The White Album: More Credible than 80's Music.

Over at Hey Dullblog, there was a link to a podcast containing an interview with Nik Cohn, about his feelings towards the Beatles' White Album, both almost forty years ago, when he detested it, and today, when he merely dislikes it. It's a great listen, both for the interviewer, Ben Ratliff, and the interviewee, who are both articulate and persuasive about their points of view, and are on opposite sides of the fence about the White Album. I posted the following comment to Hey Dullblog, before deciding to post it here, too. (It's my bloggy and I'll post if I want to!)

Listening to this podcast helped me understand the point of view of critics like Nik Cohn. But it also helped me understand my own point of view towards the White Album, which happens to be nearly identical with Ratliff’s. I am about one year younger than Ratliff, and had a similar experience to his. Though the White Album was not “played in the house” from a young age (my parents had Beatles ’65 and Sgt. Pepper’s), I did have the White Album since around the time I was 11 or 12 (bought with my allowance money), and I listened to it constantly. To me, to listen to the White Album was to enter the diverse community of its images. I still remember a day I was home sick from school, and I listened to all four sides of the album straight through, while reading all the lyrics as they were sung, on the unfolded poster before me on the bed. As an 11-year-old boy in a spiritually impoverished New York suburb at the beginning of the 1980s, the creativity, the surprises, and the mystery of the album could only draw me in and hypnotize me. It couldn’t possibly strike me as arty middle-class pretension.

Nik Cohn’s reaction to the White Album did remind me, however, of how I reacted to trends in pop music a few years later. As virtually every mainstream band succumbed to 80s production values, I felt the whole world of rock music was not only falling away from me, but falling away from its own past, and from taste itself. And it wasn’t just the grooveless sounds of electronic instruments; it was the cheap emotionalism and operatic pretensions of much of the music. Just as Cohn had no patience for the White Album’s “middle-class” conceits, I experienced 80s music as self-important and wimpy.

Cohn may still find Obla-di, Obla-da “not credible,” but I always did, and still do. I know that Paul McCartney believed it when he wrote it, and even if I sometimes prefer to skip past the song, I genuinely hear Paul’s belief in his words and the music that carries them. And his accidental inversion in the lyrics—along with “Cry Baby Cry,” later in the album—give me a more compelling message that adult relationships are not always what they seem than any other pop songs I can think of.

Likewise am I convinced that John Lennon meant it when he sang “the sun is up, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful and so are you” (also criticized by Cohn), not just because I happen to know the story of why he wrote it, but because I feel it in the track. And the fact that this song is followed immediately by “Glass Onion” (the gentle, fading guitar picking followed by the abrupt CLUMP...CLUMP of the bass and drums) shows that Lennon could invoke genuine naïveté and then slaughter it, too.

If you want not-credible, how about Don Henley singing “I can tell you my love for you will still be strong,” or Mister Mister singing “Take these broken wings and learn to fly again, learn to live so free.” Does anyone think that when Simple Minds sang “don’t you forget about me,” they really hoped that someone wouldn’t forget about them? I don’t. I don’t even believe that the Bangles wanted to walk like Egyptians.

One interesting aside: I was excited to discover that Cohn’s medieval-historian father, whom he mentioned in the conversation, was Norman Cohn, who wrote a book called The Pursuit of the Millennium, a study of millenarian religious cults in medieval Europe. I read this book in my freshman year of college, for a course called “End of the World Movements.” It’s a book about groups of people who began feeling that the culture of the Papacy was not credible.