very own and personal friends’ collections, published in 2000, went straight to number
one on the New-York Times bestsellers list, as if the words themselves of the Fab Four
still held an almost mystical hold upon our culture, three decades after the band has
ceased to exist.
The natural, easy comparison between Elvis and the Beatles is both indicative
and fallacious. If on the one hand, both are determining figures of twentieth century
popular music and culture and represent, from a purely financial point of view, alternate
versions of the hen with the golden eggs, their respective importance in the
development of both popular music and its industry are very much far apart. Whereas
Elvis represents the pinnacle of an era and incarnates its soundtrack, mostly centered
around the pentatonic developments of Blues, Rock and Country with the occasional
Gospel outing, the Beatles, on the other hand, ushered the future of pop music, that
which we are st [0