Beatles

Reeling from the failure of the “Magical Mystery Tour” project and orphaned by the loss of their manager Brian Epstein, the Beatles were heading down a dangerous path, and this state of apparent “internal madness” would soon explode into a belligerent form of anarchy that split the group into four separate entities, irreversibly torn apart by their now-ungovernable egos; in short, they effectively became solo musicians and composers.

Both their status as a united band and the theory of “mutual complementarity” were shattered by the “White Album” into countless little “flying objects”, scattered across their own personal galaxy. The “White Album”, as it's universally known, is nonetheless yet another musical masterpiece from the Beatles, and quite possibly their definitive creative zenith.

If “Sgt. Pepper” had the Beatles touching the sky with a single finger, sparking the second great mass revolution in rock, then the “White Album” served as a shameless antithesis to Sgt. Pepper's garish “colourisation”: no more hypnotic, dazed tricks, but an album, a journey, that set out to trace a path in the opposite direction, in stark contrast to the opulence and psychedelic excess of “Sgt. Pepper”.

By the express will of the four lads from Liverpool, the “White Album” would take shape as the declared “enemy” of “Sgt. Pepper's” and “Revolver”; this time, hype gives way to the most devastating musical anarchy: we witness the final great provocation from the former four knights of the realm. Starting with the cover, in its own way just as magnetic as that of “Sgt. Pepper's”, yet utterly distant and contrasting: entirely white, a “minimal” white, as if not wanting to disturb those who'd been “blinded” and then left unable to see by the previous album's dazzle. That bold move turned out, if only implicitly, to be an act of “polite yet pointed” protest against all those who had misread the ideas laid out within “Sgt. Pepper's”. After the explosion, in fact, far too many bands jumped on the bandwagon of the new psychedelic fashion, which — thanks precisely to the Beatles (even though they weren't the first to promote it, and could themselves be described as anything but “psychedelic”) — was elevated from underground tendency to full-blown trend, spreading new “concepts” throughout the pop-rock universe.

From the very first track, the propulsive, irreverent “Back In The USSR”, penned by Paul McCartney, it's all too clear that, despite barely a year having passed, the album would be built on coordinates entirely different from the avant-garde ones of the previous records. Uncoordinated, unhinged, concise and tight, the “White Album” is an ambitious work that is nonetheless endowed with a captivating simplicity, marked by an unusual but welcome roughness. With “Sgt. Pepper's”, the Beatles had shown the entire world that the music they crafted in their Abbey Road studio deserved to be crowned a new form of contemporary art, taking its place among the elite alongside the two “high” musical forms par excellence: jazz and classical music.

“The Beatles”, by contrast, has entirely different ambitions: it intends to run “in reverse”, as if it were a Formula 1 car that, suddenly realising everyone was following in its slipstream, decided — partly out of anger, partly out of spite — to slam into reverse.

The record is a trial by sound and distortion, forever poised between rock'n'roll and vaudeville (“Honey Pie”), suspended between ethereal ballads with a psychedelic appeal (“Cry Baby Cry”) and pseudo-avant-garde experiments (“Revolution 9”). But it also makes room for hard-rock echoes (“Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey”), candid, almost-classical chamber ballads carried by lyrics bordering on nonsense (“Martha My Dear”); or bursts of Lennon-esque rock like “I'm So Tired” and the celebrated “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” (one of the record's masterpieces: a song that actually splices together three separate melodic fragments, testament to the near-“scientific” method behind Lennon and McCartney's songwriting).

But the most exhilarating and emotionally resonant track is “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, courtesy of an increasingly mature George Harrison as a composer. It's a melancholy, aching ballad that is then viscerally reinvigorated, undergoing a perfect lyrical metamorphosis and ultimately conveying a profound sense of loss and emptiness: it remains Harrison's masterpiece.

The lyrics, too, reflect the sweeping, monumental versatility expressed by the “White Album”'s music: they range from the carefree themes (never silly, in fact quite ironic) of “Back In The USSR” to outright celebrations of Mother Nature (“Mother Nature's Son”, which reveals a surprising McCartney in soft-country mode); Lennon, for his part, excels on the sarcastic “Sexy Sadie” (which recounts the disappointment and subsequent disillusionment brought on by the Maharishi Yogi, whom Lennon has no qualms calling “a poor clown and a charlatan”); McCartney, meanwhile, gives ample proof of his taste for lyrics of dubious, ambiguous flavour, as in the harsh, whip-cracking “Helter Skelter”, awash with distorted, jarring noise (whose grim notoriety stems from the fact that it inspired the deranged Charles Manson to carry out the now-infamous massacre at the Polanski house, murdering the stunning Sharon Tate in the midst of a satanic ritual): a rock song designed to “assault” not just the listener's ears but their imagination too. Siouxsie & The Banshees would remember it well, later recording a goth-tinged cover.

The “White Album” is an open work, in which none of its authors impose limits or taboos on themselves; indeed, the record's mission is to smash the clichés that had reduced pop music to three simple chords paired with embarrassingly banal lyrics. But in the attempt to reach this state of absolute artistic freedom, a few small, insignificant off-cuts were not spared, and they end up as little blemishes on the Beatles' otherwise grandiose canvas. Sure, we could have done without the pointless leftovers like “Honey Pie”, “Don't Pass Me By”, “The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill”, the far-from-memorable “Rocky Raccoon” (a limp example of western'n'roll) and “Wild Honey Pie”, courtesy of an overly self-assured McCartney. And George Martin, their infallible producer, was surely right when he wisely suggested the four of them trim that incredible creative outpouring down to an excellent single album of 14-16 tracks. But the real problem was that the Beatles, in an increasingly “hot” and elusive 1968, felt themselves, day by day, to be the masters of a musical world that watched in awe at their “brilliant pop-lyrical offspring”.

The Beatles were fully aware of this god-like power, and their undisputed “unassailable” status made their egos all the more restless and dissatisfied with their own work, forever chasing technical, musical and creative perfection — especially in the case of Paul McCartney, who was increasingly at odds with his reluctant “genius partner” John Lennon. The latter, at the emotional peak of his relationship with Yoko Ono, believed less and less in the Beatles project and was already plotting, even then, to break up the group in order to devote himself to a solo career. The real “war”, as anyone might guess, was naturally between the two “great despots” Lennon and McCartney, given that “poor” Harrison had never really had the chance to put himself forward as a credible counterweight to their two-man dictatorship. Not to mention Starr… By this point the process of disintegration was already underway, and the point of no return (symbolically “announced” by the failure of “Magical Mystery Tour”) had been definitively sealed. Each of them worked and wrote on their own, bringing in session musicians at Abbey Road Studios (as George Harrison did, for instance, with Eric “Slowhand” Clapton, going so far as to credit him as lead guitarist on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, which Clapton himself would adorn with a cutting, sensual, magnetic solo).

Nowadays people often talk about crossover or the breaking down of genres; but it was the Beatles themselves, in that frenetic, hysterical year of 1968, who picked up the baton from pioneers like the Kinks and confirmed the overthrow of certain typical pop-music conventions, venturing into unfamiliar territory and emerging with new musical formulas that broke away from the increasingly stale clichés of the era.

The “White Album”, ultimately, stood as an example of “musical decoding” for the entire world of rock, one in which genre morphed into “non-genre” and vice versa, and where what was often being composed was a daring outline of musical “non-genre”. So have the courage to dive into the grooves of “The Beatles” and you'll come out the other side with a fresh understanding of rock music, whether of your era or “ours”. Although, when it comes to the Beatles, talking about “eras” is almost always relative and, in some cases, entirely beside the point.

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27/10/2006