The Beatles did not take place

I only just got around to listening to “Now and Then,” the most recent of the zombie Beatles tracks assembled from demos John Lennon had made before his murder, mainly because this essay by Owen Hatherley for the New Left Review made me curious. His assessment of the song seems right to me, though I would have put “music” in scare quotes too:

As a piece of music, the “new” “last” “Beatles” single, “Now and Then,” is of very little interest, but as a phenomenon, it is highly symptomatic. McCartney’s project of going back in time to the 1960s and 1970s and using advanced software to scrub the historical fact of the Beatles’ shabby, acrimonious end and replace it with a series of warm, friendly fakes is proof of another of Ballard’s claims — that the science-fictional future, when it arrives, will turn out to be boring.

It is somewhat reassuring — boring, even — to read that “Now and Then” is uninteresting. And after listening to it, it’s hard for me to imagine someone wanting to hear it for any reason other than idle necropsy or misplaced nostalgia. I certainly can’t imagine anyone would want to hear it twice. The jokes come readily: Only dead musicians could make something so lifeless.

It would have been far more upsetting if the song weren’t immediately dismissible after one hearing — if I found myself instead having to concede that it is actually great and thus that the creative synergy of non-deceased musicians is not actually necessary to sounding like a vital band. Even though I played the song a few minutes ago, I’ve already forgotten what it sounds like, and I’d like to keep it that way. What am I trying to protect myself from?

What it would it mean for “Now and Then” to succeed? Are there any criteria other than financial ones by which it had any chance? It’s not like every cynical cash grab is fully negated by the inherent mediocrity of its premise. Otherwise there would be no culture industry. But what could overcome the ghoulish prerogative of wringing profit out of reanimating dead people to make them act how we would have wanted them to and force them to appear to do things they never would have done had they lived?

Hatherley notes the peculiarity that “no ‘new’ Beatles song has been or, apparently, could be written by McCartney,” even though his solo material outclasses that of the other former Beatles by a lot. Would it really be any more preposterous to have an AI-generated Lennon add harmonies to unreleased Flowers in the Dirt tracks than it is to have McCartney commandeer a few Double Fantasy castoffs and turn them in to Beatle-branded products? Building the songs from Lennon’s demos is meant to capture some aspect of his exercising artistic agency, but using them without his consent cancels that out. What initially may seem like respect for the idea that a Beatles song only happens when all the original members contribute turns out to be a very flimsy alibi for grave robbing.

And it is not like the Beatles were especially collaborative at the end of the sixties, and their efforts to force it with the Get Back project had poor results. For Hatherley, the zombie songs are of a piece with Let It Be, Let It Be…Naked, and Peter Jackson’s recent Get Back documentary, which are all attempts to salvage the failed material that came out of the Beatles’ efforts to work together when they no longer cared to. With each rehabilitation project, the historical record is further falsified under the guise of clarifying or deepening it. This reinforces a feeling that all history is false, which licenses a program of telling whatever story we want with the relics, ruins, and surviving fragments. It seems plausible then to consider that the Beatles were maybe never really a band in the first place, or not really a band by the standards of what a band should ideally be — they were always a construct, an image devised for maximal commercial exploitation — so there is no harm in McCartney or anyone else perpetuating that image by whatever means become available. Degrading the Beatle brand in the present with gimmicks like “Now and Then” might even make people believe the original branding was pure and organic, reinvigorating its value.

In this New York Times piece about “Now and Then” and other backward-looking music releases, Jon Pareles worries that “digital possibilities” will lead to “untethering artistic products from their original inspirations and proportions,” with “AI … generating countless variations, pastiches and fakes.” He suggests that this threatens to overwhelm the original works. But you could just as easily argue that remasters and retreads will re-enchant the “real” versions, or make them seem more real or more original, even though they had been “copies without originals” all along, to borrow from Baudrillard.

“When the real is no longer what it used to be,” Baudrillard writes in Simulations, “nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience … And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and reverential.” One way to regard “Now and Then” is as part of that panic, reflecting a hope of re-establishing the sanctity of the Beatles by actively desecrating their legacy, “proving art by anti-art.” Much as “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real,” the zombie Beatles songs are made to make the “real” Beatles songs seem less like dated pop ephemera, less like products designed to mechanically manipulate consumers’ feelings.

But Hatherley doesn’t take that tack: “Unfortunately,” he writes, “the Beatles really were special. It isn’t all a hoax; there has never been anything quite like the sheer speed and promiscuity and drama of those six years of actual Beatles music.” There was a “real thing” to be nostalgic about now, something that has actually been lost and which “Now and Then” tries to exploit. The Beatles, Hatherley argues, “proved that working-class people from ordinary places could create, in the two-and-a-half minute slots of the lowest of low art, work that is bottomless in its complexity and richness.” The neoliberal evisceration of the welfare state has eliminated the conditions that made the Beatles possible, a fact made more depressing by how the Beatles themselves became petty “proto-Thatcherites” quick to complain “about the Labour governments’ taxation policies, which funded council houses, free tuition at art colleges and free healthcare, and without which three of the Beatles would probably have been queuing up to load timber at the docks and the other would have been dead.”

Hatherley invokes Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism, suggesting that the “social critique” implicit in the band’s very existence eventually gave way to a bogus “artistic critique” exemplified not just by their late-period hippie-ism but by their various individual discontents with the price of fame. The Beatles’ success once seemed to almost justify capitalism — they made the mass culture it generates feel democratic and meaningful rather than coercive and stultifying — but the interpersonal strife and legal wrangling of the band’s demise undermined the illusion. Pop music once seemed to evoke social leveling and “peace and love”; the fake new Beatles songs cater to a nostalgia for that sentiment while shoveling more dirt on its grave.

“Now and Then” is symptomatic of the times, as Hatherley claimed, because it shows how technology will be used to rearticulate the empty promises of capitalism without coming any closer to fulfilling them. It is of a piece with Generative AI, which offers “creativity” as something to consume while helping gut the sort of economic environment that could nurture and sustain creativity as a social process. In Boltanski and Chiapello’s terms, it addresses (albeit in a shoddy and largely unpersuasive way) the artistic critique of capitalism to try to sideline the social critique. Hatherley points out that “Now and Then” sounds like a generative model’s approximation of the Beatles, and it’s hard to disagree, especially since it would be fitting if the comparison could help each discredit the other. But mostly it is just easy, for me at least, to make a self-satisfied show of contempt for it, which doesn’t discredit anything but myself. It wants to be forgettable, so we forget about the ongoing conditions that made it possible too.