Achieving Immortality with The Beatles
The Beatles are everything to everyone.
The enduring legacy of the Beatles is how their music is able to communicate and connect with so many people and continues to do so every year. For many they are easily the greatest musical act of all time while others concede that they are at least in the top 5. Why the Beatles are so popular is something that has been discussed and dissected the world over for over 5 decades now. Yet, I feel the biggest reason is because their music can mean different things to different people.
Now as a young child I must admit I didn't grow up with much Beatles. In fact I heard more solo Beatles growing up because my parents had Cloud 9 by George Harrison on tape and Paul McCartney's Greatest Hits on CD. Now my Uncle Jimmy on the other hand was the biggest Beatles fan I knew. He had every album across all formats, he has seen Paul McCartney live countless times now and he has probably read every book and watched every documentary about the Beatles. His passion for the Beatles is definitely all consuming at times and it was his passion that actually turned me off to The Beatles for a long time. You see as soon as I got into music I got into the pop girls the most like Spice Girls, Madonna, Janet Jackson, Britney Spears, Paula Abdul, etc. Yet I was always told how most of them don't have real talent, all their music is fake, it won't stand the test of time, they can't sing, how can it be art if it's not white guys with guitars, blah blah blah. My Uncle Jimmy used to always use The Beatles to "win" arguments with me in middle school about why his music was better. Hearing that all the music you like sucks compared to The Beatles made me resent the Beatles in all honesty. I kind of hated them out of principle even though I didn't know a lot of their music off the top of my head. I mean I had heard songs by them growing up but I didn't always connect that it was them. Even as I got into classic rock in 2002 I was still resistant to The Beatles. I got into The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, The Moody Blues, Boston and more but I still was not giving in to The Beatles. Then Uncle Jimmy changed my mind.
I remember around late 02/early 03 my family was visiting my Uncle Jimmy and Titi and he had recently purchased the DVD of Paul McCartney's Back in the U.S.S.R. and was playing it on his big screen TV. The first song was Hello, Goodbye and as I sat there in the kitchen listening to it I realized I kind of liked that song. It was extremely catchy and I know I had heard it before but I had not connected it was The Beatles. In my mind all Beatles songs sounded like She Loves You and I Want to Hold Your Hand from the early Beatlemania days.
This is when I finally started to dig into them. First I got the 1 collection then I got the Red and Blue greatest hits albums and then in college I managed to snag their entire catalogue. My love for the Beatles though began that day in my Uncle's kitchen and soon I liked music from across their whole career but it was the psychedelic years that appealed to me most. One day back in 2012 I was talking to Emily, a good friend of my husband's who I also became good friends with as well. She loves The Beatles and we talk about music and Disney all the time. On this day I decided we should make a list of our favorite Beatles songs and why to see what we each thought were their greatest songs. Each list was about 20 songs long and the interesting thing was our lists had absolutely no overlap! We had both picked 20 different songs by The Beatles and the reasons for our picks were completely different as well. Emily's list reflected her life as a woman and the relationships she had had with men. Different songs reminded her of the good times and the messy breakups and it definitely felt like her Beatles picks were a diary of past boyfriends.
My picks on the other hand were either because I thought the song was catchy or because they were transportive. For some Beatles songs I just liked them simply because they were catchy and I didn't listen too hard to the lyrics such The Night Before. I loved The Night Before for its chorus but Emily is the one who brought up what the song meant, which is you have a great night with someone and the next day they give you the cold shoulder. The other songs I picked were the ones that transported you to different places the way only great music can such as Penny Lane, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Hey Bulldog, Tomorrow Never Knows, etc. The one song I picked for reminding me specifically of my own life was Emily's least favorite Beatles song! That song was Dear Prudence and it's about a person who lives their life away and sheltered from others. As sung by John Lennon he encourages Prudence to come out and experience the world because once they do they will find what a beautiful place it is. For me this song reflected so much of my life in the closet as a gay teen as I cut myself off from the world around me and probably missed some great experiences as a result. Sure I was out now but a part of me was still very drawn to the sadness expressed in Dear Prudence but my friend Emily had no time for it.
Emily's picks, while I enjoyed most of them, didn't connect with me lyrically because they were all about hetero-normative relationships. For me and music I mostly did not connect too deeply to the love songs because they were not about me. 90% of the time most love songs I liked were because I thought they were really catchy not because I was relating to the lyrics. A lot of my favorite songs were usually more about escapism which is why I loved the Beatles Psychedelic period. Songs like Strawberry Fields Forever and Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds were about escaping into different worlds. As a gay man who grew up in a culture not built for him, having songs that create a space away from your own world where anything is possible can be very freeing as well as very alluring. It also showed how I had shut down emotionally too because love songs didn't get to me emotionally either, because I had suppressed that part of myself for so long. Even after being out and married I still didn't really cry or let myself feel certain things so therefore many songs I liked were more for the surface level.
Yet this shows the genius of the Beatles and their everlasting appeal. Their music speaks to lovers and loners, boy and girls, the beautiful and the rejected, young and old, optimistic and bitter, the mainstream and the underground and this is why The Beatles are still so beloved. Talk to 10 different people about their favorite Beatles songs and why they like them and you are going to get very different answers that speak to who that person is and what they have been through. I ended up doing a Beatles challenge asking as many friends and family as I could to contribute their lists and it was a very gratifying experience to see how much The Beatles music means to people from all different walks of life. Yet again, everyone experienced their music differently because The Beatles music is so adaptable for so many people.
The fact that The Beatles' music can appeal to that many people also gives it another appeal which is that it unites people. When I watched old clips of The Beatles the parts that would make me emotional was seeing how their music not only deeply impacted people but also united people together. In the 60s The Beatles' music helped unite a generation, which in turn helped set off a youth movement never seen before and that part of their story is pretty damn powerful. The Beatles represented a seismic shift in culture that happens very rarely and that shift led to the world we live in today.
In 2016 I finally got to experience that power when I went to see Paul McCartney live in Hershey Pennsylvania with my husband, brother, parents and Uncle Jimmy and Titi. The audience was made up of people from all different groups too from those old enough to have lived through Beatlemania to kids who grew up on YouTube. It was of course an amazing show but the emotional highpoint was definitely Hey Jude. While it's not my all time favorite song by The Beatles it's easily their best song live or at least Paul's best song live. The power Hey Jude has live is incredible. For the entirety of the song every single person in the stadium sang along to every word from 7 years olds to 77 year olds. For that moment a stadium full of strangers from different walks of life were united and the connection you felt to everyone in that stadium during that song was electric and overpowering. I honestly started crying during the song and it's not because of what the song is about but what it now means. It's a song that really and truly demonstrates the power music can truly have over people. Life can be difficult and no one knows what will happen next or why we are here but songs like Hey Jude remind you what a gift it is to be alive in the here and now and to feel your connection to humanity at its purest. It feels like a piece of our collective humanity and it shows how music has the power to bring hearts and minds together. There's a reason my husband who hated the Beatles when we first started dating, now says that was one of the best concerts he has ever attended and it's because the feelings he got being part of that stadium audience affected him emotionally just like it did for me.
When Paul McCartney does leave this mortal coil it will be a sad day around the world and not just because he was a brilliant singer songwriter but because we will have lost a piece of our collective humanity that day. Mark my words the day Paul McCartney dies the whole world will be singing Hey Jude.
