Fifty years ago, The Beatles finally settled on a name and quickly became one of the most influential and artistic bands and brands in human history. Forty years ago, the release of its last original full-length album Let It Be closed out a decade of technocultural influence that has yet to be matched by popular culture in our still-new millennium.

But as in history itself, hyperreality prevailed.

Beatles leader John Lennon — born mostly rootless 70 years ago in working-class Liverpool and assassinated 30 years ago in cosmopolitan New York — proved to be the century’s most innovative and uncompromising musical artist, as well as a destabilized epicenter of controversy.

The band remixed the Marx Brothers, revised pop hits, revolutionized musical technology and exploration, and still remain more popular than Jesus — but expired in reality television’s dead eye. Only to be mediated in strange news ways: A touchstone for terrible experiments (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, All This and World War II, Across the Universe) and stunning gamer fantasy (The Beatles: Rock Band). Dark conspiracies and zombie dystopias like the forthcoming Paul McCartney Really is Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison and zombie satire Paul is Undead. Even Oasis, one of the post-Lennon landscapes most popular Beatles simulations, has a Beatles film on the way. Starring its own music.

Lennon’s mysterious life and death still swirls with technocultural iteration. The 70th anniversary of his birth is bound inextricably with the anniversary of his assassination, a cosmological yin-yang tightrope that adds firepower to the myth of intelligent design. Recently released comics compilation The Beatles envisions Lennon as such an interstellar spirit, peeking in on his terrestrial life as it unfolds. What he sees is Richard Nixon, whose unsuccessfully paranoid power play to keep Lennon out of New York was perfectly documented in the film The U.S. vs. John Lennon, grovel before George H.W. Bush for some payback. It arrives in a hail of bullets six years after Nixon is ignominiously hounded out of office, by an alleged Manchurian Candidate named Mark David Chapman — a man with actual ties to the Bush family.

Lennon’s spiral down history’s rabbit hole commands balance, as he’s torn between anniversary biopics like Lennon Naked, Nowhere Boy and others yet to be announced and commenced. Orbiting films young and old like The Killing of John Lennon and Chapter 27 — co-starring jailed tabloid regular Lindsay Lohan — try to find a center of gravity in Lennon’s myth. And that’s before you even get to the music.

When you finally arrive there, working backwards through the conflicting reality and hyperreality of The Beatles and its martyred architect, you find technoculture in formation. Pop music’s first experimental feedback on “I Feel Fine.” Pioneering backward vocals and volume on “Rain.” Groundbreaking backward solos, tape remixes, trip-hopping and more on “Tomorrow Never Know.” First staduim concert at Shea. First cartoon band, later whose television opportunists later converted an animated Beatles myth into a timeless feature called Yellow Submarine. The list goes on. We’ll get there in Geek the Beatles.

I’ll explore the band’s lasting impact in a continuing series of articles on Wired and elsewhere, anchored currently to the band’s momentous anniversaries in 2010 but drifting beyond to those to come, including its American “invasion” — which detonated a mass hysteria yet to be equaled in postmodern history. I plan to recombine these technocultural strands into a reverse engineering of The Beatles. Beginning at 0 — 1940, 1960, 1970, 1980, 2010 — and working toward the one love the band variously seeks — in its Vegas spectacular called Love, in “All You Need is Love,” in everything it did — Geek The Beatles shines a light on our much darker times, where reality and hyperreality still struggled for primacy. Love is, as The Beatles sang, “The Word.”

The manuscript should be finished by 2011. Want it?

Geek The Beatles: Let It Be’s Recombined Reality Bites
[Scott Thill, Wired.com]
Let It Be, released May 8, 1970, shortly after the band members called it quits and transformed The Beatles from a dysfunctional band into a fully functioning multimedia brand. The songs on what became the group’s last official full-length album were vault-raided and controversially remixed by mad producer Phil Spector from a heap of discarded and bitterly divided sessions, and featured little to no input from band members John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.

A Beatles documentary, released a week after the album, was similarly retconned, conceived as a “bioscopic experience” that would help sequence the genes for the intrusive reality television we take for granted in the 21st century. In the last gasp of the optimistic but lethal ’60s, however, reality film killed the pop radio stars.

“By the time we got to Let It Be, we couldn’t play the game anymore,” Lennon said in the exhaustive biographical series The Beatles Anthology. “We’d come to a point where it was no longer creating magic, and the camera being in the room with us made us aware of that. It was a phony situation.”

The original concept for the Let It Be film would sell instantly today: Inconspicuous but ever-present cameras document the greatest pop band of all time as it composes, rehearses and then performs and records its next album in front of a live audience. “You can glide in with your cameras,” an earnest but frustrated McCartney said in the film. “Go places that TV cameras don’t go.”

But the film bowed to the Beatles’ momentous reality: The band, like the decade that it so thoroughly informed, was finished.

What remained after The Beatles’ recombined Let It Be killed on the charts but flopped in theaters was not a band, but a brand. That evolution heralded a coming, contentious age of creator-owned businesses, increasing copyfight litigation, remix culture, band-brand revolutions, crappy tech and more. Here are nine — number nine, number nine — ways the breakup of The Beatles, as well as the twin iterations of Let It Be, hallmarked tectonic shifts in media culture, using the album’s song titles as points of departure. You know, just to twist the anniversary knife a little.
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