Beatle Fatigue

I have Beatle fatigue.

I’m sorry. I totally admire them and all they accomplished. I even saw Macca in concert with my husband in 2019. I understand the historical importance and the genius and the revolution and the harmonies and the hair.

But here’s the tea.

My husband is a Beatleologist, and as a result, I feel like I’ve spent the past thirty-plus years earning a PhD in the Beatles. 

Sometimes willingly.

There have been long documentaries. Alternate takes. Remasters. Outtakes. Box sets. Interviews conducted forty years after the fact in which everyone tries to remember what they ate for lunch in 1967.

I’m worn out. 

I’m done. 

The latest documentary, Man on the Run, McCartney’s musical life post-Beatles, made me feel like I was being forced to sit in a darkened basement watching someone’s home movies with no snacks.

WITH NO SNACKS!

Word Raccoon was not convinced we had to stay. She kept testing the door handle.

I told her it would be rude to leave.

She said rudeness is sometimes a survival skill.

I don’t need to know McCartney’s favorite soft drink. (They didn’t say, but I really don’t want to know. It’s an example.)

I don’t need to know the name of his fucking dog.

Who cares about his haircut nowadays?

Is that what he wants to be remembered for? 

I highly doubt it.

I want the songs. The strange electric beauty of them. The way McCartney struggles against his worn bass so melodically. The way the songs rise up out of nowhere and rearrange the air for three minutes. Mull of Kintyre? (By Wings, of course, but McCartney’s.) Chef’s kiss. 

But I don’t need the daily weather reports of any musicians’ lives. (And this documentary in particular covered little new ground, even in my estimation.)

At some point the work starts to disappear under the TONS of documentation. The songs get buried under commentary the way fossils get buried under sediment, and soon you’re studying the layers instead of the creature, no matter which musician or artist we might be talking about.

(Word Raccoon opened the basement window and considered escape options. I lured her back from the edge with promises of the last piece of chocolate cake if she behaved.)

I’m worn out.

I want to live my life, not recount the minutiae of someone else’s. I want to write that 100 times in different fonts. 

While we can enjoy the work of others, while we can learn from them, to immerse yourself too much in someone else’s art is to ignore your own. To discount your own. 

Oh god, you’re not NOT creating your own work and just consuming someone else’s, are you? YOU KNOW BETTER THAN THAT! 

And maybe more than that, to elevate someone to that degree is to quietly step back from your own place in art, whatever that place might be. (The above point, just quieter. I don’t feel quiet about it, though.) 

Admiration can turn into a kind of silence. If art belongs only to the geniuses, then the rest of us become audience members, studying their lives instead of living our own.

I don’t think art works that way.

I don’t think it should work that way.

I don’t think it should be allowed to work that way.

If we bury ourselves in “But I’m not McCartney,” or insert-an-artist, isn’t that just fear in another costume? 

There is room for all of us. Not just to listen, but to answer.

Word Raccoon said we had perfectly good poems upstairs waiting for us that we could be editing.

And possibly snacks. 

Definitely cake. 

With that, we left the chat.