John Lennon
The Beatles
Yesterday I watched Spinal Tap: The End Continues. I never saw This is Spinal Tap, but I don’t think that much matters. My point, here, is that in that context, listening to “Free as a Bird,” it sounds very much like a song an aging band would’ve come up with. Never mind the actual context; it’s very much as if Lennon himself conceived of it that way, and using its bones…Could the rest of the band have come up with anything else? In some alternate reality where Lennon wasn’t killed, if they’d gotten back together, is this how they would’ve sounded anyway?
The ‘90s were already the beginning of a seismic shift in rock. Everyone seemed to have become convinced that mainstream rock had been shifted on its axis by Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, and that his sudden death effectively killed the genre’s future. And it’s been exactly that diagnosis ever since. At about the same time the surviving Beatles were cobbling together both the Anthology documentary and the accompanying archival albums, an unexpected revisit not just with history but the living remainder of the band many still considered, and consider to this day, the defining rock band, no one seemed to know how to take it seriously anymore. Might in some way that moment somehow pushed the idea of current rock bands, in the mainstream, so far out of orbit it was impossible to reposition? The wild experiments that followed the Beatles, and the push out of the mainstream that resulted, left little ground the general public seemed interested in exploring. The very idea of rebellion had become marginalized, after fueling so much of rock history, and suddenly there’s this new Beatles track, and it’s the calmest the band ever sounded. Where do you go from there?
Anyway, a thought.
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