Kenneth and Todd F. Davis, eds.) tend to focus more either upon the message or upon
the recipient: on the message side, John Covach’s essay, “From Craft to Art,” provides
an insightful breakdown of several song patterns that shows how The Beatles altered
and thus transcended traditional forms into their own original structures, while Walter
Everett’s “Painting Their Room in a Colorful Way” analyses the highly creative timbre
explorations of the Beatles, especially with and after Revolver. Ian Marshall’s “I am He
as You Are He as You Are Me and We Are All Together: Bakhtin and The Beatles”
applies the Bakhtinian concept of “dialogics,” that is the constant possibility of multiple
dialogs within a literary universe to The Beatles in order to underline the remarkable
level of communication within the members of the band and how their music reflects
constant and multiple dialogs between the instruments and the voices, and later, the
lyrics themselves. It could be argued that Marshall’s use of Bakhtinian theory, rather
than clarifying matters, further separates us from the nature of our object of study and
proves more rhetorical than explanatory for, after all, a good band is supposed to play
“together,” i.e., each member must be in constant dialog with the others in order to
create an orchestral effect, a characteristic which is taken for granted in all formations,
regardless of the type of music involved, and which is far from exclusive to The Beatles:
the very basic blues and jazz forms of call and response are indeed already based upon
the structure of a dialog. If The Beatles were indeed as “tight” as a band can get, and
hence did not play as individuals but rather as parts of a greater whole, such quality
could apply as well to The Rolling Stones, The Police, and of course, Queen. In spite of
representing a valuable effort to apply literary theory to a popular culture corpus, this
particular essay does not enlighten us much about what made – and still makes – The
Beatles different from any other good band.
From the angle of the receiver, James M. Decker’s “Baby You’re a Rich Man:
The Beatles, Ideology and the Cultural Moment,” John Kimsey’s “Spinning the Historical
Record: Lennon, McCartney and Museum Politics” and William M. Northcutt’s “The
Spectacle of Alienation: Death, Loss and the Crowd in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club
Band” all make valid points, if sometimes a bit opinionated, regarding context, public
perception and manipulation of The Beatles as a cultural phenomenon. However, all
things considered, we are still at a loss to clearly explain the uncanny success The
Beatles still enjoy to this day, and neither extreme commercialization nor clever
merchandizing, nor Paul McCartney’s well-known business savvy can account for the
interest and the respect The Beatles command over a vast majority of musicians and
music lovers from all horizons33.
Considering all three actors of the universal axis of communication at the same
time as a dialectical structure, a move which has not yet been made by Beatles
scholars, seems to shed some light upon why The Beatles became artists within a
medium which was all but destined to produce art – popular music for popular
consumption. It is indeed the highly privileged communication The Beatles had
Beatles up to 1962, that is before their first record. (Marc Lewisohn. Tune In. The Beatles: All These
Years, Vol. 1. New York: Crown Archetype, 2013.)
33 Highly praised contemporary jazz guitar players, such as Stanley Jordan and Bill Frisell have
played and recorded jazz versions of several Beatles’ songs.
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