First listening to the Beatles at age 35 thread
“You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers," Michael Tilson Thomas once said. "They simply define what music is." On another plane, the same is true of the Beatle, whose super-canonical status means I've never felt the need to actively like them.
Saying you "like" or "don't like" the Beatles has only as much force as saying you "like" or "don't like' the Bible: the sheer depth and breadth of cultural influence involved obviates all personal judgment. Even avowedly non-believing modern Westerners have a Biblical worldview.
Similarly, we're all Beatles listeners — even if, like me, we've never owned a Beatles album or even listened to one all the way through. But despite having never pursued their music, I've long meant to gain an understanding of the Beatles as cultural nexus, as body of knowledge.
And so I'm spending the next three months listening seriously to each and every one of the Beatles' studio albums, in order, one album per week. Accompanying reading will include Ian MacDonald' "Revolution in the Head," Rob Sheffield's "Dreaming the Beatles," and other volumes.
Please Please Me: Their debut album, famously recorded in one day-long session. Or rather most of it was, everything but the four singles that came out before. Those include "Love Me Do," one of the songs I already knew by heart despite never once having voluntary listened to it. 
"Twist and Shout" I'd similarly internalized in detail through cultural osmosis. But many songs I'd never heard before, and the album's mixture of the thoroughly familiar and the totally unfamiliar is, in microcosm, what I expect from this Beatles listening project as a whole.
Perhaps the songs in between, those I'd encountered only now and again in life, hold the most interest. The opener, "I Saw Her Standing There," is one such song. The opening lines ("She was just seventeen / You know what I mean") would make you low-hanging MeToo fruit these days.
But then, the Beatles themselves were only in their early twenties at the time. This is, as I understand it, their "boy-band" phase, though they'd somehow already managed to put in a Gladwellian amount of gigging hours in order to develop the live set Please Please Me records.
Beatles die-hards prefer the early stuff, but I'm looking forward to the thematic variety to come. Here it's almost all about love, which is to say sex — but then, per Larkin, sexual intercourse began in 1963, "between the end of the Chatterley ban
and the Beatles’ first LP."
and the Beatles’ first LP."
With the Beatles: It surprises me that I remember hearing nearly nothing on this 56-year-old album before. When I first put it on, I thus heard what was to me more or less a "new" Beatles album, a listening experience for which any serious Beatles enthusiast would no doubt kill.
Even before I started listening to the Beatles I understood that each member's having a distinct identity (sometimes opposed to the others') makes the band more naturally interesting — and even more so the fact that aspects those identities come through in the songs themselves.
(Bill Clinton once claimed that the Beatles embodied everything in the sixties. That is, P.J. O’Rourke later wrote, "everything in the sixties was either brilliant but troubled, earnest but flaky, stupid, or Paul McCartney.")
Though many Beatles fans identify themselves by declaring a "favorite Beatle" (as Harry Potter readers might claim to belong to a Hogwarts dormitory), their discussions of the band also implicitly acknowledge an effectively fixed and agreed-upon respect hierarchy of its members.
The position in that hierarchy of each of the lower three Beatles seems to owe to his particular tendency toward excess. "Till There Was You" would sound like the debut of Paul's famed weakness for the saccharine, but the song is of course a Broadway showtune, not one of his own.
While not inclined to worship a figure like John (at least not his messianic late-60s incarnation), I have to admit that his opener "It Won't Be Long" holds up more solidly than any Beatles song I've yet heard. On first play, I felt like I was hearing something new and thrilling.
A Hard Day's Night: Much more familiar territory for the non-Beatles-listener than its predecessor. Even before putting this album on, I must have heard the title song and "Can't Buy Me Love" hundreds of times, all inadvertently. (Maybe more; both run less than three minutes.)
More notably, this one has songs I'd often heard and could recognize as the work of the Beatles without ever having known their names: "I Should Have Known Better," "If I Fell," "And I Love Her" — admittedly, I could have guessed that last one — all highly "Beatlesque" melodies.
I have yet to crack my Beatles books, but I find myself wishing someone would write one only about the band's throwaway songs: "I'm Happy Just to Dance with You" on this album, "Little Child" on the last. I also find myself wishing they'd sing about something other than girls.
The first side of A Hard Day's Night is the soundtrack for the eponymous Beatles movie, which I saw about 20 years ago. But somehow I can't call to mind any other context in which I must so often have heard the songs that were already familiar to me. They were all just... around.
Beatles for Sale: I've enjoyed every Beatles album I've listened to so far over this past month. Still, I can't help but notice that none of their individual tracks have turned into "earworms" — i.e., songs that I don't just want to but need to hear again, and again, and again.
Admittedly, most of my own earworms in recent years have tended to come out of old school, Japanese city pop, west-coast yacht rock, "future funk," etc. — pop-musical realms about as far removed from as you can get from early Beatles records.
The overexposure of certain Beatles hits, on which I've touched before, must also have something to do with it. There's nothing wrong with "Eight Days a Week," say, but I'm not sure what one more spin of it would get me at the margin.
But Beatlemania, at its height when Beatles for Sale came out, was surely driven by nothing if not the need of 1960s teenagers to hear certain Beatles songs over and over again. I've thought of the Beatles as an "album band," but in 1964 they were still about the two-minute song.
They were also more about early rock-and-rollers than I'd quite realized, an affinity underscored by Beatles for Sale's abundance covers of Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry — cultural entities I know most intimately as Jim Jarmusch references. youtube.com/watch?v=dLFVpr…
LITERARY INTERLUDE: A highly relevant Murakami story, newly published by the New Yorker: "This might seem strange, but it wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties that I sat down and listened to 'With the Beatles' from beginning to end." newyorker.com/magazine/2020/…
Help: Of all the albums so far, this one must surely sound most familiar to the non-Beatles-listener. There's the title track, "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," "Ticket to Ride" — though somehow I can't force the Carpenters version out of my head — "Yesterday"...
I told a more Beatles-savvy English friend about this project a while back and he immediately laid into "Yesterday," calling it "saccharine" and one of the very worst Beatles songs. But like much of the band's best-known work, I've already heard it too many times to evaluate it.
It did occur to me, though, that there must be a quiet consensus among hard-core fans as to which popular Beatles songs are actually bad, or at least undeserving of their place in the Beatles canon. (My friend also told of hating "Hey Jude," though he respects its musicianship.)
There must also be a consensus about when the Beatles turned from "single band" to "album band," as I described myself thinking of them earlier. Though technically a soundtrack, Help doesn't quite possess the coherence I expect from an album. But I suspect that's about to change.
I will say this for "Yesterday": its arrangement for guitar and recording by just Paul and a string quartet set a precedent for the sound of Nick Drake, the first English singer-songwriter of the 1960s in whom I took a great interest. youtube.com/watch?v=idcaRT…
