Tusk Vs The White Album

Yeah, those are two of my favourites.

"White Album" gets referenced in all sorts of fun places. I can't hear "Oh Darling" without thinking of the Replacements, or "Sexy Sadie" without thinking of "Karma Police."

the fun place that is "Karma Police"

The stuff that flopson calls 'bad musical comedy' mostly does seem funny or clever to me and the 'children's music' stuff mostly feels enjoyably silly or manic.

"Oh Darling" is on Abbey Road iirc, which I'm thankful for, because I never liked it.

lol ok "desperation" - so where should i file your "random beatles fan" pantomimes of other posters' opinions then? like does it really surprise you that i would come to the conclusion that you're not participating in this conversation in good faith?

File 'em under "unlikely scenarios", if you must file 'em anywhere.

I remember when I first heard The Beatles - I actually found it quite disappointing. It felt that they'd just thrown everything on there whether it was any good or not. One of the first things I did was try and condense it down to a single LP that I felt was of the same quality as Rubber Soul or Revolver. I still think that some of the bands worst songs are on The Beatles.

Whenever anyone tries to do this, I feel like they're missing the point. They take out all the fun, ridiculous songs like Bungalow Bill and Piggies, and keep all the proper rock songs like Back In The USSR. It's like trying to put a tether on the album, when half the reason to listen to it is the feeling of never really knowing where it's going to go next. If anything TWA is the truest representation of the psychedelic experience - it's vivid, messy, emotionally all over the place, wondrous, creepy, nostalgic, hilarious and most of all unpredictable.

As a teenager first getting into the Beatles it was these dafter songs that appealed to me the most. Bungalow Bill is more than a 'campfire song with rock backing'. For a start it's about as far from rock music as the Beatles had come thus far. The chorus is happy-clappy, deliberately so, but you'd have trouble getting boy scouts to sing along to the verses. It's more like a fried, dream-logic Disney song but with grotesque Tex Avery characters playing the individual characters. I love it for the same reason I love the Beach Boys' 'Smiley Smile'. I'd take it over many of the straighter songs on TWA, but then I wouldn't change TWA because to do so would be to alter the strange whimsy and character of that album as a whole.

CD Player: "Well, somewhere in the black mountain hills of Dakota there lived a young boy named Rocky Raccooooooon-ah!"

Random Beatles Fan: "Fuck, man!" *bead of sweat drips off their forehead as they shut themselves in their wardrobe*

― Gholdfish Killah (Turrican), Sunday, October 29, 2017 6:23 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

LOL @ CD Player. Yeah that song ends in a gruesome death. For a pastiche, it has a high amount of peril and melancholy. 'I'll be better Doc, as soon as I am able'. Again though, the creepiness of TWA is felt in its flow, not necessarily in one specific song or line. Turrican, you're reminding me of that Peep Show scene where Jeremy rifles through the first book he sees in the university professor's library, reads one line and asks 'And that's meant to be good is it?'

I'd say that Glass Onion is definitely creepy in that it refers back to the Beatles' own Walrus-mythos, like a flashback to a weird nightmare you thought you'd put out of mind.
But so many songs paint pictures that are incomplete. Who is this Rocky Racoon? This Bungalow Bill? Do they know each other? Are they cartoons? Are they violent killers? These Piggies who are eating with forks and knifes - it's not made explicit but they're eating people, right? And what's happening in Cry Baby Cry? Who are these baroque people singing songs of sixpence and slaughtering blackbirds to put in pies? These songs are superficially frivolous but there's a dark undertone to all of them. Number 9, number 9. 'Wild Honey Pie' - a bunch of braying animals trying to emulate a rock song. And what's the relationship between Wild Honey Pie and Honey Pie?

TWA is quaint and creepy, perhaps because it seals the Beatles myth. It at-once self-references and expands the universe created on MMT, Yellow Sub and Peppers, but shows it in a more fracture way, like examining this colourful world through a snowglobe or a glass onion.

i wonder if different masterings affect how one receives this album. so much of what i like in it is atmosphere and vibe and i could see that being really vulnerable to a too-bright or too-punchy sound. would bring out the "kid" thing overmuch potentially. like "cry baby cry" is one of the key points in my spooky/creepy take on this record, those haunted-house piano lines banging down the stairs in between these dead-eyed doll children acting out century-old games in slow motion while miss havisham's cake rots under cobwebs in the corner. but if i'd first heard it on those awful 80s CDs it's possible i'd just hear it as some cutesy pastiche of the wondrous imaginations of children or something... like the lesser end of the elephant 6 version of this material. but my mom's vinyl copy, that's got the vibe.

if TWA is a film, it's Monty Python's Meaning Of Life, a sprawling rollercoaster of sketchy vignettes permeated by an undertone of disgust and violence

This album is exactly like a glass onion in the sense that I can see straight through it. There's nothing in there, which essentially is what the song itself seems to be about.

Whenever anyone tries to do this, I feel like they're missing the point. They take out all the fun, ridiculous songs like Bungalow Bill and Piggies, and keep all the proper rock songs like Back In The USSR. It's like trying to put a tether on the album, when half the reason to listen to it is the feeling of never really knowing where it's going to go next.

You mean that they take out the patchier, written-in-a-cigarette-break stuff and leave in the genuinely great stuff, which is an approach that makes complete sense. I think at this stage I've heard the LP enough times to know exactly where it's going to go, so fortunately I know when to have my finger ready on the skip button, or to lift the stylus.

I've always enjoyed the dark undertones of 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da', though, if we're continuing to talk about things that aren't there.

There's a bit in 'Sexy Sadie' during the outro where the piano goes slightly out of tune and I just think to myself "fucking hell, you couldn't be arsed to get someone to tune the thing!?"

Also, there's quite a fair bit of material on The Beatles that needed a bit more work, if not cutting altogether. Nowhere is this more clear than on 'Dear Prudence', where it was Siouxsie and the Banshees that hit upon the definitive version.

i wonder if different masterings affect how one receives this album.

i have a half-baked tin foil hat theory about this, w/r/t a lot of old music that gets "remastered"

Turrican is right that "Bungalow Bill" is a load of pony. As is much of this album. At least it's interesting though, I mean, people rave about "Abbey Road" and that's got some real garbage on it. By the way, the piano is out of tune all the way through the Beach Boys' "Wild Honey" and it sounds great.

I love the pencil sketches on this album as much as the technicolor of Sgt. Pepper, etc. Just the sound/timbre of their voices, the personality in their singing, the distinctive drum fills, bass lines, etc., apart from how accomplished or not the songs are as compositions. The pleasure of listening to this particular group of musicians. Obviously that won't appeal to everyone.

i get the same kind of pleasure from Let It Be/Get Back, i know what you mean

fyi looking through a glass onion would actually be difficult and bizarre because each unpeeled layer of glass would introduce further refraction and scattering of the light. so yes i agree it is a good summation of the album.

that is a much better reply to the glass onion comment than the one that i came up with

Also, there's quite a fair bit of material on The Beatles that needed a bit more work, if not cutting altogether. Nowhere is this more clear than on 'Dear Prudence', where it was Siouxsie and the Banshees that hit upon the definitive version.

I like some of the Banshees' stuff OK but this is a truly incredible comment!

making incredible comments is easy if you try

It's hard to imagine you having a Beatles-related opinion that isn't coloured by backstory/biography/mythology, yes.

fyi looking through a glass onion would actually be difficult and bizarre because each unpeeled layer of glass would introduce further refraction and scattering of the light. so yes i agree it is a good summation of the album.

― Doctor Casino, Tuesday, October 31, 2017 8:04 AM (forty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

haha I had the same thought

i always pictured a lighthouse fresnel lens

i have some original thoughts about the white album which were published in the NYT back in 1968:

The Beatles' album is nothing. It's titled simply The Beatles (S W B O 101), it comes in a plain white cover and it covers 30 songs lasting for almost 90 minutes. It ranges wide, from classic rock through country and Western through avant-garde electronics to mock 1930, from the city blues through schmaltz through English music-hall and back to mainline pop again. It is, by turns, solemn and facetious, despairing and camp, maudlin and uproarious. Quite obviously, it's been put together with endless care and tenderness and, finally, it's boring almost beyond belief.

What's gone wrong basically, the trouble is, simply that rather more than half the songs are profound mediocrities. They're not new, the lyrics aren't sharp, they're not even felt. Mostly, they're rehashes of stuff that the Beatles have already done much better elsewhere. This album is exactly like a glass onion in the sense that I can see straight through it.

Even worse, faced by such deadwood, the Beatles haven't played it open but have covered up with a tortuous network of cross-references, in-jokes, pastiches and throwaways, a dreadful sniggering at their own sources. And, as they said they would, they've returned to their roots in fifties' rock but they haven't gone back hard, they don't mash out anything really loose and raucous. Instead, they hide behind send-up: the middle eight of "Back in the U.S.S.R.," for instance, is pure surf-age Beach Boys but it's all half-hearted and limp; the Beach Boys themselves did it ten times better.

In this way, scattered through the album, there is mock-cowboy ("Rocky Racoon"), mock-West Indies ("Ob-La-Di, Ob-La_da"), mock-blues ("Yer Blues"), mock-Muzak ("Goodnight"), even mock-Beatles ("Glass Onion") and none of it works, it all loses out to the originals it all sounds stale.

What survives in all this? Not very much: "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" is cheerful homicide, with an instantly hummable melody and some good Lennonesque lyrics ("Hey, Bungalow Bill, what did you kill, Bungalow Bill?"). "Don't Pass Me By," Ringo Starr's first published composition, is the Beatles five years back, straight ahead and clumsy and greatly enjoyable, backed by a beautiful hurdy-gurdy organ and made perfect by Ringo's own vocal, sleepwalking as ever. "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?" is a fragment, a nice one; "Revolution," taken much slower here than on the single, has excruciatingly smug words but remains a brilliant melody line. "Helter Skelter" is solid hardrock, the very first hardrock song ever actually, and "I'm So Tired" harks back to "I'm Only Sleeping," not nearly as good as that but not bad either. For the rest, it's dross almost all the way. The only track that I've found myself actually playing for pleasure has been "Happiness Is a Warm Gun," which is obviously mostly by John Lennon and which stands in roughly the same tradition as "A Day in the Life" and "I Am the Walrus."

As usual, "Happiness" includes more than its share of half-baked poeticisms ("she's well acquainted with the touch of a velvet hand like a lizard on a window pane") but, toward its climax, it breaks into a marvelous parody of high school rock in the mid-fifties, of groups like the Diamonds and the Monotones, and Lennon keeps repeating the title phrase, "Happiness is a warm gun," and the Beatles sing "bang bang--shoot shoot" in back of him. Just this once, the take-off has edge, it's not pure self-indulgence.

About the album as a whole, I still think it's bad but I don't think it matters much--The Beatles are going through a bad patch right now and their ego trip it out but they're too restless, to self-critical and too clever to stay like that. Next time around, no doubt, they'll make it good again.

This album is exactly like a glass onion in the sense that I can see straight through it.

uncanny

i couldn't resist adding it in

i'm always surprised by the lack of attention that "long, long, long" gets. even in Nik Cohn's 1968 review which takes the time to criticize just about every song, it only merits a half-diss by getting lumped in with the "dross almost all the way". it has always struck me an other-worldly song, a very odd composition that is still very easy to hum along to, with one of the best cathartic releases on the album ("so many tears i was searching, so many tears i was wasting"). it also sounds contemporary, or rather, it just sounds timeless (except for the backward sound crescendo at the end which used to ruin it for mixCDs unless you edited the ending out)

I heard it playing in a record shop years ago and thought it was Pink Floyd.

fyi looking through a glass onion would actually be difficult and bizarre because each unpeeled layer of glass would introduce further refraction and scattering of the light. so yes i agree it is a good summation of the album.

― Doctor Casino, Tuesday, October 31, 2017 3:04 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What you've described is not what the album sounds like, but okay Sheldon.

The closest any Beatle came to sounding like Pink Floyd was McCartney on 'Loup' from Red Rose Speedway, particularly the part where it drops down to the organ and the ascending bassline.

lol okay I am glad you have finally arrived in my life to tell me what an album I have been enjoying for twenty years objectively "sounds like"

Nik Cohn otm

"okay Sheldon"

I'm gonna have to find that Nik Cohn review...

glass onions are usually translucent but not transparent btw

oh i now see that other sheldons have covered that.

Guys, it's 2017 and not all of you are baby boomers clinging onto the notion that things were, like, soooooo much better back in the day - it's fully acceptable to admit that not everything The Beatles did was/is great and you can call out these records for what they are instead of listening to 'em through the layers of bullshit mythology that's accumulated over the decades.

Can I just say - I'm not a baby boomer (born in 1997) and while listening to Sgt Pepper/The White Album/Abbey Road it was The White Album that was by far the most captivating listen - Sgt Pepper felt overegged and Abbey Road was just a dirge.

I'm gonna have to find that Nik Cohn review...

Take as long as you like. Even if it takes a year or two.

xxpost:

If you were born in 1997, that means you probably started to pay attention to music around the end of last decade/beginning of this one. The Beatles has, unfortunately influenced a lot of shit indie so it figures.

If you were born in 1997, that means you probably started to pay attention to music around the end of last decade/beginning of this one. The Beatles has, unfortunately influenced a lot of shit indie so it figures.

Nope, started paying attention when I was 5/6. Fair play for standing by your intial points, though.

Well said, Sheldon Jr.

turrican you make such wild & blind assumptions about people you don't know at all beyond a username and a birth year

more like Turrican-you-not

"profound mediocrities"? "boring beyond belief" ... seems like Nik Cohn had a point.

Also:

Sgt Pepper felt overegged

It is!

Abbey Road was just a dirge

It isn't! (There's about as much resemblance to a "dirge" as 'The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill' has to a "march")

What has always bothered me about FM was the slick production. It distracts from the fact that the songs are often musically quite poor.

i'm still wrapping my head around this one

Flappy bird, I don't need to know you on a personal level to reach the various conclusions I have.

i hate it when i am distracted from music's quality by good production

The beatles

https://i1.wp.com/gifrific.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/leaving-now-grandpa-simpsons.gif?ssl=1