Michael Gerber
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The Fabs at Brasenose College, Oxford, March 1964

Folks, I’m not sure this one is worth posting—I’m not satisfied with it, but sometimes I’m the last to know what will spur discussion. Enjoy.—MG

As part of my freewheeling, exhaustive, and ultimately exhausting attempt to do anything other than what I am supposed to, this morning I ran across a very interesting blog post by a Beatles scholar named Serene Sargent. Coming hot on the heels of yesterday’s attempt at work-avoidance, a Substack about the decay of the university and the death of the humanities, and the increasingly important role of knowledge-gathering outside academe—and in the midst of a flareup of interest in the JFK assassination—this trifecta shook loose some thoughts I’d like to share.

As you can see from the first link, there is on the internet a recent kind of Beatles fandom in which the fans call themselves “scholars.” This expresses itself mainly in extensive fact-checking and -gathering, followed by an ongoing Talmudic disputation of everything involving John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Much brainpower is expended, by many—it is essentially a floating Beatle University. There are websites—podcasts—YouTube channels—all good fun for a certain kind of big-brained Beatle fan. I suspect these fans would bristle at my calling this pursuit “fun,” but I mean no disparagement by either “fan” or “fun”—why I characterize it this way has everything to do with me, and not with them, as you’ll see later in this post.

This type of fandom is very different from earlier types. As a Beatles fan obsessed with the Sixties, I might well have wanted to take a college course in the group in 1989, but the faculty at Yale would’ve considered this idea preposterous. Not so today, where Oxford herself offers such a summer seminar. That low- and highbrow culture has met somewhere in the middle—that no item of pop culture is considered too small to avoid academic-style analysis—is a hallmark of our era; and to me it suggests that the very idea of higher education has changed. A degree, doubly so a fancy one, used to be a gauntlet a person needed to run to obtain entree into certain areas of society. Now it seems at least in part determined by what students already know and want to think about. If students are customers, it follows the customer—even at uber-snotty places like Oxford—is always right. If the space in a kid’s head once occupied by The Aeneid is now filled with the various takes of “Strawberry Fields,” that’s a change, not because one is better than the other, but because it was possible in 1989 for a kid’s brain to accommodate both, creating a useful internal tension. (Ask me how I know.) And speaking as a producer of pop culture, it remains to be seen whether this academification is good for the pop product. The last Star Wars movie—surely created by film school grads well-versed in this new way of engaging with pop culture—is certainly not better and perhaps is worse than either Lucas’ original Saturday serial or The Empire Strikes Back.

None of this is the problem of Beatle scholars on the internet, who can only engage with the world they’ve been dealt. The emergence of this flavor of fandom was also inevitable, as more and more Beatle-data was digitized and found its way online. What do you do when all the unreleased tracks are on YouTube? You dissect them! Online Beatle scholarship may well make the received story fundamentally more accurate; the only downside I can see is missing the forest for the trees. But this kind of fandom is about the trees. Each tree. Each individual leaf. And by examining each individual leaf—so it is believed—and conferring amongst each other, a newer, truer vision of The Beatles story can be built. And that over the years, more and more truth will be accumulated, without end.

This linear progress seems to be how science and engineering work, fields where reality can be measured and tested, with well-defined principles, and hypotheses that can be tested and proven or found wanting. But I’m not sure history works this way; human affairs are fundamentally mysterious, no matter how many facts one accumulates. There always remains interpretation—and our interpretations might actually be getting worse and worse, the farther we extend from the world under review. Santa Monica in 2026 is nothing like London, England in 1965, and there is a humility necessary.

One of the things never directly expressed but nevertheless clear in Ms. Sargent’s essay is the relationship between historical research and a sense of ownership—these scholars guard their Fabs jealously. Errors of fact are serious things; the word “cataclysm” is bandied about. Motives are questioned. Mark Lewisohn comes in for a lot of stick, not just for his habit of conflating quotes, or his errors in scholarship (Tune In Vol. 1 is being scoured, and found wanting), but for Lewisohn’s market-positioning: he alone can tell the story.

This makes me chuckle. Of course this is what Lewisohn says—he can say no other thing because this is what every author says, and every publisher, too. Humility does not sell you books; Spitz before him touted “the real story,” and before him, Norman; and looming over it all, Anthology, “their own story, in their own words.” All selling the latest, surely-finally-absolutely definitive version of the group and its times. But will Lewisohn, with all his research (and apparent Frankenquotes) offer up a story vastly different from the one we know? Not so far. But I am glad for his books and his work and so I nod politely and say, “Go ahead, Mr. L., shoot your shot.” And I say the same to any Beatle scholar.

Was Hey Dullblog present at this birth of this very intellectual way of enjoying The Beatles? ‘spect so, though almost immediately there were other sites (Tumblrs, then; Substacks now) that scratched these itches much more deeply and well than we did. And that is because…well, I have to admit a few things to you.

I am, in general, comfortable with gatekeepers.
“Of course you are, you’re a middle-aged white man! IOW, a gatekeeper!” Well, guilty as charged, when it comes to my little fiefdoms (I run this website, and a magazine). But at least you know who you’re dealing with, and that’s not nothing. As with this post, I try to be clear about where I’m coming from and why. But more importantly, places which embrace distributed, anonymous editorial authority—for example, Wikipedia—have not proven to be superior to an old, editor-run encyclopedia. Don’t believe me? Think of a contentious topic in which you’ve read deeply (say, the JFK assassination). Now go read the Wikipedia page; you’ll find a lot of questionable stuff there—assertions presented as settled fact, debates sanded smooth, et cetera. Some of this is a structural flaw: Wikipedia cannot be wiser or more nuanced than mainstream media because of its sourcing rules, and it can be worse, because bias doesn’t average down—more people can mean more bias, more confusion, and volume or authority carrying the day. Moderating a webpage, especially anonymously, is a social act, subject to all sorts of horse-trading and hidden hierarchies. One “expert” is not necessarily worse than a bunch of anonymous mods, each with much less knowledge. Interpretation is ever-present. Authority still exists and must be exercised; “gut calls” must be made.

Is Wikipedia better than Grok? Yes. Is it better than a properly edited encyclopedia article on the topic? Often not. Anonymity, collaboration, multiple authorship…the holiness of these things is the internet’s secular religion, but perhaps it’s time to step back and see where this faith has taken us.

I have been a sentient adult for the entire length of the consumer internet, and the information ecology today is infinitely worse than it was in 1989. While shining us all on about freedom and access and egalitarianism, the internet has given us monopoly and dystopia, and now AI has come in to deliver the coup de grace. The only things that are not spun, are things too small to make any money. I know what politics and fandom and media was like before the internet, and I know how it functions now, and…man, young people, I am so sorry. Part of the reason I keep doing Dullblog is out of misplaced guilt over the rest of the internet.

In my experience, pre-internet people were not less well-informed; perhaps they were better-informed, because the data had been pre-contextualized—you weren’t making up the whole story yourself, you were building on frameworks provided by experts. Gatekeepers weren’t absolute authorities; if something sounded like bullshit, people could and did read more widely. But you did so with some basic knowledge; you didn’t walk around with a headful of facts, selected by your limbic system for reasons known only to you (and sometimes not even then). There were professors who told you what a lifetime of scholarship on a topic had taught them; there were doctors and scientists who shared discoveries with the world; there were governments which, in addition to being corrupt sometimes, and self-dealing often, and always difficult to improve, actually kept the world from blowing itself up. The gatekeeper world got us through the Cuban Missile Crisis. The non-gatekeeper world can’t even impeach President Corrupty McPedophile.

Does “knowledge want to be free”? Should “the power be put in the hands of the individual”? No clue, but we have to at least entertain the idea that knowledge work may simply require a level of patience, care, and judgment that most people don’t have or wish to develop. Prior to social media, gatekeeping institutions from the fully staffed and functional State Department to the biased  New York Times had agreed that Fascism was bad—no matter how simple or intriguing or viscerally appealing its arguments were, especially to young men. The gatekeepers, those smug bastards, firmly closed the gate to Fascist ideas. Few tears were shed over this; few people felt unduly constrained. There were no American concentration camps most of the time, and that was good. Gatekeepers can be unfair and opaque, but they can also be very useful.

I don’t think The Beatles are all that important.
The things that people choose to become scholars in aren’t necessary what the world needs to know about. I adore reading about the Kennedys, and could spin you a tale about how important it is that we learn the lessons encoded in their story, but…you shouldn’t necessarily believe me. I’m an obsessive on the topic, for lots of personal reasons which I can explain sometime. But my fascination, while (mostly) harmless, doesn’t mean finding out who shot JFK is really that important.

The Fabs are fascinating and wonderful, but they’re arguably even less consequential. Unlike many Beatle scholars, I’m perfectly happy with Mark Lewisohn’s books not because I think they are 100% true, but because they represent a good-faith effort to get a workable narrative. I feel comfortable saying that they are broadly accurate, which is probably the best that can be hoped for in a book of their type. They are not fully “what happened”—no book is, regardless of length. But their factuality is only one part of their usefulness, and sometimes not even the largest part of it. Often when I read a book about The Beatles—as when I read a book about the Kennedys—I am launched into a reverie about them, and all the things that touched them, and how that time is different from my own, and how I might apply whatever lessons I have gleaned.

But in the end, the “importance” of these topics to me is located in my own life and experiences. Obsessions are useful to others not in the mutual reinforcement of them—though that is as fun as sharing a crack pipe—but in the deeper personal context, what the interest reveals about oneself, which is only revealed after sincere self-excavation. (Whether one shares that with others is another story.)

Finally, I don’t think the truth is findable, and certainly not through the accrual of facts.
Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August came out in 1962; we certainly have learned more facts about the outbreak of World War I in the 64 years since, so why is Tuchman still essential reading for anyone interested in the topic? Interpretation; judgment; usefulness of narrative. Even if her thesis is someday proven wrong (as with Gibbon), The Guns of August will till be useful.

Whatever popular historians might tell you, “history” is not actually the sharing of truth. It is the creation of a useful story, fashioned from a limited set of always-incomplete facts, reflected our time as much as the past. Facts are important, but they are not the most important, which is lucky because the supply of new facts dwindles over time. Murders can be solved via science—the Ripper murders may have been, the JFK murder might one day be—but for larger histories, new facts are likely to matter little. We probably already know all the facts we need to understand The Beatles’ story—after all, what four people have been more documented?

If we say that History is “figuring out what happened” the proportion is probably 75% “figuring out”—meaning, a person filled with biases formed by their own experiences applying judgment, fitting facts together into a story that makes sense to them. The remaining 25% is that portion of experience that are observable facts agreed upon by all, which sketch out the rough outlines, like ships in the fog. We know the Titanic is about there, and the iceberg with the streak of red paint about there…

Facts, facts, and more facts. Will we ever know for sure why The Beatles broke up? Do they?

•     •     •

So where does all my high-toned blub-blub leave us? Well, I’m glad that some fans care enough about The Beatles to continue to gather more facts about them. I’m glad, too, that they will hold Beatle authors’ feet to the fire, especially as publishers, too, lose faith in those expensive gatekeeping editors. Precision will only get more important, and more challenging, as AI-generated material continues to pollute the data-stream.

“Getting the story right” is a laudable goal, even if impossible. The history of The Beatles is vastly, vastly bigger than the (truly immense, life-swallowing) JFK assassination; the Fabs’ story stretches over years and years, and involves a much larger cast of people interacting with a seemingly infinite number of events. So I don’t think fact-gathering and collation is going to get us closer to the truth, which is often easier to glimpse from a distance. Beatles scholars may, perhaps, develop into a sort of priestly class, professors without Universities, their degrees self-conferred by the time and energy to read and winnow. Is that better than having it done by journalists, or academics? I think it’s probably more similar than different.

In the end, I think one of the internet’s most sacred of cows—that more data is better—is proving to be false. It’s running up against the boundaries of time and attention; as the amount of data flying at people balloons exponentially, readers are defaulting to the role of customer—they are selecting the story which appeals to them, reading that, and calling it a day. Perhaps this is why a world where people “do their own research” is proving to be less-informed, and more susceptible to deception, than the old gatekept one.

We cannot go back, but we do not, as yet, have a clear way forward.

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