> This is strange, in a way, since the series does not present an obviously alluring portrait of creative collaboration. Its principal locations are drab and unglamorous: a vast and featureless film studio, followed by a messy, windowless basement. The catering consists of flaccid toast, mugs of tea, biscuits and cigarettes. The participants, pale and scruffy, seem bored, tired, and unhappy much of the time. None of them seem to know why they are there, what they are working on, or whether they have anything worth working on. As we watch them hack away at the same songs over and over again, we can start to feel a little dispirited too.
Are you kidding me?? This is probably the most inspiring part of the whole show! This is how you create things. It's a long, "unglamorous" slog full of dead ends, muck & mire, and discovery. This is what gets an artist excited - the oeuvre in gestation, the birthing pains, the grim determination depsite not knowing whether you're pursuing genius or madness! Gets me fired up every time.
The completed creation is usually a bit of a downer, like when you finish a good book.
If you ever played in a band, even if it's a middle-aged-friends-with-minimal-talent one, you'll enjoy Get Back immensely. It looks so real. Even if you weren't in a band, but in some other kind of a team of peers, you'll enjoy how group dynamics plays out. I still didn't manage to watch part 3, but first two are pure gold.
Beatles fan since 1963 here. Easily the best thing I've ever read about them. All the mind-reading, which I generally hate in profiles like this, is pretty well justified by context. For anyone creative, Peter Jackson's "Get Back" can be both heartening and devastating: the former because it reminds you that a lot of creativity is sweat equity, and the latter because holy shit, they just had it like no one else.
I'm actually not a huge fan of the Beatles* but wow, I really enjoyed this essay.
* I think it's because they are simply so good (an the sense explained in this essay) that I just heard them too much over the last 50+ years and they have become as much a universal cultural cliche as, say, Shakespeare. I have certainly listened to them a lot, with pleasure, but not so much in the past couple of decades.
I was a teenager in the 1980s. For some reason, the Beatles were never on the radio (at least not the stations I listened to). So, I grew up not really familiar with the Beatles music. I watched the documentary and was surprised by how enjoyable a lot of their music is. I was also surprised at how very little I recognized. You would think that with such a popular band I would have heard their music at least occasionally over the past 50 years.
I grew up with their albums (my hippy mom had a few from their psychedelic period, my step father had some of their last few).
If you listen to the albums, not what the DJ's spin in the radio, you got a much richer tapestry of songs, maybe a greater respect for their creativity, inventiveness.
As an example, people unfamiliar with the Beatles complete catalog have of late been flipping over "Tomorrow Never Knows" [1] (from 1966!) and overlooked gems like [2] "Hey Bulldog".
And some people thought they were just "Yesterday" and "Yellow Submarine"....
I love tomorrow never knows, the bass and drums are just unbelievably tight, and I don't have any idea how they were able to do all that creative sampling stuff using magnetic tape.
There was a technical constraint: you pretty much always listened to the whole side of an album so heard a bunch of songs. With many bands there were clunkers and fillers but surprisingly, as noted by the article, there were fewer — barely any, really — such in the Beatles œvre.
I only knew them through Red and Blue albums and somehow it created one vision of the beatles that is split from reality. So much I don't want to watch Jackson's movie.
There were quite a few deep cuts and some of their influences there that unless one listened to every Beatles record and saw their interviews one might not recognize, only the big hits got airplay on genre stations (some pop, some classic rock, some countdown best of) 10-20 years later. I'm about the same age but had all their albums. The last few albums had eclectic mix of songs compared to earlier pop hits centered albums.
Sometimes an artist is so influential that to go back to discover them for the first time, from a modern perspective, they can sound cliche ... when in fact they invented the cliches. Right?
I have chatted with coworkers after "The Lord of the Rings" films came out who had not read Tolkien but after seeing the movies thought that the story was fairly derivative. Maybe not such a surprising take if you allow that nearly all fantasy since Tolkien has been so heavily influenced by him that his fingerprints are everywhere — in D&D, films like "Willow", etc.
I remember hearing Raydio's hit "Jack and Jill" [1] back in 1978 when it came out (I was 14 years old) and it was probably the first synthesizer I had ever heard in a song. I cannot even describe to you how alien and wonderful that sounded when I first heard it. Electronics in music would become so mainstream of course that it is hard to "shock my ears" any longer and even harder for someone used to it to go back and hear this song from over 40 years the way my "virgin ears" heard it.
True, but there's also the tendency of people to look at a fairly rich period of change and wrongly attribute the new ideas to just one or two popular people/groups. This happens a lot with the Beatles (you even get extreme ideas like the Beatles creating the genre of rock) but it's not uncommon with other bands from the 60's either (Velvet Underground, to name one prominent example).
If you listen to a lot of 60's music, you find a ton of interesting ideas coming from all over the place, and coming fast. It's interesting how something that sounds so out of place one year sounds pretty normal two or three years later. The Beatles did interesting stuff, but I haven't found a lot that seems ahead of it's time the way, say, the Kinks using power chords in '64 does.
I don't know: fuzz bass, guitar feedback, orchestral pieces in a rock song, the "concept album", reverse guitars/vocals, countless other studio tricks. I read Geoff Emrick's book "Here, There and Everywhere" and he goes into great detail on the new ground the Beatles forged.
Interesting to me too reading about it, they would create/introduce something new like a tape loop, use it on just one song, and then move on. Where other bands would define their entire sound by just such a novelty.
The thing is, people tend to exaggerate how many of these the Beatles actually were first with. For example, here's fuzz bass from 1961[1], and another instrumental from 1961 with a lot of fuzz[2]. Both by Grady Martin, who's hardly a household name.
There was a lot of musical experimentation during this time period coming form all over. There's a tendency to collapse all of that to just a few popular bands, and then pretend they're the lone geniuses who invented everything.
It is true but consider also that whoever made the first song with a new tech which became popular actually was the first to truly make it work well enough to make it popular.
I listened to everything by the Beatles that I could get my hands on to make a playlist for my wife. The theme was "Beatles-adjacent but as good or better". The Beatles finally clicked for me.
> they have become as much a universal cultural cliche
Same thing happened to me when I first listened to U2's Joshua Tree and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. The first halves just sound like Greatest Hits records. But nope, they're just so ubiquitous that I've already heard half the album through cultural osmosis.
He is far from alone in thinking that. Even among music critics that are generally positive about U2 there has always been a fair amount of criticism of his voice.
TIL what that actually means (the wiki bit below). Its also the name of a hearing aid company in Ireland [0], making it even more ironic. Pretty sure this is where the name originated from.
Found out that (according to wikipedia)[1]:
"is an alteration of bonavox, a Latin word which translates to "good voice"."
There are a number of artists where if you hear them on the radio at the supermarket or whatever, it sounds like boring pop background noise, but if you actually sit down and listen, you understand how special it is. Cat Stevens was like that for me.
It's become fashionable to say that the Beatles are bad (maybe you don't enjoy the music, but they were revolutionary) or to trivialize them as a boy band (they were, but even early on they were so much more). I don't particularly love them, but it's hard not to be fascinated by their fairly brief career.
I always felt that even if ABBAs songs might be catchy and perfectly put together, they lacked depth. They were shallow. They had very little to say to their fellow human beings except "I am super trooper dancing queen"
It's pop (shallow I can see), but it's a masterpiece. The drum groove, the piano locks, the bass, the harmonies, the recording it's all just perfect fit and flows from start to finish.
My favorite Swedish band was Army of Lovers. Well-done pop-music as well but it also gives the impression, maybe just an illusion of depth. https://youtu.be/cUo0YkLyrjU
Their only song worth the effort is Waterloo, but hey what a song. It was the year of dinosaur bands doing more dinosaur music, and Waterloo was such a tremendous breath of fresh air. Really wonderful, it was.
Funny, I've found that enough time can heal the "overexposure" and I can listen again. Sometimes it takes years, as in 5 to 10. Speaking of the Beatles, I have pretty much all of their songs completely memorized so I need to take long breaks. For quite a while I would listen to them every couple of years and that was it.
I'm now conscious of when I'm overplaying something and lay off it for a while.
A similar thing happens for me when songs are used in commercials or movies and I subsequently have trouble listening to them without the visual association taking over. This has "ruined" many songs for me in the past, but after enough time away I can thankfully appreciate the song on its own.
” This fatigue cannot be cured by decades of not hearing it.”
But it also can. I caught myself enjoying old one hit wonders that I hated at the time due to listening to it so much. Then decades later, I could enjoy them.
It helps if you play an instrument. And especially if you switch from let's say a guitar to a bass or a keyboard or drums. You don't have to be good. But pretty soon you'll hear new layers in old songs you thought you know fully.
I can enjoy a lot of music I wouldn't otherwise like, if I listen to one of two instruments within. In my opinion, playing an instrument, not matter how badly, greatly expands the joy you get from music.
That too. For songs I listened the most I even prefer cover versions now. The more the cover strays from the original - the better. You still have the song you love but it's also fresh in some ways.
Sometimes a change of perspective, or a new piece of information can revitalize a song that was 100% dead to you. For example, I would ALWAYS turn the station / hit skip when I heard Cecelia by Simon and Garfunkel, since I overdosed on it as a teen in the late 80s. I lately found out that Cecelia is the patron saint of musicians, which completely changed the song for me and it is new again.
Likewise as an adult I found out about the romantic drama within Fleetwood Mac, and the Rumors album was resurrected for me. I really hope something like this happens to me again, it's a great feeling.
I'm a lyrics person meaning I listing to the lyrics. If I don't like the message/story I can't listen. Cecelia is one of those.
. Making love in the afternoon with Cecilia
. Up in my bedroom (making love)
. I got up to wash my face
. When I come back to bed
. Someone's taken my place
Seriously? You're in love with a girl who cheats on you in 5 minutes? I guess if you're polyamorous but if that was the case the song wouldn't exist. The fact that they person sticks around for this mental abuse is a complete turn off. I love how catchy the song is but I can't take message of such a bad relationship and that fact that he's digging his own hole by continuing to hope she'll stop cheating.
As the post you're responding to notes, Cecilia is the patron saint of musicians -- the song is about the fleeting nature of inspiration, not a literal description of a interpersonal relationship.
Cecilia suffers more than most songs from typical FM-radio car-listening conditions. It's like a whole different song when played back at home on even minimally-acceptable speakers, from a decent medium.
I don't experience this! Sometimes I'll get stuck on one song and listen to it for days, or an album for months, for multiple hours each day. Sometimes all day. Then one day I'll stop entirely. I always still love the music afterwards.
If you enjoyed this then there is a good chance you will also enjoy Ian Leslie’s ‘64 Reasons to Celebrate Paul McCartney’, one of my favourite reads of 2020.
> using a show to perform songs from the album they just made is what ANY NORMAL BAND WOULD DO. But no. John and Paul get together before Christmas and decide they have to create a whole album’s worth of new songs,
That kind of struck me. I save all my presentations, so I can use them again. But I never do, I always gotta make a new one.
What I wouldn't give for an equivalent film about Led Zeppelin making one of their albums. Though I feel like they'd be the last band to ever agree to it.
I first thought watching Get Back might "spoil" the magic of how the Beatles made records. But somehow seeing all the quotidian banality and hard work made it all the more impressive.
Nothing to do with the article, but I liked looking at the culture, at the time, in the film. Like the old man in the trench coat and pipe, that walks onto the roof across the way during the second take of "Get Back". You see him again during the song "Dig a Pony" - I guess he liked the Beatles, I wouldn't have guessed.
The interviews with people on the street during the performance were funny. I got the feeling that the interviewer was looking for older people and trying to get them to say it was a noisy nuisance. One of the first people shown was an older woman talking about how lovely it was to hear music on her way home from work.
> Since it aired, he has been getting texts from fellow writers who, having watched it, now have the urge to meet up and work on something, anything, together.
It's like some form of "recency bias". Its a similar effect to when the Tennis US Open is in NYC and in the weeks before and after the event its impossible to get a tennis court.
It's interesting to contrast all the praise for this video with the criticism of the very idea of group brainstorming as a useful activity in another article posted on HN the other day (sorry can't find link). Why is that? Which is it - surely this could be classified as group brainstorming?
The author should post some of this to Wikipedia. Then a greater audience can read details they may have missed from the series - and possibly re-watch it with a different perspective.
They were blue-collar artists. They just tried. They did not wait for ideal conditions. Solomon in Ecclesiastes 11 preaches such wisdom. They planted seeds without bothering to check the weather. Some of their seeds sprouted anyway, while those who waited for perfect weather, never planted at all, and grew nothing.
"Genius" is just practice, and deliberate at that. You don't see it. It's not some dramatic characteristic that you see in Paul McCartney, or whoever; No, John Nash was not intensely examining numbers and equations as they were dramatically floating around him like in "A Beautiful Mind". He did exactly what you do, only without the neuroticism; without the time-wasting; without the rumination.
Just plant the damned seeds. See what happens. Stop wasting your time ruminating. Imagine if Bach, or Da Vinci, Palestrina, Van Gogh, or Von Neumann decided to wait, and wait, until everything was just right, before they begin their studies/work. Nobody today would recognize those names. You would not be able to listen to Missa Papae Marcelli. It would just not exist. These people would be called "workaholics" today, an incredibly unfortunate term. Bach wrote over 1,000 pieces in his career. Van Gogh has over 900 paintings in less than 10 years.
As far as I can see at this point, "geniuses" are simply people who do not waste their time. Q3/Q4 of the Eisenhower Matrix is another planet to them. They live on the "Important" row, and they utilize that time.
To tie this into the HN community - think of the people who "want to learn to program" and yet they spend all of their time ruminating on which book to read, or language to learn, et cetera.
It's a small club. Yes, luck is always involved, and you are not in control. Luck hits you. When the lightning strikes, you're either ready or you are not. The problem is that most people seem to behave in an exact opposite manner. They waste their life, waiting for luck to swoop them off of their feet. This is definitely wrong. You prepare yourself for when these opportunities decide to reveal themselves.
It's like saying "I'm not going to begin to exercise and attract a partner until I meet them first" - a recipe for failure. You must become the attractive person, and then, when they happen to enter your life, you attract them.
Please don’t apologise - very well put and I agree completely.
The fact that the work is necessary is what most people overlook. I just worry a little that if we expect too much then that itself can be a barrier to sustainably putting the effort in.
It’s OK to work hard and achieve a modest amount. We should take pleasure in what we do achieve.
>"Not everyone who works as hard as the Beatles achieves what they did."
Definitely true that they had a remarkable result, but I don't know of anyone who actually works/worked that hard and 'failed' (by any reasonable definition). Most people tend to dramatically overstate their persistence and work ethic.
Around 20 years ago I fell in with a bunch of screenwriter wannabes. Roughly 100 people, plus or minus, including myself. A difficult, highly competitive creative field.
Every person in that group who worked hard at it has had success at some level. That varies from making distributed indie films to running a network television show, but some level of success.
None of the successful people half-assed it, none of the hard workers utterly failed, none of the half-assed people made it.
The degree of success is largely out of your control. Innate ability, luck, etc are all factors. But the time and effort expended are in your control, and they're the primary factor of being able to make a run of it.
So what you're saying is that the combinations are like:
Work Don't
hard try
.-----.-----.
Get | :-) | :-( |
lucky | | |
|-----+-----|
No | :-( | :-( |
luck | | |
'-----'-----'
You don't have any control over what row you end up in. But if you want any chance of success, you better at least make sure you're in the left column.
The analogy I like is that you have a net and you need to catch luck in that net to succeed. Naturally, you want the area of your net to be as large as possible to have the most chance of catching luck. There are a lot of things that can increase the size your net. One of them being working hard.
Yes but my underlying point was that if you don’t expect Beatles level success then you might turn the Work Hard / No Luck combination to :-) - just enjoy what do you do achieve through your hard work.
And the other part that comes with that is that no one that achieves what the Beatles did doesn't work as hard as they did. As you said, necessary but not sufficient. Hard work exposes you to opportunities, some people have better opportunities than others.
> "Genius" is just practice, and deliberate at that. You don't see it.
Actually, in the case of the Beatles we can sort of see it. Half of their first album was covers, and the originals, while nice pop songs, were still a long way from their greatest work a few years later. During that time, they worked really hard, they wrote and released a lot of songs, and their songwriting improved immensely. How they were able to work so hard and stay focused while in the maelstrom of Beatlemania, though, is hard for me to grasp. Most others would have gone astray.
My own Beatles preference is for the middle period, roughly from Help! (1965) through Revolver (1966), when they were still polishing their pop songwriting skills and only beginning the experimentation. Though there’s great stuff later as well, of course.
> were still a long way from their greatest work a few years later.
Their whole existence was really only a few years. That said, even "I saw her standing there" kicking off the first album is a really good 'basic rock' song that has become a classic (they're all classics, I know, but it's... just still so fresh 60 years on). Not 'greatest' piece, of course, but holds up well compared to a few other originals on that album.
> During that time, they worked really hard, they wrote and released a lot of songs, and their songwriting improved immensely. How they were able to work so hard and stay focused while in the maelstrom of Beatlemania, though, is hard for me to grasp...
Their progress is astounding. From "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (October 1963) to "Day Tripper" and "Drive My Car" and "Nowhere Man" and "In My Life" (October 1965) - that level of progression in writing/recording/production in a self-contained band which also produced 2 films, 5 albums and more than a hundred shows around the globe... it's just not going to be repeated. Between changes in the entertainment business itself, as well as the talent/skill combination we witnessed in those four... it just won't happen again. But we have all the recorded legacy to enjoy :)
I made a comment about One After 909 in another thread last week. It's the only(?) song we have of theirs with a recording from both 1963 and from 1969. The evolution in their playing, their approach to their own song - is really something to ... I hesitate to say 'marvel' at, but just really engaging for people who want to hear their progression. IIRC it was slightly under 6 calendar years - March 1963 to January 1969. They were good as a group in 1963 - they were so much tighter (yet looser!) just a few years later in 1969.
I recall a fellow employee said he wanted to get into programming, and what should he do? I suggested he pick up the manual, read it, and start programming.
Needless to say, he did nothing of the sort, and the world passed him by.
You see this behavior in many communities; fantasizing. Visit www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning and you will find a group of people who discuss about "language learning" and few people learning a foreign language.
The topics are always similar; "which book", "which audio course", "which foreign language", et cetera. They seek perfect conditions, and they do not exist. They fantasize about how great their life will be once they obtain these perfect conditions. Eventually, they may move on to another subject, as their interest wanes, and repeat this cycle.
While I think that's essential, it's not that simple: Some things require much more preparation (e.g., becoming a brain surgeon), and there is also a lot of failure, regrouping, learning, and trying again - which the four Beatles didn't do as much of as most people. Most people have many years of 'failures'.
Also, most importantly, don't expect popular acclaim - the Beatles are an extreme exception - and don't measure your 'success' that way. Especially in art, have faith in your vision and accept that the public may not grasp it now, soon, or even in your lifetime. Even many great artists recieved little acclaim (or worse) in their lifetimes.
> They did not wait for ideal conditions.
In fairness, they didn't need to wait because ideal conditions were there - in culture (esp. at time that valued innovation and creativity), in music (ditto), in recording technology, in television, in mass media generally. It's a bit harder to be the Beatles today. (Who is doing it?)
I mostly agree, but you are viewing ideal conditions in a macro-economical manner; perhaps whatever your society encouraged. Bach lived in a time and place where being a composer was a matter of finding a church to employ him, or "serving a court", et cetera. Were these ideal conditions for becoming a composer? They are, but it's a bit lame to say "Well, if I were born in 17th century Austria, I could be a great baroque composer, but in 2022, my society just doesn't encourage that." It's trivial.
People usually are conforming their interests to their society. Most people are not dreaming of being baroque composers today, but perhaps audio engineers, or whatever. The Beatles are a product of their time. They saw what was being encouraged, and it influenced them. A Beatles does not exist today because our society does not encourage it.
Frankly, there exist many contemporary painters who I consider clearly superior to Van Gogh, and their society thought so as well. For whatever reason, our society doesn't value them as much as him. Our views have reversed.
I do not know if this makes sense at all. I'm sure that I'll see this tomorrow and wonder what I was thinking.
It makes great sense, thank you. It's a cliche'd point in most situations, that people are products of their time, but in this case it explains and joins two mechanisms - the Beatles not only benefitted from 'ideal conditions', but were possibly driven (in part) by them.
I'm sorry, but no matter how much you study math, practice the scales or study anatomy, you'll never be another Nash, Bach or DaVinci.
Hard work and resolve will get you far, and genius alone is no guarantee of success, but true genius isn't simply the application of enough hard work and resolve.You either win the genetic lottery or you don't.
Yes, and that will make you an expert, possibly even a master, but not a genius. Genius isn't skill or technical competence, it's potential. Ramanujan was a genius even without formal training. Van Gogh died a genius before anyone cared about his art. Einstein was a genius daydreaming in the patent office. Shakespeare was a genius when he was writing dirty jokes.
It's really hard to say Ramanujan was a genius "without formal training." He didn't have the formal training of an English mathematician at Cambridge, but he had access to tutor and some material. He absolutely obsessed over what were essentially mathematical reference manuals for years in a way that was probably central to his extreme skill in symbol manipulation. It was a form of training that almost nobody would voluntarily expose themselves to.
It’s funny that you bring up Van Gogh, because he was as far from the archetypal genius as you can imagine. He started late, and he produced a lot of quite crappy paintings for many years before he produced his great works. And not least, he had a family that supported him so he didn’t have to waste his time with making a living.
From the outside you might not be able to see the difference, but perhaps inside the discipline you can see the difference.
Often one might think that results are the indicator. But I don't Crick and Watson were genii (prefer to sound of geniuses) just hard workers but when the payoff of their hard work came out you would probably be excused for thinking they possessed that special gift.
It's a problem to say this because it's just a truism. Genius implies some sort of exceptional work; seeing what nobody thought to look for. People aren't geniuses. They produce genius. Von Neumann was clearly exceptional, but was he "a genius"? His output was exceptional. He planted seeds and definitely did not wait for ideal conditions. We may debate the legends of his cognitive abilities - eidetic memory - but he absolutely was a "workaholic". He never won a Nobel Prize or a Fields Medal, as if to imply his output was not of the quality of genius.
I think I'm going to counter some of your points. First off, almost none of the people you list would be considered blue collar, that is to say low-skilled working class under someone else's employ. These people were all elites and almost all of whom ran creative studios where they delegated work to uncredited studio artisans.
Secondly, neuroticism is a big problem with creatives and its not like these people didn't have the exact same motivation and mental block issues, its just they found their own ways around them. Drugs and alcohol were often the answer for many of them.
Thirdly, a lot of them led pretty hedonistic lives. Especially your painters. They led Parisian-style cosmopolitan lives of late nights, affairs, hiding gay affairs from the authorities, dealing with hangovers, not showing up for work on days they felt uninspired. Nearly all of these people were self-employed and sold directly to buyers or were funded by patrons. They didn't have any idea of the 9-5 grind and would probably consider it horrifying. Remember, almost everyone on your list lived in pre-capitalist societies and as such had different economic freedoms and systems than ours, and ones that, for successful creatives, meant that actual "work" was entirely different than what you may think it meant.
Art studios for many of these people were a bit like a corporate setup. They'd dictate an outline and leave reference work and a young apprentice or skilled artisan would do a lot of the painting. The master would show up occasionally to correct them and contribute stylistic tones and outlines. The master's real job, like a CEO, was marketing and he was off wining and dining with society to keep his avante grade status as an elite who is welcome in elite circles. These people's social lives were like Versailles's court. They had a great deal of dealmaking and alliance making to even be seen as a viable and important artist. This business and social skill is as important as the art.
And yes high performers were incredible perfectionists. There's no shortage of stories of a famous artist having violent fits because the work didn't match their vision. Mental healthcare back then was poor and Van Gogh obvious was into self harm for example. Perfectionism is the price of entry, imo. It makes us strive for excellence but weighs us down as well. If you're not perfectionist motivated, you may not be able to compete against those who are.
Yes you can cherry pick the prodigious, but they also have artistic block periods, slow work days, etc. And a lot of the higher content creation came after fame when they could afford to farm it out to the factory studio.
So yes, try hard and get over your fears, but there's no magical state of being a "do-er" that fixes everything. Like everything in life moderation is best and a lot of these guys had pretty pleasant lives compared to the stressed out office worker of today. When was the last time you got drunk or had sex at lunch or decided to take a few weeks off to go to Vienna because you were bored with life? Or you decided to move to another kingdom because a low-level regal wants to farm you out to her friends.
tldr; the modern grind is historically inaccurate if you apply it to the past masters. Leisure lifestyles were far more the norm for creatives back then than grindy ones. The nosleep, work 3 jobs, prance on social, never be "off," live with puritan middle class morals, stimulant driven grind is an artifact of our unregulated capitalism, not history.
I do know that Von Neumann was privileged, with a wealthy father.
You misunderstand. I poorly use the term of "blue collar" as a mindset, and not to their socioeconomic status. It's definitely not the ideal term.
I disagree with your words on perfectionism. I believe that their work exists in spite of their neurosis.
Van Gogh, Von Neumann, Bach, The Beatles; all of these people were industrious with exceptional outputs. Van Gogh is famous for it, as he discusses his process in his letters, adopting the ethic of farmers, painting quickly & in poor weather, et cetera.
It's not relevant anyway. It was an excuse to preach. I did not intend to submit the parent and, as usual, regret it.
I find it implausible that 4 school chums from Liverpool turned out to be musical geniuses. It's much more plausible that they were reasonably smart, really loved music, and worked very hard learning to play. Once one learns to play well, moving into composition is a natural step.
It's unsurprising that the Beatles' music they created as a group was better than what they did afterwards (much better). After all, if you're John Lennon, who is going to tell you your latest song sux, and btw, here's an improvement to it? Nobody but a fellow Beatle.
every exceptionally talented person/group is unlikely to show up in the exact circumstances that they do. In a thunderstorm, each individual tree has a very low chance of being struck by lightning, but nobody is surprised that some tree is struck by lightning.
Of course, to realize their potential they also had to work hard, and collaborating with other exceptionally talented artists also no doubt helped.
I would also push back on the idea that the music they created as a group was much better than what came after. George, in particular, released arguably his best work (all things must pass) after the breakup, and both john and paul released great albums afterward (imagine, ram)
One argument for genius is the scene where McCartney literally creates Get Back out of thin air in a few minutes time. It's magical to watch. I don't even like the song.
That said: All Things Must Pass is unquestionably George's best work and the overall best Beatle solo album. But I'd argue that every other solo album was considerably less interesting than, say, Abbey Road or Revolver. Imagine has two classics, some interesting stuff, and some filler.
Unquestionably the best Beatles solo album? Ummm, no. Plastic Ono Band is the best solo album, and the second is Ram. All Things Must Pass is somewhere up there, but most of it is boring filler.
all things must pass is weird, because if it were a double album that just elided the 3rd disc there would be basically no filler on it at all, but that last third of the album is just not up to par with the rest of it at all. I think if you're willing to ignore that disc you can make the argument that it is the best post-beatles solo album. Those other two albums are also great and definitely in the conversation
none of the post-beatles albums are as iconic as the big beatles albums, but i think at least all things must pass and ram hold up very well compared to the classic beatles albums. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you either is better than abbey road or revolver (which are two of my favorite albums ever) but they are in the neighborhood
It was a confluence of events but the main thing was playing clubs in Germany, basically playing covers for something like 50+ hours a week on and off for two years. And they were playing late at night to drunken crowds, so they could experiment and goof off too. That's how John, Paul, and George developed their impeccable harmonies, tight playing, and a massive repertoire of hits.
That's just an absolutely crazy amount of hours to be performing in such a short period of time, and nearly impossible for most musicians to actually get paid for (outside of relentless busking).
I think very few bands since have worked as hard as the Beatles. Their 2 years in Hamburg playing long hours in night clubs daily is something few bands can do (or would want to), and that forged them into something special (not just in technical musicmanship). The Beatles never shied from putting in the work.
It wasn't 2 full years, but... certainly, multiple stints of 8 hour sets for weeks on end - it's basically a full time job.
Other 'factors of the time'. They wanted to play rock and roll. There just wasn't THAT MUCH of it. In 1961... there were a few years of the genre, several albums by their heroes, but... it's not enough to play and attract people in bars for weeks on end. There were other factors too, but that constraint was one, that helped push them to expand a bit beyond just 'rock' stuff (some earlier standards, etc) to help differentiate themselves from other bands (and eventually self-composing as well).
By coming back from... IIRC, their second or third Hamburg stint, they had somewhere around 800 hours of playing together as a band. That just wasn't a thing (yet). I mean - not even most of their heroes/idols didn't have that much stage time as a single unit. The "self-contained rock band" really wasn't a "thing" yet.
I've been in bands, and we were never even in a position where we'd be able to play 6-7 hrs a night for weeks on end. I'm sure no one would have wanted to anyway (like you say).
Depends on what you mean by "like the Beatles." If you mean popularity, it's because there's only so much room culturally for artists to reach that level of popularity. They are essentially the mascot for Rock and Roll music and there's no changing that.
> So why aren’t there a bunch of bands like the Beatles?
"Like the Beatles" how?
They were at the right place at the right time (that is, the time where pop music was starting, hence you had less granularity), and singing in the "correct" language to get a massive audience.
Further than that, they were lucky to not get broken up or faded out early.
This in no way diminishes their work, but it was a hole in one.
In a way it's kinda of a Fermi paradox of bands, except there's no paradox because nowadays there are multiple bands (at smaller niches) with several very competent musicians playing. Or "manufacturing" bands.
Is Max Martin a lesser musician than Paul or John? Probably not really and I don't like most of his songs.
It seems you're looking at the probability the wrong way. There are thousands of chums all over the world making music. Some had more talent and were therefore more likely to become successful.
I almost always dislike HN comments that find fault, but:
encomiums, anomie, Antipodean, recce, &c.
I love language and people using the rich breadth and depth of it, beautifully and resonantly. Here, these words are either misused or my understanding of the author's meanings are far off the mark, over and over, to the degree that I don't know what they could mean (beyond misuse of these words). I haven't seen the documentary, however, so maybe that is the case.
The essay doesn't need them, these words fall (IMHO) awkwardly into sentences.
From the American English dictionary Apple provides...
Encomiums: a speech or piece of writing that praises someone highly. Lou Reed, not noted for his gushing encomiums about fellow artists, said, “They just made the songs up, bing bing bing. They have to be the most incredible songwriters ever - just amazingly talented.”
Anomie: lack of the usual social or ethical standards in an individual or group. I think we learn something along the way, too: that the anomie and the ecstasy are inseparable.
Antipodean: relating to Australia or New Zealand (used by inhabitants of the northern hemisphere) I wondered if [Get Back] was the result of a man who, locked down in his Antipodean editing suite, had waded too deep into his material and lost control of it, a Kurtz in the Beatle jungle. Peter Jackson is from New Zealand :)
recce: another term for reconnaissance (only found in the British English dictionary) We see how much [Paul McCartney] relishes his physicality, scaling the gantry, climbing the chain, leaping up to the rooftop for a recce.
When I read it I presumed he was using anomie in the sense of Durkheim, usually taken to mean a kind of listlessness or alienation, from one's work and society. I really like: "the anomie and the ecstasy are inseparable".
> Durkheim’s term for this “froid moral” in which morality breaks down is anomie, a state of deregulation, in which the traditional rules have lost their authority.
That seems like a different meaning. Or am I missing something from the documentary? Is there some sort of anomie in the sense of the IEP quote (which roughly matches the Oxford English Dictionary, which in term cites Durkheim).
Thank you for laying out all that, but what do you think of the usages?
> Encomiums: a speech or piece of writing that praises someone highly. Lou Reed, not noted for his gushing encomiums about fellow artists, said, “They just made the songs up, bing bing bing. They have to be the most incredible songwriters ever - just amazingly talented.”
As I understand it, it's not 'praise highly', but "A formal or high-flown expression of praise; a eulogy, panegyric." (per the Oxford English Dictionary) Reed's praise isn't that.
> Antipodean: relating to Australia or New Zealand (used by inhabitants of the northern hemisphere) I wondered if [Get Back] was the result of a man who, locked down in his Antipodean editing suite, had waded too deep into his material and lost control of it, a Kurtz in the Beatle jungle. Peter Jackson is from New Zealand :)
But so what? Clearly it is meant to say much more than geography, but what? Why should we think Jackson's tools or process or ... (or what?) are somehow upside down? What is upside down? How are they upside down? Why use a word, one that stands out, if there is no way (afaict) to understand its meaning? One (at least) suspects it means nothing.
As I work away in my own Antipodean lair, a few miles away from Jackson (sadly working on projects that will make any number of orders of magnitude less impact) it felt like an entirely natural sentence that resonated deeply with me.
> I wondered if [Get Back] was the result of a man who, locked down in his Antipodean editing suite, had waded too deep into his material and lost control of it
Note that Peter Jackson is a New Zealander, and presumably was in the country while editing, so the editing suite was ‘Antipodean’ in the sense of the dictionary.
Yes. That's what I mean to address (apparently imperfectly) with the sentence beginning, "But so what? Clearly it is meant to say much more than geography ...".
As an Australian who lived a number of years in the UK, I was initially surprised had how frequently I’d encounter people using the term antipodes to refer to Australia and New Zealand. A term I understood but had never actually seen or heard used previously. Yet it had fairly common and casual usage in the UK.
> "But so what? Clearly it is meant to say much more than geography ...".
Maybe. Maybe it was meant to emphasise the distance and isolation from much of the rest of the world. Or maybe it was just a turn of phrase that is common and understood in a context and experience outside your own.
This is definitely written from a British perspective -- “Antipodean” and “recce” at least are much more conventional in British English than you might guess.
In this case I took “Antipodean” to have the additional meaning of extreme remoteness from Britain (both the setting of the documentary and implicitly the centre of the universe from the British perspective).
Yeah, the author seems to be British - there’s no obvious Brit spellings in this piece, but if you look at https://ianleslie.substack.com/ you’ll see a story excerpt with “favourite”, plus pieces about the BBC and Boris Johnson.
Writing in British as opposed to American covers quite a few subtly different shadings of word meanings, as well as a willingness to use words a fourth-grader wouldn’t have encountered.
New Zealand isn't far at all from the British center of the universe, other than in miles. Jackson's movies did pretty well in the UK; they weren't shown in the art house theatres with the subtitled movies.
Bear in mind Britain sent convicts to Australia because it was so remote. 'Antipodean' still carries with it a sense of remoteness in the UK even if the countries may be culturally close.
> Britain sent convicts to Australia because it was so remote
That was a long time ago. We could bear in mind that for most of human history, people in Britain had no idea that Australia or most of the world existed.
> 'Antipodean' still carries with it a sense of remoteness in the UK even if the countries may be culturally close.
A number of us have done our best to explain what the author is conveying with the choice of language he is using but if you don’t believe us then there’s not a lot more we can do.
They seemed fine to me. If I was his editor I'd have changed encomium, but it's not terrible. Anomie and Antipodean seem well used. In particular, I enjoyed and found thought-provoking his replacement of the cliche "agony and the ecstasy" by "anomie and the ecstasy". I've no strong opinion on recce, which is not a word I regularly use.
Are you kidding me?? This is probably the most inspiring part of the whole show! This is how you create things. It's a long, "unglamorous" slog full of dead ends, muck & mire, and discovery. This is what gets an artist excited - the oeuvre in gestation, the birthing pains, the grim determination depsite not knowing whether you're pursuing genius or madness! Gets me fired up every time.
The completed creation is usually a bit of a downer, like when you finish a good book.