The Beatles as Postmodernists

As with most things Pop-related, the best place to start this madness is with – yeah – The Beatles. It is utterly impossible to escape the relentlessly extensive range of their mighty influence - and all the same, why would you want to? Opposed to the vast majority of the Pop Music sensations of today who shall remain nameless, I would consider it fairly safe to say that The Beatles were and, arguably, continue to be the world’s biggest band for a reason; their ongoing popularity is forever restoring my faith in the music industry and humanity in general.

Essentially, in keeping with the point raised in my introduction, it is the shameless blending of High and Low forms so indiscriminately that gives Pomo its unique flavor by this measure. The Beatles are the ideal progenitors of Postmodernism within popular music as, particularly in their later work, the intermingling of avant-garde forms and pastiche with the rock and roll of the masses adheres to a fairly standard Postmodern model. The fabs are often cited as being the first popular musicians to embrace experimental aesthetics, thereby transforming Pop from a commercial youth culture phenomena into a legitimate art form and elevating the Pop record to something to be listened to rather than simply bought and consumed.

As Paul Gleed in his essay, The Beatles and Questions of Mass and High Culture explains, “the Beatles can be viewed as instrumental in challenging and dissolving such traditional and restrictive categories as ‘high art’ and ‘mass culture’. Indeed, even with the best of intentions, struggling to place the Beatles somewhere neatly between the hand-clappers [low] and the jewelry-rattlers [high] has for years obscured the true extent of their art” (Gleed 162). It is in fact this perfect amalgamation that the Beatles somehow attained that makes their music and their mythology so fascinating; for rarely has any artist in any medium achieved such a fine balance. The enduring commercial and critical success of the Beatles is in no doubt indebted to the seamless blending of these cultural forms; if anything, the Beatles helped to demonstrate that the High and the Low are nothing but ideals that do not exist on any particular plane and instead are merely words attached to meaningless cultural models, or as Lyotard puts it, “they [language games] do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are the object of a contract, explicit or not, between players” (Lyotard 129).

Framework for Postmodernism in the Popular Medium

Of course in the beginning of their career, the Beatles were simply young British men more or less re-appropriating the music of American musicians such as Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley; musicians who, in turn, had appropriated their own music from black American traditions. Although this melding of styles would be in effect as early as the late 1950s with globalization and the slow vanishing of cultural boundaries, in order to take full effect, both Pomo Pop and the Beatles would need an outlet for their growth and that vehicle would be the LP.

Prior to (arguably) 1965, very few artists released full-length albums at all, as the musical atmosphere was largely singles-oriented; furthermore, when LPs were issued, they were largely loose collections of songs rather than singular artistic statements. Outside of jazz, cohesiveness over the course of a full album was unheard of and without this medium, there would be no Postmodernism within Popular song, as this allowed for the expression of numerous ideas under the banner of a single entity and many of the aesthetic and formal conditions associated with Postmodernism would be extremely difficult to attain over the course of one three-minute Pop song.

When describing a Pop record as being Postmodern, it is an all-encompassing affair that includes not just the music itself in terms of both lyrical and formal content, but also the entire aesthetic approach of the piece counting as well its cover art in conjunction with the contents of the packaging.
Which brings us back to 1965 and the release of the relatively underrated Rubber Soul. While not a drastic change from their previous work, the album is often thought to be the first Pop Album in that each of its songs represents a part of a whole rather than a loose collection as the Beatles veer away from their skiffle-Pop, Ed Sullivan image and turn now to more folk and country influences and sewing the seeds for their future masterpieces. Rubber Soul is important because it represents the first shift within the Beatles on their path to reaching this perfect straddling of High and Low that would culminate in 1968 with the release their self-titled tenth album that is colloquially referred to as The White Album.

1966’s Revolver continued the trends brought to the surface with Rubber Soul, finding the Beatles delving further into sound and genre experimentation; “Love You To” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” in particular seeing John Lennon and George Harrison testing new ground in sonic textures and instrumentation, while Paul McCartney would lean towards the Vaudeville and Tinpan Alley sounds such as in “Here, There and Everywhere”. Revolver indeed stands as a landmark work, less for its critical value but for its sheer cohesiveness, perfecting the album format that Rubber Soul envisioned. Where Rubber Soul presented an album largely based around the same style of music shown in a unified manner, Revolver introduced the idea of pastiche into the Beatles repertoire, while at once remaining thematically and tonally integrated. This pattern culminates in the final track, the aforementioned “Tomorrow Never Knows” a song that integrates the Beatles popular rock sound with flashes of traditional Indian music, ambient and avant-garde noise-manipulation technique and, notoriously, sections read from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The song is also, according to Russell Reising, the point at which all of the apparently disjointed themes and thought-fragments come together.

“In its [“Tomorrow Never Knows”] willful transcendence of death, ‘it is not dying, it is not dying’ also links up fully with Revolver’s earlier songs. Throughout the album, the Beatles maintain a running dialog with thoughts of death and life, of morbidity and exuberance, rejecting or transcending them at every step of the way” (Reising 114). This cements the status of Revolver being a unified statement unto itself, the first of its kind; a full-length effort that is both unique in its parts, however amalgamated under a banner.

This would of course be followed by the greatly romanticized Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the total reinvention of the Beatles as artists within the popular medium. I will speak only sparingly upon Sgt Pepper’s as many of the points I would make, I have already stated with regards to the previous two records, however, it is worth noting that this is the point in the Beatles’ career in which they were recognized officially by critics as being legitimate artistic innovators.

Pomo Pop Emerges: The White Album Pastiche

It is, as mentioned, 1968’s White Album that remains the Beatles’ masterwork; a sprawling, fragmented epic – thirty tracks, not one the same, recorded infamously during a period of almost overwhelming internal conflict within the group. The White Album is not only the Beatles' most oft-debated work, far and away their most controversial and polarizing, but also marks the first truly Postmodern Pop Record.
Often considered little more than a chaotic hodgepodge that spits in the face of the virtues of continuity that even I, just mere paragraphs ago championed; even producer George Martin has stated publicly and frequently that he had pushed to narrow the album down to a single LP. The unholy mess of the inflated double-album is where much of The White Album’s genius lies, however, as it is very much like the work of a group of solo artists rather than a single band-unit. The Beatles, very much at the apex of their contempt for each other, it is well-known, wrote the majority of the songs individually and in many cases played all of the instruments on their own tracks, rather than involving the other members at all in the process. As a result, the album incorporates a vast range of musical styles and influence that crash into each other violently as the Beatles hurtle irreverently through country, folk, hard-rock, baroque-pop, British blues, dub, Tinpan Alley and avant-garde noise, among others in an aggressively messy collage of soundscapes.
Of course, the device of pastiche with regards to the integration and blending of historical and aesthetic artifacts within one piece of production, and by extension the dissolution of cultural and formal barriers, is integral to the postmodern position. The never-ending charge of technological progress and the vast rise of communications would inevitably give way to fervent interdisciplinarianism through an increasingly large scope of influence and cultural bombardment.

As Jameson puts it:
“what follows is not to be read as stylistic description, as the account of one cultural style or movement in which the very conception of historical periodization has come to seem most problematical indeed …in any case, the conception of ‘genealogy’ largely lays to rest traditional worries about so-called linear history, theories of ‘stages’ and teleological historiography …One of the concerns frequently aroused by periodizing hypotheses is that these tend to obliterate difference and to project an idea of the historical period as massive homogeneity.” (Jameson 191)

This blending and homogenizing of timeframes, cultural values and the like, being entirely a result of increasing access to information is exactly what is manifested here where in a record where Harrison’s Orwellian harpsichord-pop track “Piggies” is allowed to be followed immediately by McCartney’s interpretation of American Country, compete with ragtime piano, “Rocky Racoon”. Unusual pairings and juxtapositions of unlikely musical influences are tantamount to the White Album experience; witness the jarring one-eighty of Lennon’s agonizing, howling blues number “Yer Blues”, to McCartney’s softly plucked folk piece “Mother Nature’s Son”.

The White Album is forever careening brutally from song to song and it is in this abruptness where it comes together (so to speak). Its beauty lies in its chaos; it never at any point knows what kind of album it wants to be: sometimes it’s a hard rock romp as evidenced on the disc 2 tangent of “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey”, “Sexy Sadie” and “Helter Skelter”, and sometimes it’s a quirky post-psychedelic calm as in disc 1’s “I’m So Tired”/“Blackbird”/“Piggies”/”Rocky Racoon”. At all times, however, it is a blissful portrait of the impeding death of the decade and the group that defined it – its direction is uncertain and its scope is global.

Pomo Pop Emerges Cont’d: Expanding in All Directions

Among other things, including the expansive, fractured pastiche form of the record, The White Album further represents the artistic development of all four Beatles as each was allowed to explore uncharted sonic territory, including Ringo Starr who received his first songwriting credit on the album for his kitschy-country stomp “Don’t Pass Me By”. Harrison, although still confined to just two tracks per disc makes each of his four songs count, including the aforementioned “Piggies”, a song that makes heavy use of irony in its playful instrumentation coupled with sinister, Animal Farm-inspired lyrics; and “Savoy Truffle”, a fabulously giddy pop track about eating too much candy and featuring one of the album’s numerous moments of self-reflexivity. “Savoy Truffle” is notable in this, as when Harrison sings “we all know Obla-di-bla-da”, not only is he referencing a song featured earlier in the same record, he is also mispronouncing that refrain while at once making mention to the Beatles enormous social stature – a very cheeky nod to the diluting nature of mass culture, perhaps the most recurring theme of the album, a reaction against the mass-produced music machine that made the Beatles the biggest band in the world.

“The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of the decision makers,” Lyotard suggests, “Even now it is not composed of the traditional political class, but of a composite layer of corporate leaders, high-level administrators and the heads of major professional, labor, political and religious organizations.” (Lyotard 132) This of course brings back the debate of High Art v. Mass Culture; the Beatles being the world’s most popular musical institution are inevitably handled by the powers that be at the major labels and are thus expected to churn out the hits, which is of course in conflict with their incessant artistic growth. When Harrison mentions the success of the group within the song, is he reflecting upon the nature of these constraints, particularly with regards to the inevitable backlash by those merely wishing to be fed the old songs?

This is in interesting contrast to Lennon’s “Glass Onion,” a song that references no less than five external Beatles songs and is well known to be itself a reaction to the over-analyzing of their catalog for hidden meanings, i.e. the Paul is Dead conspiracy. By this measure, where do the Beatles fit in the High/Low debate? Via self-reflexive lyricism we have Harrison railing against the Low and Lennon against the High at once. Paradoxically, despite Lennon’s noted distaste for the over-analyzing of his work, The White Album marks what would unquestionably be Lennon’s most decidedly highbrow work with the Beatles, finding the man exploring dark and ambitious territory with each of his contributions.

Obviously, “Revolution 9” is the standout here, featuring violent tape loops, reverse sound effects and a number of other moves form the John Cage playbook, it is probably best known as the most-skipped-over of all Beatles songs. Being sandwiched between Lennon’s more straightforward acoustic number “Cry Baby Cry” and the Starr-led string-ballad “Good Night”, “Revolution 9” demonstrates not only the influence of the infamous Yoko Ono, but sees Lennon coming into his own as a fully-fledged avant-garde musician: he can bitch all he wants about people taking him too seriously, but one can hardly pretend to be a populist whilst spouting off noise like this, which of course only bolsters the fabulously healthy dose of irony The White Album provides.

Later Beatles and Conclusion

The final two Beatles albums, Abbey Road and Let It Be, saw the emergence of the neoclassicist Beatles, surrendering their violent, experimental urges for a sophisticated pop sound that would lead them to the end of their existence in great style. Abbey Road, notably, with its titanic second-side pushes the fragmentation found in The White Album to the very limit and succeeds unusually with eight songs clocking in under three minutes in succession. This tactic leads to one of the weirder swan songs in music history, Abbey Road being the last album that the Beatles recorded despite Let It Be being released afterward.

It is worth noting, that in 2004, hip-hop producer Danger Mouse miraculously, and very illegally, created a mash-up of The White Album, taking the instrumentation of tracks from that record and splicing them with the vocals from Jay-Z’s Black Album. This monstrosity known as The Grey Album, is a masterpiece of Pomo ingenuity, taking the first classic Pomo Pop album and turning it into a hip-hop leviathan. Hip-Hop being almost always innately Postmodern by default, with its heavy use of sampling and relentlessly self-reflexive lyrics, when added to The White Album only adds to the chaotic, outrageous mystique of the Beatles tenth record. This intertextuality brings the album into the new realm of wherever it is that Postmodernism is heading. Later in this series, I will loosely define Pomo Pop as ending at around 2001 in its traditional sense, however, The Grey Album proves to be an interesting anomaly within this definition, or perhaps its something new altogether.