The Beatles - The White Album
[Insert White Album Cover Here]
So. What is it that makes the White Album an amazing mental kaleidoscope or a nonsensical mosaic of vacuity depending on which side of the bed you fell off that morning?
How can i even ask that question? It's blasphemy. The White Album is a masterpiece. How dare i!
Shut up p(nmi)t, bottle has the floor.
The White Album is Sgt. Pepper, the sequel. It exists at all because the fab four had to make another album, but they had to make that album as the band who created Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Magical Mystery Tour. They've sprained their epic imagination muscles, but the hallucinogenic residue is still blocking all their pain receptors.
This album can be whatever you want it to be (it is a blank canvas, after all) because it's just a string of empty metaphors. The boys brought their lego buckets to play time and dumped them all out on the floor. Sure they made a sculpture, but it's the pieces rather than the finished shape that make it what it is (it's three EPs all smashed together, in my opinion, but i don't have the patience to write about that at the moment).
As i said a couple days ago, this is actually the end of the Beatles and what comes after is ironically their best work while they are learning to admit that the magic part is over. They all want different things, and they aren't willing to let the peanut butter and chocolate mix anymore. Like it or not, Zappa, The 4 Seasons, and Brian Wilson (even though he couldn't finish his until decades later) could make these kinds of modular monstrosities because they had a strong, personally meaningful reason to do it. The Beatles didn't, they were just making it up. The fact that they were the Beatles was omnipresent in their minds, and the ultimately hollow fame wasn't enjoyable for them. But they didn't know that at the time, they thought they were having fun.
Forget it's The Beatles for a moment, and it sounds like 4 uncompromising space cadets joined together by studio production and orchestral arrangement. This album isn't supposed to sound like that. It's not supposed to be a double album of random crap, and that's why Zappa wrote We're Only In It For The Money 6 months earlier (he was either psychic or right).
So this album is literally bookended by Zappa saying The Beatles as you know them are finished, and The 4 Seasons turning up with a coffin, a bag of nails, and a hammer. We all know i'm making these relationships up, but it's a compelling narrative. I'm not creating that narrative to mess with you though. I'm simply bringing what i think are real subconscious consequences of the minuscule world that is big mainstream pop/rock. These people mingled, they went to the same parties, their friends told them stories about what happened after they left, and a lot of the weird stuff they did was the result of being petty little people in a tiny little gossip factory, using their illusions to make a dollar, or a statement, or just not be so lonely at the top.
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So. What is it that makes the White Album an amazing mental kaleidoscope or a nonsensical mosaic of vacuity depending on which side of the bed you fell off that morning?
How can i even ask that question? It's blasphemy. The White Album is a masterpiece. How dare i!
Shut up p(nmi)t, bottle has the floor.
The White Album is Sgt. Pepper, the sequel. It exists at all because the fab four had to make another album, but they had to make that album as the band who created Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Magical Mystery Tour. They've sprained their epic imagination muscles, but the hallucinogenic residue is still blocking all their pain receptors.
This album can be whatever you want it to be (it is a blank canvas, after all) because it's just a string of empty metaphors. The boys brought their lego buckets to play time and dumped them all out on the floor. Sure they made a sculpture, but it's the pieces rather than the finished shape that make it what it is (it's three EPs all smashed together, in my opinion, but i don't have the patience to write about that at the moment).
As i said a couple days ago, this is actually the end of the Beatles and what comes after is ironically their best work while they are learning to admit that the magic part is over. They all want different things, and they aren't willing to let the peanut butter and chocolate mix anymore. Like it or not, Zappa, The 4 Seasons, and Brian Wilson (even though he couldn't finish his until decades later) could make these kinds of modular monstrosities because they had a strong, personally meaningful reason to do it. The Beatles didn't, they were just making it up. The fact that they were the Beatles was omnipresent in their minds, and the ultimately hollow fame wasn't enjoyable for them. But they didn't know that at the time, they thought they were having fun.
Forget it's The Beatles for a moment, and it sounds like 4 uncompromising space cadets joined together by studio production and orchestral arrangement. This album isn't supposed to sound like that. It's not supposed to be a double album of random crap, and that's why Zappa wrote We're Only In It For The Money 6 months earlier (he was either psychic or right).
So this album is literally bookended by Zappa saying The Beatles as you know them are finished, and The 4 Seasons turning up with a coffin, a bag of nails, and a hammer. We all know i'm making these relationships up, but it's a compelling narrative. I'm not creating that narrative to mess with you though. I'm simply bringing what i think are real subconscious consequences of the minuscule world that is big mainstream pop/rock. These people mingled, they went to the same parties, their friends told them stories about what happened after they left, and a lot of the weird stuff they did was the result of being petty little people in a tiny little gossip factory, using their illusions to make a dollar, or a statement, or just not be so lonely at the top.
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