Anonymous asked: I'm curious on your Mt Rushmore for a)Beatles b) PSBs
I’ll do PSBs in another post (it’s almost impossible anyway). Beatles are a bit (only a bit) easier, so.
“Eleanor Rigby”: The best of the fully orchestrated McCartney numbers because its tense fussiness matches the lives under discussion - this is also great because a) it’s a radical expansion of pop empathy, the people in this song are old and worn out and uncool and b) unlike other Beatles empathy exercises it doesn’t deliver or promise any kind of happy ending. The song’s swift conclusion is pragmatically callous.
“Paperback Writer”: This on the other hand is pure snark and all the better for it - their funniest song, one of their crispest too, a glimpse into the mindset of the creative no-hoper, all the crueller given its source you might say. These days the paperback writer would be hassling @neil_himself or @stephenfry for RTs of his self-published Kindle project, I imagine.
“You Never Give Me Your Money”: A stand-in for the whole last 10-15 minutes of Abbey Road Side 2. AR side 1 is my least favourite chunk of Beatles, AR Side 2 is the best editing job of all time given how mostly half-cut the songs were. I once put together a playlist with the Beatles tracks in recorded order (going by Revolution In The Head), and the total collapse in coherence after Peppers is scary, especially listening to this material out of compiled order. On record of course it’s astonishing, the pop equivalent of the end of a Grant Morrison comic, a band reaching escape velocity, jettisoning material as ballast and finally breaking through into some higher mythic reality zone.
“A Day In The Life”: I don’t have anything to say about it really but it’s good eh?
