what had actually happened.

Time also has a way of distorting our views. I know that I take Kurt Cobain a lot more seriously now than I did when he was alive. Until his suicide brought his art back into focus for me, I thought of Nirvana as a pretty good if simplistic and overhyped grunge band that was never as cool or interesting as Soundgarden or Pearl Jam. He wasn’t the voice of my generation until he no longer had a voice.

That effect is probably even stronger with the Beatles, who shaped a generation far more intensely than Cobain ever could have. In the many years since the Beatles were a going concern, we’ve seen Wings, and Plastic Ono Band, and the Concert for Bangladesh. We’ve seen The Compleat Beatles and Anthology. We’ve heard Let It Be de-Spectorized. We’ve seen John Lennon martyred, and Yoko Ono transformed from witch to hipster icon. And we’ve grown more familiar with the canonical materials, while the uncollected detritus of abandoned pop culture — radio and television interviews, DJ chatter about new Beatles songs, the speculation of one’s friends about whether the Beatles turn on, the newspaper and magazine articles — all fade into oblivion.

Above all, we know how it ends now. We know that Sgt. Peppter’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the highwater mark, that Abbey Road is the coda. We know that no Beatle ever did anything solo that was as impressive as the Beatles together. And we know that the story was closed forever by a pointless murder.

But what was it like to here “Tomorrow Never Knows” without knowing what was to come?

Sitting with my parents, listening to their memories of these songs when they were new, I got a taste of what that might have been like. And that got me to thinking about my own first experience of the Beatles.

Until 1987, what we had were the records — the American records. I grew up with an album called Song, Pictures and Stories of the Fabulous Beatles, a decidedly silly repackaging of Vee-Jay’s Introducing… the Beatles that included a gatefold, drawings of the Beatles, blurbs on their likes and dislikes, and places to put heart-shaped photographs of oneself under photos of each Beatle and the words, “JOHN LOVES,” “PAUL LOVES,” “GEORGE LOVES” or “RINGO LOVES.” It was a record meant to be bought by a schoolgirl, and it was, and that has some meaning to it.

What changed in 1987 was that the surviving Beatles and George Martin released something resembling the whole Beatles catalogue in what became canonical form, based on the British albums, with the stray bits and pieces gathered onto Past Masters I and II. I say something resembling the whole because they did away with the instrumental versions of several songs that populated the American versions of A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, and because all of the canonical CDs were in stereo. To muddy the waters even further, in 1987 George Martin took it upon himself to redo the stereo mixes of Help! and Rubber Soul, so we’ve been listening to different versions of those LPs than the already somewhat obscure British stereo records.

The newly released remasters are a useful corrective. The music sounds grand, which is obviously the most important thing. I don’t imagine that it sounds quite like a brand new pressing of British wax played on a brand new hi-fi from 1965 — certainly not when I play it on my iPod, through quality earbuds — but it sounds clear, resonant, full, and punchy.

And the release of the mono remasters, complete with the original stereo mixes of A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, makes it possible to hear something much closer to what everyone heard when the Beatles’ music was new. For the first couple of albums, the stereo mix is pretty arbitrary, mostly an artifact of how the music was recorded for mono: the vocals are all in the right channel, and the instruments are all in the left. I’d go so far as to say that Please Please Me and With the Beatles are actually preferable in mono, even on headphones.

There’s also the peculiarity that certain songs have different bits in them, depending on whether you’re listening to the mono or the stereo version. The Sgt. Pepper that played endlessly on the radio was probably the mono version, in which “She’s Leaving Home” is a faster number in a different key, avoiding some of the soupiness of the stereo version, and the reprise is noisier, layered with more crowd noise and crescendoing with some great shouting by Paul that’s missing in stereo. (In other cases, the stereo versions are better. Who wants to miss out on Paul reaching for the high notes as he sings, “Every single day!” during the fadeout of “Got to Get You Into My Life,” or Ringo’s famous “I’ve got blisters on my fingers!” as “Helter Skelter” fades back in?)

Getting to hear all this music, in a variety of formats, is wonderful. And it’s not too difficult to create a playlist that recreates the American discography (although you do have to live without those instrumentals).

So what’s the difference? Well, often the songs were in different orders, and the whole experience of the early Beatles was shaped by the overlapping releases of Introducing and Meet the Beatles!. The latter album, which launched American Beatlemania, opens with the world-conquering “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” but leaves out “Twist and Shout” (not released by Capitol until The Early Beatles came out in 1965).

Even more significant were the changes to the middle-period albums, which were my parents’ favorites, and whose structure and release schedule helped to map their courtship and coming of age. The now-canonical albums aren’t the ones my father remembers. Help! opened with a James Bond theme intro (not digitally available), and was full of instrumentals. It didn’t contain Yesterday, which wasn’t on a US album until after Rubber Soul.

And it’s maybe Rubber Soul where the changes matter most. My father remembers that record as part of his experience of traveling around Europe in the summer of ’66, being in love with my mother. In the US, it opened with Paul’s lovely, folkie “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” not the smirky “Drive My Car.” Side two opens with “It’s Only Love,” a considerably sweeter number than “What Goes On.” And the dark moods of “Nowhere Man” and “If I Needed Someone” are left off completely. The result is an album that has a different ratio of love to chagrin. There’s a different vibe.

Then there’s the whole sea change that seems to come with Revolver. In the US, that change was spread out over two albums, with “Yeterday”…and Today coming first, opening with “Drive My Car,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” “Nowhere Man,” and “Dr. Robert,” and closing out with “Day Tripper” (not found on any UK album). In America, Revolver was a bit less trippy than in the UK, and provided almost a lull in the psychedelic experimentation before the summer of Sgt. Pepper and love in 1967.

Somewhere in my parents’ house is a reel-to-reel recording of my parents calling in to a radio show and chatting with John Lennon while they were tripping on LSD. I’m not entirely sure whether I’ve actually heard this tape, or just heard of it. I can’t remember what anyone said. But this sort of relic reveals the unbridgeable gulf between the canonical text and the lived experience. No one will ever release a handsome boxed set of snippets like that. But chatting with John on the radio was another kind of listening to the Beatles. I’ll have to dig up that tape one of these days and find out what, if anything, they talked about.