http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/10/john-lennon-letters-hunter-davies-review

"Fifty Years of the Rolling Stones", "Fifty Years of 007", "Fifty Years of the Beatles" as a 49 year-old I feel a little resentful of the latest round of anniversaries. They might as well write: "Hey, something really exciting and important happened here and you just (but only just) missed it.

We, the children of the echo, should get a life. We, the children of the echo, should know better.

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I enjoyed this article - I identify with all this in quite a similar way. I'm 46 now and was 14 when John Lennon was killed, so got a big dose of "Look what you missed" at that time. The whole nostalgia thing must be occupying quite a bit of Jarvis' attention at the moment. There's a balance to be found somewhere between celebrating the best bits of the past and getting on with your life, but where is that?

weej wrote:

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That's the best thing he's written in years. Excellent stuff.

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 Are you comparing it to his lyrics?

Really good read though, yeah. Probably not so good for hopes of a continued Pulp reunion, future retrospective anthologies etc.

Eamonn wrote:

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weej wrote:

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That's the best thing he's written in years. Excellent stuff.

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 Are you comparing it to his lyrics?

 

Really good read though, yeah. Probably not so good for hopes of a continued Pulp reunion, future retrospective anthologies etc.

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Well they wouldn't be considered a "past band" if they released new material. If they keep on touring on old stuff, however...

It's a great article, and i hate anniversaries as well, but heritage is an important part of what makes humanity. The Beatles are what made a lot of nowadays music possible so i don't think we should move on. If the Beatles hadn't been a big deal to people in the 90s, maybe i would have never heard of them until now. But i did discover them when i was 9 or 10 and they helped, along contemporary music, to shape what i am today and what i am proud to be today. So maybe, somewhere, some 10 year old kid will hear about that silly auction and wonder what the fuss that was all about. Maybe that kid will then love the Beatles, pick up a guitar and change the world of his generation. Music shouldn't live in the past, but it should always remember what was in the past...

I'm more troubled by the thought that The Beatles will be made irrelevant in another generation or two.  In a way, the time is right for a new sensation that will emerge and overshadow them.

The Beatles grew out of an era of narcissistic youth: the youth of the 60's rejected their parents' ideals and scorned their culture and history (sounds cliche, but it's kind of true). The youth of the day were looking for flag-bearers to represent their dreams and ideals. The Beatles fit the bill.

I think today's youth are really very similar to the youth of the 60s, at least in terms of self-interest. Speaking generally about today's teens and early 20s, I think they are an incredibly self-assured generation. They believe that they are special. And who knows: maybe they are. They certainly like themselves a lot. They idolise their own; they follow celebrities that are their own age and act and look like them. (See Taylor Swift, One Direction, Justin Beiber, pretty much any major pop sensation since Britney Spears). 

I sound like such an old man saying this, but when I was a kid we didn't idolise other kids, that would have been incredibly embarrassing. We looked to the generation that was 10-15 years older than us for our fashion cues and our ideas and to help us define our own nascent philosophies. Maybe you worshipped Madonna, or Kurt Cobain, or The Beastie Boys, or in my case Jarvis, or maybe you were so cool you were listening to The Beatles back when nobody else your age did. Regardless, our idols were always older and cooler and smarter and more talented than us, and we aspired to be more like them and less like ourselve. I think this was the generational echo chamber that Jarvis refers to in his article.

But it's clear that today's youth aren't hamstrung by the cultural echo chamber. They are inventing themselves and rejecting the past, and I can see where a great new force in pop culture, a pop monster like The Beatles, but distinctly different, could emerge. In 30 years time everyone will be talking about that group or artist with the same reverence that we talk about The Beatles today. And The Beatles won't mean a damned thing. I fully expect it to happen, maybe it's already begun (N'Sync? Lady Gaga? Jessie-fucking-J?). 

Mind you, I have a creeping feeling that whatever it is will turn out to be utter shite, and I would much rather we just stick to worshipping The Beatles instead. 

andy wrote:

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fredthe3rd wrote:

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Michael Jackson.

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i cant remember who was fashionable in 1999, 2004, in 2008, hell even in 2011, i can't... can you ?

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 This is a really excellent question. For a time in the late 90's early 00's I was frightened that a band like Busted or McFly may be the new Beatles. They wrote their own material and were fresh faced young cheeky chappies who were incredibly popular with teen girls. What concerned me was that I had become too old and jaded to realise this fact as well (plus I thought that they were crap). was I like an older person who cast scorn on the Beatles when they first appeared unable to truly see the effect they were having. My fears turned out to be unfounded but only history can really judge.

I agree about Eminem, though even he's been around a while now. Is it possible to have the same impact now or is everything so fragmented, what word was used here, nicheification (sp?) that you can't have the same communal experiences, in the same was as people no longer all sit down to watch the latest episode of the popular TV programme at the same time and discuss it in the office/playground the next morning. Economics seems to be driving experiencing music to being a more transient, in-the-moment thing of live performance or the latest big thing on Spotify or whatever rather than the culture of previous generations of owning, collecting, analysing and cataloguing and even maybe ultimately fossilising past music. The big tribes in music if we have any now are the hordes who make the pilgrimage to Ibiza every summer or to the zillions of festivals. Though maybe if I listened to radio 1 more I would know something about real pop stars these days. I suppose a lot of what makes an immediate impact is part of some wider cultural phenomenon than simple musical quality, so stuff like the X-Factor or Lady Gaga probably counts as those, who use music as a vehicle for their work but that is not their main raison d'être.

There's the nostalgia extremes of, on the one hand, "Everything was so much better in my day, all this modern stuff is a worthless racket" and the other extreme of the only thing that matters is what's new and the past is irrelevant and somewhere in between, seems a sensible balance of accepting that we are all products of the culture we grew up with, including those parts we didn't experience for ourselves before we were born, and appreciating what that has given us, but we can't languish in past glories at the expense of getting on with our own lives today.