Still Fab - The Beatles and their timeless influence

Reason, June, 2001 by Charles Paul Freund

The apotheosis of their personal development is not the avant-garde experimentation of the White Album (only a few of its cuts get much play anymore). It is Abbey Road, which, dear as it is to the hearts of many rock enthusiasts, could just as well be hailed as the greatest pop album of all time. Certainly, it could have been played almost in its entirety on MOR radio. As for the Beatles' career coda, the Let It Be album, its major songs--especially the title number and the whining "Long and Winding Road"--out-treacle anything that Matt Munro ever dared record.

Getting back

Does this distinction between "pop" and "rock" actually matter? From the point of view of the music, no. One either likes the stuff or doesn't. But from the vantage point of rock mythology, the distinction is potentially revealing.

Over the years, what might be called the rock establishment--the music's historians, its journalists, often its performers, and now a class of academics, too--has developed a complex story of the music's origins, nature, and social role. As humanities professor Robert Pattison has pointed out, this story has been laid out along the lines of 19th-century Romanticism. Unlike other forms of music, goes the myth, rock prides itself on being elemental. Though it was commercialized by whites, its soul is black. Its true roots are in Africa by way of the Mississippi Delta. Stolen from blacks by Sun Records in the guise of Elvis Presley, the music nevertheless remains true to its undeniable nature. It is a music that stands outside middle-class restraint, reveling in its sexual power, emerging from--and this is a real phrase from a real musicologist--"orgiastic magic." Some statement of primitivist obligation is essential to the pose of rock seriousness, and it is in fact part of the Beatles' persona as well.

No grand narrative is complete without a vanquished villain, and this narrative features one, too: pop music. Pop was everything rock hated. Pop was polite; rock is outspoken. Pop was false; rock is authentic. Pop was constrained; rock lets it all hang out. Pop was commercial artifice; rock is, in Pattison's portrait, Walt Whitman's "barbaric yawp," updated and indispensable to surviving a corrupt consumerist world.

Not much of this story has any merit. Rock music is obviously indebted to black forms that preceded it, but these forms aren't African. The various kinds of black music that developed here are American, and were themselves influenced by other American forms. Efforts by such music writers as Gerald Early to demonstrate the indebtedness of Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, and other '60s black crooners to an Italian-American model (an overtly pop model) have yet to be absorbed into this myth. There's no Romantic capital in that story. Similarly, rock is indebted to the "country" musical forms that emerged from a variety of influences, including European yodels, but there's not much Romantic capital in saying that, either.

But the real problem with this myth is its treatment of pop. Rock describes not one type of music, but a variety of styles that have influenced each other, including doo-wop harmonizing, boogie-woogie, jump forms of swing, soul music, rockabilly, etc. Looming over the other influences, however, is none other than pop.