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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very funny but wrong, 5 Feb 2007
This is a marvellously entertaining book, and I would heartily recommend that people read it. The style is loose and irreverent and some of the insights and observations are howlingly funny, particularly the final devastating critique of Maxwell's Silver Hammer.
That said, I feel the book is rather misguided in its overall assessment of the Beatles' music, and their legacy, and more often than not what shines through is the author's own subjective predjudices.
Hall's basic premise (which is highly contentious) is that rock songwriting is an essentially literary art-form, and that songwriters are basically novelists, story-tellers and poets who set their literary creations to music. In Hall's world, these novelists/poets/songwriters earn their stamp of approval by being as "Literary" as possible, endowing their songs with worthy messages, political commentary or intensely serious, passionate imagery. Basically, he reduces the history of rock and roll (which I would argue has never, with a few notable exceptions, been a literary art form) to the world of singer-songwriters such as Jeff Buckley/Leonard Cohen/Van Morrison/Nick Cave/Lou Reed, fill in the blanks at your convenience.
Now, clearly, these are all great songwriters and artists (well,apart from Nick Cave), no question there. But to denigrate The Beatles simply because they do not fit this particular archetype seems to me to whiff of arbirary prejudice. It ignores/misses the fact that The Beatles' greatness came from entirely different sources- from the heritage of British music hall, from Edward Lear-ish absurdist humour, from ideas borrowed from the artistic avant-garde, from mainstream Western and Eastern classical music, and at base, from the fundamental idea that pop music is something fun, entertaining, escapist, and in fact the exact opposite of high-brow literature and protest poetry. It also misses the crucial point that rock and pop lyrics do not necessarily attain greatness because they have literal, political meaning or because they read well as poetry. Lyrics become great when they sound great set to music, when they encapsulate timeless truths very simply. Which the lyrics of the Beatles frequently did.
Hall also is badly misguided when he says that The Beatles lyrically turned their backs on the overwhelming issues of the day (what he did he want them to do - churn out a decade's worth of worthy protest songs about the Vietnam War? Anyone who has ever heard Mike Love's dreadful anti-nam song on the Beach Boys' Surfs Up album will shudder at the very thought). Of course, the very opposite is true - in songs such as All You Need Is Love - derided by Hall because he says the tune sounds like Three Blind Mice - The Beatles frequently reflected and encapsulated the general spirit of their times, and in fact this is one of the central reasons why they are so revered and so celebrated.
Hall's general ignorance shines through when he dismisses a song such as Blackbird as vacuous and banal. Anyone who has taken the trouble to research the Beatles' music and lyrics in any detail would know that McCartney intended the song to be a heavily cloaked metaphor for the black civil rights movement. Does everything have to be brutually spelled out in black and white? The fact that Hall dismisses an angry, surrealistic protest song such as I Am The Walrus (surely one of the THE great cynical, anti-peace and love songs of its time) as meaningless garbage also indicates a failure of the imagination, as well as a lack of understanding of the songs' background and gestation.
Of course, in Hall's world, arguments as the ones I have just set out would immediatley simply label me as a sucker and a Beatle-head, someone who has swallowed all the myths wholesale and got myself "lost in piffle". There is clearly a lot of embittered anger and defensiveness going on here.
So, where does it all come from, we're left wondering? Hall had a rather distressing introduction to the music of The Beatles, during a late-night listening session with a friend. The Long And Winding Road was the guilty track - hardly the pinnacle of the band's achievement as it is well known that it was a shoddy demo tarted up in a style totally uncharacteristic of the Beatles by Phil Spector.
All well and good, but then Hall goes on to dismiss the bands' entire recorded output, bafflingly claiming that Lennon and McCartney were objectively bad songwriters who didn't know how to put a decent chord sequence together. That this is so manifestly untrue can be testified by any number of famous and inspirational musicians, many of whom are lauded by Hall himself. Springsteen, REM's Peter Buck, Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, The Byrd's David Crosby - every man a Beatles' fan down to their bones. Hall's argument would presumably be that all these men were simply "buying into the myth" rather than rationally using their ears, but you don't need to be a music graduate to intuitively feel that this is wide of the mark.
Yes, useless bands and artists can be hyped to success, and yes, the Beatles are in many ways over-rated, but to claim that the majority of their output was "shoddy work cobbled together" is a banally extreme position to take. It doesn't help that when Hall does single out a particular track to dismember, he chooses either their obvious worst (Maxwell), or a track such as Come Together, the tune of which was an obvious homage to Chuck Berry.
The claim that The Beatles's true influence was no greater than such bands as Brian Poole and The Tremeloes is also rather fatuous, given that it is a well-documented fact that the song Tomorrow Never Knows alone directly influenced not only the entire sixties psychedelic movement, but also the kraut-rock phenomenon and acid house and techno (hello The Chemical Brothers). Even Dylan was influenced by the arrival of The Beatles, as his early rock'n'roll recordings amply demonstrate. He praises them openly in this autobiographical Chronicles, and calls them revolutionary. Is his Bobness lost in piffle too I wonder? Which of Hall's category of deluded Beatle fans does he fall into - I don't recall him mentioning a "Genius Rock And Roll Roet Laurette All Time Greatest Lyricist Ever" category?
Neither does Hall's supposedly devastating "nail in the coffin" argument about George Martin being the key to the Beatles' music's diversity hold weight, as admirers of the band gladly accept that he was part and parcel of their artistic success. Butch Vig and Steve Albini were essential components of Nirvana's success too - or does Hall think that such music arrives fully formed on a record simply by the artists playing live into a tape recorder?
Finally, if Hall wants to slag off artists because their lyrics don't say anything conventionally "meaningful", I would direct him forthwith to Little Richard and Awopbamaloobomawopbamboo". A fairly influential and well thought of lyric, or so I'm told.
A funny, valuable, wrong-headed book - read it.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
My 75th Beatles book, 7 Dec 2003
This review is from: Living Life without Loving the "Beatles": A Survivor's Guide (Paperback)
Very entertaining. Mr Hall couldn't possibly upset Beatles fans with such a strongly-felt display of (reverse?)enthusiasm for his subject matter, after all, enthusiasm of all degrees is what The Beatles generated. Personally, I'm always happy to encounter the thinking music fan, even if the results of their cogitation differs from my own views. I love The Beatles. And Gram Parsons, The Stones, Willie & Waylon, Al Green, Led Zeppelin, Tim Hardin, Van Morrison, Emmylou Harris and on and on. I consider Nick Drake overrated, REM tripe and Tom Waits a very bad joke. As for Bruce Springsteen, surely he's Meatloaf without the humour?
But Mr Hall correctly identifies Britney as a maker of good pop records - well, at least one. But I'm afraid, Mr Hall, liking Mandy by Barry Manilow DOES make you a bad person - at least round my house. Great book.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
When it's all too much - help is here..., 29 April 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Living Life without Loving the "Beatles": A Survivor's Guide (Paperback)
If you’ve ever withheld a deeply felt opinion for fear of assigning yourself to the status of village leper, this book is for you! Daring to cast doubt on the untouchable status of the Beatles’ music may be just one of those situations where it’s tempting to steer clear and take the easy road to social inclusion. You may even have a token Beatles compilation LP in your collection just to prove you’re not a secret misfit. Hall’s book gives us the courage to be a little more assertive and, like any good argument balances every Beatles-bashing with suggestions of songs and artists that deserve a hearing. At once, hilarious and heartfelt it’s easy to see that Hall, born in Liverpool in 1964, has indeed spent a lifetime painfully researching his subject. Full of quips you’ll find yourself reading out to anyone who’ll listen, Hall ridicules and systematically annihilates that previously unchallenged authority that without the Beatles we’d still be crooning around the juke box. Hall’s style of writing is compassionate and familiar, communicating with the reader rather than talking at them; admitting foibles and honest mistakes whilst all the time encouraging us to live more assertively, listen more passionately. Like any thought provoking discussion, you don’t have to swallow every word. If I choose to forgive opera its excesses because of the most beautiful, heartbreaking aria from Handel’s ‘Julius Caesar’, that’s OK, it’s my choice and not the result of social pressure. ‘Living Life…’ culminates with the precision deconstruction of one of the Beatles’ lesser known masterpieces – ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’. Having never had the aural ‘pleasure’ I wasn’t sure how this would work but I needn’t have feared. Hall’s passion and attention to every detail provided me with a new experience – ‘hearing’ one of the worst songs ever without actually having to listen to it! As always, amongst the humour there’s a serious message, not least that for every re-re-re-release (and that’s not a typo) of all those Fab Four compilations, there are ground breaking artists and poets going unheard. Whatever your view of the Beatles, ‘Living Life…’ can be used as a sign post, nestled in the hedgerows, reminding us that there are indeed many long and winding roads to beautiful, passionate music and poetry; they’re not always the easiest or most obvious, but once taken, the real journey’s just beginning.
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by Philip Norman
