I don’t mean to sound like an old man, but do people know anything about the Beatles?
There’s a popular online narrative that the band’s iconic White Album is “haunted,” “creepy” and “cursed.” Did you know the almost goofy, self-referential “Glass Onion” is suffused with “supernatural mischief”? Did you know that John Lennon’s noisy, avant-garde “Revolution No. 9” is about putting you in the headspace of a child having a nightmare? That the jet plane sounds in “Back in the USSR” are “off” or jarring? That “Birthday” is weirdly aggressive, that “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da,” (a Paul McCartney song and an example of what Lennon dubbed “granny music”) is a bit too sugary, like when horror movies use innocent music to make the setting spookier? That “Yer Blues,” meant as a parody of blues music (“In the morning want to die / In the evening want to die”) is genuinely suicidal and therefore disturbing?
There’s a “sinister vibe to the album, like something’s going on underneath that wasn’t explicit,” one Redditor writes. “It’s like there’s something happening under the surface the listener can never quite reach,” says another. This will go on for as long you want to search for it and sift through it.
Some of the comments in these discussions make germane observations: that the Manson murders cast a shadow over the album; that it does have a rough, unfinished, experimental feel in part due to production shakeups and conflict among the band members; that 1968 was a hell of a year and some of the ambient unrest in the culture probably comes through in the sound; and, of course, that the experience of psychedelic and other drugs almost certainly explain some of the weirder lyrics and sounds.
Now there’s nothing wrong with this interpretation of the album—art is, of course, deeply subjective—but the Beatles were fun, even at times goofy. Some of this commentary is missing context that would turn the apparent spookiness into silliness. If you read about the origins behind a lot of Beatles songs, they pull together Britishisms, anecdotes, expressions, magazine articles and random personal experiences. (It’s a bit like how the genesis of Paul Simon’s “Mother and Child Reunion” was a menu item in a New York City Chinese restaurant featuring chicken and eggs, and called “Mother and Child Reunion.”) If you ask me, the scariest parts of the White Album are that “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” is supposed to actually sound Jamaican, and that “Savoy Truffle” did with chocolate what “We Didn’t Start the Fire” did with historical events.
But more seriously, what’s striking about these discussions is that they sound a bit like a group of people egging each other on, escalating the sense of spookiness until it becomes self-perpetuating: until, ironically, every innocent counterexample becomes further evidence. Some of the comments give the vibe of someone bringing their own dark baggage to their experience of a cultural artifact. People who seem to know a little bit about drugs—variously heroin (“Happiness Is a Warm Gun”), meth (“I’m So Tired”) or LSD (all of them?)—discern, or imagine, that the songs are about drugs, or maybe more subtly, capture the feeling of being high on those drugs. Again, of course, this might be the case. It is the Beatles, after all, and it was the ’60s. But it also seems that if your life has had some darkness to it, you imagine more darkness out there.
And the darker the people out there, the darker the predominant cultural analysis is going to be, until you get a self-reinforcing loop. What if we are reflecting a darkness in our culture back at ourselves, reading it into cultural artifacts and sending those darkness-infused interpretations back out into the culture?
And what if the internet is like a heat pump for darkness, concentrating the darkness and idiosyncrasy and uncanniness out there, distilling it and then pushing it back out into the world?
To quote a different band, ooh, it makes me wonder.
The point here isn’t about the rightness or wrongness of various interpretations of weird art, or that there’s anything “wrong” with anyone’s subjective feelings about a rock album from 1968. It’s more the general phenomenon of separation from an artifact creating a kind of false narrative, which then becomes cemented and passed on.
This same phenomenon probably applies to history and policy analysis. I’ve had the impression for a while that a lack of historical memory and a broken continuity of information are a factor in the unsettledness of a lot of commentary. Young people in some ways are in the position of having to discover or reinvent things that haven’t been passed on to them, and in doing so, we don’t fully grasp what we’re describing. As I put it once, “Ronald Reagan famously declared that freedom is ‘never more than one generation away from extinction.’ The fact is, almost everything may only be one generation away from extinction.’”
A long time ago, back in college, I was involved in food activism. At a conference we attended, an older lady who had worked for almost 40 years in a college dining hall spoke about how things had changed, in her telling, for the worse: When she started, bread was baked on premises, and vegetables were still bought whole and cleaned, peeled and cut in-house. Over time, food had become increasingly premade and prepackaged, and the dining hall workers did less actual cooking.
This was very illuminating to me, because it wasn’t the sort of thing we young guns talked about. The young activists I knew had enthusiasm and earnestness, but they didn’t necessarily know what the past they supposedly wanted to restore really looked like. Perhaps they didn’t see themselves as wanting to “restore” a “past,” even though in many ways that’s what our demands about “real food” boiled down to.
This all applies to my personal passion of urbanism, too. It raises the question of activism and humility: Are you willing to say that you just want to get back to where you once were, rather than reinvent the wheel to feel important? I further wonder, when young people like me look with rage and longing at old pictures of trolleys running through dense urban streets, or before-and-after photos of urban renewal, if we’re really seeing what we’re looking at.
It’s easy, looking back, to feel a sense of loss, or, in the parlance of a popular meme, “remember what they took from you.” But did anybody “take” that from “me”? Shouldn’t I also understand what exactly the people who actually did rip out the trolleys or tore down the old cities were thinking at the time? Shouldn’t I understand their subjective understanding of progress? Shouldn’t I resist forming my own free-floating narrative about a complex thing that happened somewhere between 60 and 90 years ago without knowing quite a bit about it all?
To tie this all back to the Beatles: The enduring popularity of “the White Album is haunted” has me wondering how many generally received narratives about things in the past are based on a lack of context or understanding. How much cultural ignorance gets laundered, by repetition in general and social media in particular, into a kind of secondhand truth?
Art is subjective, but context does provide facts. “Savoy Truffle” really is less of an uncanny meditation on decay when you learn that it was George Harrison poking fun at Eric Clapton’s toothache-inducing chocolate habit, for example. But as with so many things, as the stories that ground and explain things fade away and become the domain of nerds or superfans or historians, the things in question stand alone and disembodied, taking on a different valence.
Some of this is just the natural ebb and flow of attitudes and information over time. But some of it points to an abdication of our responsibility to pass on knowledge, to maintain a basic shared cultural literacy. And as that shared culture breaks down, what is sweet now can turn so sour.
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