This Is This

I heard the “new” Beatles album yesterday. Some bits were OK, but others weren’t awful, but it was a little pointless.

I should explain something. I am a musical snob. There.

What George Martin and his son have done is revisited the master tapes and remixed them, so Fab fans can listen to them again in a new context. So you know that reversed cymbal you liked in Strawberry Fields? There’s a break in there which is nothing but the cymbal before the chorus. Some parts are stripped down, and other parts are woven in.

There’s a bit in Lady Madonna where it takes in the distored guitar from Hey Bulldog.

It’s Beatles for tourists.

“And in your left ear, you’ll notice the horns from Got To Get You Into My Life. The trumpets and saxes were recorded are over fourty years ago…. Sir Paul had this hip hop beat flown in piece by piece from New York in the United States.”

A friend at work asked me to listen to it and I lasted about a minute, until I slid my chair back a step, flung of my headphones, threw them onto my desk and looked down at them in sudden mock horror.

If this is going to happen with every generation, I’m glad I’m only taking up one of them.

But people will buy it, so who am I to criticise? Where there’s a market, I should park it.*

A piece of music is just that - a piece. It’s presented the way the artist wants it at the time. Time moves on, you move on, they should move on.

OK, I thought that Elvis remix of “A Little Less Conversation” was great, and I have some good remixes of Goldfrapp and Manic Street Preachers but still.

I don’t need to see a colour version of Guernica.

*You could have had:
If it’s shelves they’re stacking, I’ll quit yacking.
If it’s an earner, it’s on the backburner.
If it’s selling, I’m not what-the-helling.
Where there’s retail, leave the detail.

Also on This Is This
See, if you put on a hat, suddenly you’re this guy wearing a hat, you know what I mean? If a friend below the age of 60 comes up to you and you’ve never seen them in a hat before, I bet you think, “Oh, look, it’s Steve. In a hat.”
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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 25th, 2006 at 8:30 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can skip to the end and leave a comment yourself.