It occurs to me that I let 9/9/09 pass by without any comment on The Beatles. Given that I’ve gone to the effort of ranking, and commenting on, every Beatles song out there, this seems like a bit of an oversight.
Now, I don’t particularly care about the things that were actually released on that day. I can see the appeal of Rock Band, but the utterly fictive nature of the process leaves me on edge. It is simulacra in a very unpleasant way. The idea that people will devote insane amounts of effort at becoming proficient at Rock Band, as opposed to…you know…learning an actual instrument is depressing to me.
People talk about the value of Rock Band as a video game that is inherently social, and there is something to that. We had Rock Band in Hanover this summer and there is something very entertaining about a video game which includes those who are not playing. That said, something else which facilitates this kind of atmosphere is the actual playing of instruments.
As for the re-release of the albums, I also can’t get myself tremendously worked up about it. I’m not the sort of audiophile who cares that much about the digital quality of my media. What’s more, I grew up with the records themselves – which will always be the definitive versions of these songs. I don’t really feel like I’ve lost anything moving from those records to MP3s, so I can’t make myself too worried about picking up a remastered CD.
Which isn’t to say that I don’t want both the complete stereo AND the complete mono box sets. Obviously I do, but that’s a matter of a personal obsession for completeness, not because I really expect to hear something different.
So, the actual events of 9/9 didn’t matter much to me. But still…how can I let a big Beatles week go by without some sort of comment? Given that, I’ll ignore recent events and go back to the previous decade’s big Beatles revival, and talk about the ‘new’ Beatles songs we got with the Anthology, particularly “Free as a Bird.”
I always liked “Real Love” – the old Lennon demo got a lot of listens from me before I ever even heard about the Anthology project – but despite the enthusiasm I tried to muster about A New Beatles Song “Free as a Bird” never did much for me.
Part of the problem is that I couldn’t help but feel that it sounded like a New Jeff Lynne Song more than a creation of The Beatles. And I like Jeff Lynne a lot. But if wanted to hear Jeff Lynne’s take on artists I love, I’d put on Cloud 9 or Into the Great Wide Open or something. When it comes to The Beatles, I wanted something more.
But after listening to it again recently, I think I’ve changed my mind. Those complaints still stand, but they’ve been tempered by time and the setting aside of expectations. The Lennon vocals still stand out against the (over)production of the rest of the track, but that no longer feels like a problem. Where I once thought of the production as overwhelming (caging, one might say) Lennon’s ethereal singing, now I think of it more as offering a sort of structure for the old tapes: a recognition of their delicacy. Where Lennon’s voice quavers the new additions pull it back up to the surface and then, when you get “like a bird I’ll fly” you can almost feel it being set free.
So yeah, it’s grown on me. Still might not crack my top 100 for them, but that’s not really much of a criticism.