My Tiny New Beatles Review


 

I was reading an old essay this morning about the Beach Boys written by Jules Siegel and in it Siegel was talking about the "put-down" in certain pop-music reviews (and this was like 1967 or something) and how common it was to see put-downs in pop-music reviews because journalists felt it somehow demonstrated their objectivity as a writer, to put-down the artist. 

As in, "I'm not a fan." 

It was also "hip to be insincere" at that time and nobody wanted to be caught being sincere. After decades of it I guess Siegel quotes a writer who asked, "who needs all this goddamn intense sincerity all the time?" 

There were reasons for the insincerity craze, but it sort of dismissed The Beach Boys who seemed too square and awfully sincere when compared to the Beatles. The same writer tells Siegel, "this year it is hip to be sincere." 

Because who needs all that oppressive insincerity all the time? But, it turns out, this is just as bad as the other thing: fads. 

I think some people just want insincerity. They don't want to handle the truth if the truth will hurt in any way. Better to be glib.  

But I find there's nothing more frustrating that being in love with someone who can't be sincere. Which is why as a teen I swore to myself that I would never marry a comedian. (Task fail.) Because back at my parents' house, my brother and his funny friends just couldn't be sincere for a minute (not even to order a pizza). Everything was fodder for comedy.  

The Beatles arrived in America like a breath of fresh air with their whip-smart personalities and smart-aleck communication style. 

It was as if American youth were saying "can we not take everything so seriously? Our handsome and charismatic young president has just been shot in the head in front of everybody and the first lady had to crawl back over the trunk to rescue pieces of him."

Sincerity was death when the Beatles arrived. Sincerity was grim. And new circumstances required new attitudes. New times require new styles. 

And now we've come through grim decades of insincerity: hundreds of public shootings, incels, politics-as-a-joke, the whole jackass trend, a disregard for the safety of the vulnerable and a level of cynicism maybe not experienced since Medieval times.  

Sincerity. Insincerity. I guess it's just good to be ambidextrous. Sometimes you need to float above it all for fun or sanity. Sometimes you need your to feel your feet on solid ground...for a refreshing change. 

Sixty years later, the surviving two members of the Beatles have released new music and it seems pretty sincere to me. If your knee-jerk response is to say sincerity is why their music is no longer any good, I think you just may be stuck in your own private hell wearing a jackass suit covered in mousetraps.

 

New Ringo Starr Songs

"It's Been Too Long" (3 March 2026)


"Choose Love" (3 April 2026)

 

New Paul McCartney Song

"Days We Left Behind" (26 March 2026)

 

New Paul McCartney & Ringo Starr Duet

"Home to Us" (8 May 2026)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Playlist for The Gingerbread Forest

Image
    I should have called this the Gray Haired Old Lady Music Blog. But when I set up the Blogger blog a few days ago, I was in a very surly mood and did not care to take any time to give this a fancy or accurate moniker. So I just picked Music Blog. But then today, the right name came to me like an Angel. More on that later.   To start off I picked Blogger as a tool so I that didn't have to bother with a vanity URL and so that I could hearken back to a time when the Internet wasn't a cesspool of evil brokenness. Kind of like zines do one step back. I actually forgot how crappy Blogger is, how awful the features are, how god-awful the HTML is under the hood and how I can only upload images if I use Blogger in the Firefox browser. Something about safety settings but it's always something. Just like how nothing online works anymore.    And here I must confess I have other blogs. Which is a socially awkward thing to admit in the year 2026. I have a  C...
Read more

Default Set

Image
So I've been asking all my friends and family to give me their Top 10 list of music acts they love. These are like deserted island picks. Not who my friends listen to the most often right now or over all time or who they've seen play live the most. Just their favorites.  I got this idea from Lucy O'Brien and her book  She Bop . She did the same query in the 1990s but with men only and found that none of them had women included in their lists. Only one of her respondents, an African American man, included two women on his list. O'Brien suggested this was vaguely cultural.  First off, people complained that coming up with ten was hard. Then after a time, they complained that keeping the list to ten was hard. Talking it over with them, there are these "bubbling under" lists that developed, their "almost top 10s" that were interesting in themselves. As if to say, "I like these artists or bands, just not top-10 like them."  Okay so my brother do...
Read more

Music for Funerals

Image
  I was gone for five minutes. Like five minutes. (Not really five minutes.) And so much happened from my musical favorites list. Unbelievable. Like I was gone for 10 days at most. And all this new stuff was both stressful (because I couldn't attend to it, tied up as I was with family arriving for my mother's interment, that being the end itself of a five-year long transitioning) and yet it was also very comforting, that I would have something to look forward to afterwards and that something would go on when all the realizations of my mother finally being gone were ready to set in.  Actual Funeral Music  This is not actually a post about music for funerals. But my mother did have requests for music, particularly Andy William's singing "Battle Hymn of the Republic" in 1968 (her final political sayonara)...  ...and a recording of a my Dad's cousin (no longer with us) singing "His Eye Is On the Sparrow" which she loved and which is played digitally and ...
Read more