A world with no Beatles?
‘Yesterday’ stirs nostalgia, prompts thoughts on Fab Four’s impact
Danny Boyle’s rom-com “Yesterday” recently opened in theaters, and its premise — after a global blackout, memory of the Beatles and their music have evaporated from the world — has both enchanted moviegoers (the film did very well opening weekend) and outraged much of the Twitterati who feel it doesn’t do justice to the Beatles’ music. So, two Chronicle pop-culture writers — Wei-Huan Chen and Andrew Dansby — discuss the premise and what the Beatles’ music meant and means, yesterday and today.
Wei-Huan Chen: So, what if the Beatles never existed? How do we even begin to tackle this question? I don’t want to spoil too much, but in the movie “Yesterday,” an aspiring singersongwriter realizes he’s in an alternate reality where this is the case, and he Googles Oasis and finds out the band never existed. OK. What else changes if John, Paul, George and Ringo never became a band? Sure, a supposedly “derivative” band no longer has a foundational pop-rock group to be inspired by, and we lose “Wonderwall.” What else?
Andrew Dansby: My favorite joke/moment in the film was when Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) plays “Yesterday” for his friends and one expresses admiration but also pumps the brakes on Jack’s belief that the song is
great. She says something like, “It’s not Coldplay. It’s not ‘Fix You.’ ” That moment rang true. There is great music from the past that endures for a reason. But trends change and evolve for a reason. And if you create a scenario where someone knows “Fix You” and has never heard “Yesterday,” a lot of them will side with “Fix You,” which sounds like a travesty.
One of my favorite things about the film was the gentle way it made me think about the evolution of popular vocal music in the 20th and 21st century, and the role of nostalgia in all of it.
This is a long way of saying that the Oasis joke was funny — because Oasis
does owe a ridiculous creative debt to the Beatles, though one the band has always admitted. But they’re hardly alone. Coldplay and “Fix You” also vanish in a world with no Beatles. Even Jack’s Radiohead poster might vanish. Radiohead has done a Beatles-y thing in keeping its fervent fan base despite some experimental musical pursuits.
On the flip side: We don’t lose everything. Somebody in the mid-’60s would’ve come along and found a way to advance early rock ’n’ roll. Maybe they wouldn’t have found that enchanting, weird middle ground between Little Richard and skiffle.
I guess this is where the conversation would get into science fiction, because taking away the Beatles changes things. But it doesn’t erase a halfcentury of music wholly. They weren’t an egg that hatched. They were some part of a tree, and we can argue about where they fit in a system of root, trunk, branch, smaller branch and leaf.
Chen: I mean, the question is essentially the reverse form of, “Please summarize the entirety of the Beatles’ cultural and musical influence,” which, of course, is not something you tackle in a 110-minute rom-com. So “Yesterday” makes a few jokes and moves on without going, “What happens to pop? What happens to the mythology of the rock musician as creative genius?
What happens to psych rock without ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and so on.”
Honestly, it’s too much. Because you can’t look back at the complicated tapestry of Western culture and say, well, what if we removed this one very important thread in the middle right here?
The other question, which I find perhaps easier to answer, is, “How would audiences respond to ‘Hey Jude,’ ‘Let It Be’ and other great Beatles hits if they were never composed until today?” The movie suggests people nearly immediately recognize these songs as some of the greatest pieces of songwriting ever. Jack Malik shoots to stardom. In the era of social media and postgenre music and YouTube and Spotify and everything, though, does a great singer-songwriter still dominate the culture like that? I don’t know. Are you convinced this would happen?
Dansby: Yeah, there was a great book, “The Song of the Dodo,” that was about ecosystems. And it mentioned that if you take an animal out of an ecosystem, everything changes. The metaphor was some sort of fancy rug: If you take out a representative percentage of that rug, the entire rug is useless and unravels. It’s not like you just have 99 percent of the same rug.
I also found myself thinking about the contemporary reaction to these songs if they were brand new, as presented in the movie. And I think some of them do have this timedefying quality. “Hey Jude” is rousing to me because I’ve heard it all my life. My kid is 13, and she only needed to hear it once before she would go into na na na nananana mode. Not all great songs can achieve that effect. On the flip side, “Yesterday” presents some other songs that I don’t think would have a prayer today if they were brand new. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” doesn’t work as a new song in 2019. People love it for its nostalgic value and its joyful quality. But times and mores evolve, and while our culture bends backward in retro ways stylistically, I don’t think courtship and sex are among them. Even “Please Please Me” — which wasn’t in the movie — sounds quaint today. And that title was nasty for its era. But not so nasty that it didn’t sneak past various cultural gatekeepers and arbiters.
So I’m mixed on this one. Even when I try to eliminate more than 50 years of cultural ubiquity from my mind, I still hear in their grander songs’ qualities that are fetching on first listen.
Where are you with that?
Chen: I’m of two minds. First, you make a great point. We don’t need a movie to figure out what happens when people hear the Beatles for the first time. People get introduced to the Beatles all the time. And a lot of them love it. I was infected with Beatlemania in college, and that was after I spent most of high school listening to the Who, the Rolling Stones, Queen and Boston. The first time I listened to “Abbey Road,” I realized the Beatles operated on a higher plane of album composition than most of the “classic rock” bands. New generations loving the Beatles is real-world proof that they still cut through the noise.
On the other hand, people buy more Ed Sheeran (who’s in “Yesterday” hilariously as Ed Sheeran, who discovers Malik) albums than Beatles records today. In jazz, Miles Davis and John Coltrane are still more famous than Esperanza Spalding. In classical music, Bach and Beethoven are still more famous than Philip Glass. Can we say the same of the Beatles, and who would we compare them to?
I suppose it’s a test of time. During the height of Coldplay, probably more people listened to Coldplay than the Beatles, but today, I’m not so sure. People love new things and celebrities, and we’ll never know what it felt like to see the Beatles live — if it felt more like history than seeing a big concert today. God, my head is spinning. I think I’m going to go listen to “Something.” The song always calms me down and makes the world seem simpler. Shall we end with our go-to Beatles track? I’ll stick with the above. “I don’t want to leave her now” …
Dansby: My kid asked me my go-to Beatles track in the car and I responded with “And Your Bird Can Sing,” which was met with resounding silence. I think she wanted something familiar from the film. Actually, my favorite “track” is a cheat: which is side B of “Abbey Road.” Though your mention of “Something” is a good reminder that their third best songwriter still created a couple of songs that ended up standards. I mean, “Something.” … That song has been covered by Frank Sinatra, Shirley Bassey, Isaac Hayes, James Brown, Willie Nelson, Johnny Rodriguez, Liberace. … The bridge is unassailable.
Anyway, this all makes me think of that recent Bob Dylan not-quite-documentary from a few weeks ago, “Rolling Thunder Revue.” The concert footage was from the mid-’70s, so more than a decade after Dylan had debuted and about a decade after the recordings most people would identify as his best. And I was intrigued that the crowd was generationally mixed. I assumed kids in 1976 wouldn’t be inclined to go hear their parents’ ’60s totem. But it reminds me that a few music folks manage that sort of crossover. And the Beatles have done so.
A lot of the reason is the music. And even that is multipronged. One thing I think served the Beatles well is the very contained discography. They simply didn’t stick around too long. We could quibble about the solo recordings, which are great, which are good, which are eh, and which are terrible. But their recording era was limited to about eight years, with … I think 13 long-players in that time and some singles. They kind of made 20 years of music in that period, but they existed just long enough to push trends rather than falling behind them. And that’s not to be ignored. They don’t have a “Steel Wheels” or “Dirty Work.” People smarter about the mechanics of music can tell you more about why the songs were progressive and enduring. I can respond to them more viscerally.
But I think it was the historian Douglas Brinkley I was talking to recently who said they were as much a TV phenomenon as they were a musical phenomenon.
And that’s interesting because visual stimuli and platforms have changed so much in the 50-plus years since.
Think of it this way: The Beatles connection to cinema was to be involved in Beatles-made films. Which people saw or skipped. But doubling back to Coldplay, “Fix You” ends up in the trailers of films like “King Kong,” which puts that song inside your skull whether or not you actually go see “King Kong.” That’s interesting to me. The “test of time” thing is always interesting. There are songs that stick around and others that don’t, and some that don’t but then they get dredged back up and recirculated. For the fun I’ve had at its expense, I have no reason to think that “Fix You” won’t stick around a long time. It’s a ballad that strikes a sweet but melancholy tone in describing difficulties regarding connection. The best Beatles songs in “Yesterday” — or at least those I think are the best — are built from similar materials. I appreciate some rousing quality to “Back in the USSR,” but I can’t imagine anybody would rank it above “Yesterday.”