Another Song I Wish I’d Written: Modern Rock and Post Modern Rock
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 13th, 2008 No Comments »
Almost nothing is more sacred to me than the Beatles. I love them, in the deepest, most spiritual sense. To me, it seems like the Beatles at once saved and destroyed popular music.
This editon of a Song I Wish I’d Written is a two-way tie. The two Beatles songs I’ve chosen to worship today were conceived at opposite ends of the Beatle’s career. High-energy, electric-guitar-based rock and roll are the book ends that separate the Beatles’ remarkably varied career of experimentation and innovation. But examining these two rock songs back to back, one hears the difference between modern and post-modern music.
The first is called “Tell Me Why”.
Although most people think of John Cage before John Lennon when they think of modernism in music, I feel 1960’s rock music qualifies. It incorporates surrealism, political messages and irreverently leaves behind the social norms of the old school.
The song begins with a riff played to the same rhythm as the hook of the Charleston, as funny as that sounds. This erupts into a groove lead by a walking bass that also could belong to a hit song from twenty years earlier. But the vocal harmonies that take over are screamed at the top chest-voice of three young men. When John Lennon takes the lead vocal for the verse, it is in a voice so filled with pathos that the song’s story of troubled love is told at once, without the listener needing to pay any attention to the unremarkable lyrics.
The second song I chose is called “Birthday”.
It appeared on the Beatles’ most philosophically complex work, a self-titled 1968 double album nicknamed “the White Album”, for it’s blank white cover, designed by “pop-artist” Richard Hamilton.
At this point in their history, the Beatles find themselves unexpectedly robbed of their father figure (Their manager Brian Epstein had died), disillusioned with their “guru” (the Maharishi who was caught chasing his female pupils), and beginning to come apart personally. John Lennon had left his faithful wife for a brilliant Japanese avant gard artist named Yoko Ono. Paul McCartney had lead them into self-parody with the embarrassing Magical Mystery Tour TV-film. It was enough to put all four of them off of anything bright, colorful, or full of that 60’s optimism, which is nowhere to be found on the White Album.
It’s this context that helped them create “Birthday”. Here, they return to their rhythm and blues roots, but with a brand new attitude, that can only be described as post-modern (if you agree with composer and music theorist Jonathan Kramer, who posits the idea that post-modernism is more an attitude than a style or period). Although some have credited 1970’s punk as the first post-modern popular music, I agree with those others who have given the credit to the Beatle’s white album. “Birthday” in particular, has all the conditions of post-modern music.
It drips with irony. Lyrics like “You say it’s your Birthday…. We’re going to a party-party…. I would like you to dance…. take a cha-cha-cha-chance…” sound like any late fifties party-oriented dance song. But the ferocity of the vocals and the guitars (distorted to a degree still rare at that time), and the addition of the curious line “Well it’s my Birthday too, yeah”, give the song a disturbing nature. These lost, confused, bitter Beatles are not so much paying homage to their heroes, the 50’s pioneers of rock and roll, as MOCKING them.
A minimalist drum break leads to two measures of power chord pounding eight notes on two filthy guitars and one demented bass. These two measures basically created the absurdly simple, ultra-violent groove upon which the punk music of the Sex Pistols and Ramones are based.
On the chorus, two practically tone-deaf Beatle wives sing the line “Birthday”. The choice was not made out of an urge to get their wives into show-business. It was an affront to the cliche of the female backup singer, and an anti-aesthetic statement almost resembling Dadaism.
It was around this time that Timothy Leary said the Beatles were “evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with mysterious powers to create a new human species.” and Charles Manson used the White Album as an apocalyptic prophesy or something. So let’s not get crazy, here. It’s just a song, on an album, by a rock band. But it does something to me no other recording can do.
