Lindsay Pereira
4 am. Sunday morning.
Britney Spears on MTV sings passionately about
how
all she wants to do is make you happy. I cringe, shut my eyes, switch
off
the TV, and slip The Beatles' 1963 debut 'Please Please Me' into my
player.
Everything stands still, and I smile almost at once.
Why did The Beatles rule the world when they did, I ask myself, still
smiling while 'I saw her standing there' happens once more.
Beatles? Huh?
As the MP3 Generation speaks, an epitaph is being written.
An informal survey by Rediff returns horror responses from:
"They make me fall off to sleep" to "New band?"
|
Could they,
today, have given the Backstreet Boys a run for their money? If I fell
asleep now and woke up one morning in the year 2040, would 'Love me do'
still play somewhere? The answers refuse to come.
Cut to the sixties, when Elvis would simply move his knee to make my
mother's go weak.
After John Lennon's aunt Mimi once told him, "The guitar's all very
well,
but you'll never make a living out of it," I really hope she lived to
eat
all her hats.
Because, hey, little John Winston Lennon and his three
clean-cut buddies Paul, George and Ringo managed pretty well, thank you.
My player interrupts. Why wasn't I born when this sound first hit the
airways? A queer kind of pacification to the latter query comes from The
Beatles themselves. Tomorrow, I'm told, that's November 13, The Beatles
hit
cyberspace with all they've got, via their official Web site.
(http://www.thebeatles.com/) Prompting me to ask almost at once: If the
web
does what radio did all those decades ago, could Beatlemania be
unleashed
all over again?
The result of over a year's hard work -- with inputs from band
members,
friends, tech wizards, and a sum reported to be around $7.5 million -
the
site coincides with the release of a new Beatles album titled, simply,
'1'.
I pause for a while, trying to dissect this piece of information. It
marks
a huge move, from playing to generations fed on a steady diet of radio,
to
audiences comprising largely those who were probably foetuses the last
time
the band played to screaming masses.
73 million Americans stayed up late to watch TV when the four
teenagers
performed for the Ed Sullivan Show. It was a night where, even in New
York,
no major crimes were committed. Sullivan faced the cameras, and asked
all of
America to "Judge for yourself." Who could blame their verdict?
Tomorrow, history repeats itself, re-introducing that old magic to a
whole
new set of people groomed in front of computer screens.
Keeping aside more questions, I slide in 'Rubber Soul.' An album that
could claim marijuana as its muse. No more rhyming couplets, this was a
taste of what The Beatles could accomplish, with or without the LSD.
They had little or no formal knowledge of music, I realise, glancing
through a biography. Which is why I remember shaking my head in awe the
first time someone told me they drew comparisons in complexity to
composers
like Gustav Mahler.
In a country where bands tried their best to imitate American
musicians,
with the rare burst of something exceptional like home-grown skiffle
music,
The Beatles rewrote what avant garde was all about. And what they used
was
just high octane energy, feel good tunes, and the good ol' BBC ('The
Beeb'),
to get their message out. Radio worked then, but will modems do what
telecom
did in '63? Will The Beatles' foray online survive the rigours of our
hype
driven markets?
The cynic in me surfaces again, confronted with the little detail of
today's teenagers being largely ignorant about the Beatles phenomenon.
News
reports from around the world, however, beg to differ.
Barely five months ago, presses around the world turned day and night
to
meet the demand of over a million and a half volumes of The Beatles
Anthology, written by the band members themselves. Costing $60, it was
the
last element of the Beatles Anthology trilogy launched in 1995 with a TV
documentary and 3-CD set that sold 45 million copies worldwide.
There's more. In a recent poll conducted by Rolling Stone for the Ten
Most
Influential Artists, Top Ten Rock Bands of the Century, and Best Rock
Band
Ever, guess who came out on top? Also, guess who walked away with three
out
of the top four albums?
Okay, granted. But what about the overdose of Beatles information
already
online? From links at the Beatles Fans Home Page
(http://www.beatles.about.com/musicperform/beatles/mbody.htm) to a tour
of
Beatles sites in Liverpool and London
(http://www.music.indiana.edu/som/courses/rock/england.html); books
about
them (http://showcase.netins.net/web/reading/beatles.html) to all their
lyrics (http://www.stevesbeatles.com/), to Beatles Desktop Themes
(http://www.upv.es/~ecabrera/theme.html) -- everything's covered, and
how.
Fans can even log on at the John Lennon Artificial Intelligence
Project
(http://www.triumphpc.com/john-lennon) that recreates Lennon's
personality
by programming an advanced bot with artificial intelligence using his
own
words. Letting you have, in simpler terms, a virtual chat with the man!
Given this kind of competition, how will the official site stand its
ground?
Rumours abound. While '1' offers 27 songs encompassing all the group's
British and American number one singles, the site will apparently create
a
unique Beatle experience for each track. A section called Get Back, for
example, supposedly gives viewers an audio-visual recreation of The
Beatles
last performance in Savile Row. There's a virtual walk round Studio 2 at
Abbey Road, an interactive section enabling participants to 'become'
John,
Paul, George and Ringo, and visuals that can be viewed with different
effect
glasses for the tongue-in-cheek track, Day Tripper.
Time will tell, is all I can say to myself, turning to my player yet
again.
I listen to Abbey Road, the last Beatles album with its passionate
'Come
Together.' Three minutes into the track, realisation dawns, and John
Lennon
stands vindicated. Maybe they really were more popular than Jesus.
6 am. No more questions. No answers. Only the music. Which is probably
just the way the Fab Four would have wanted it anyway.
