The Beatles, Sean Spicer, and the Chicago Women’s March
Saturday was a tale of two crowds: the kerfuffle over the inauguration audience and the turnout for the women's marches around the country and around the world. Given that the facts / "alternative facts" in question concerned crowd size, it's fitting that the ever-popular Beatles featured in a couple of the memes generated in the wake of Sean Spicer's statements to the press about [...]
Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles”
Please welcome back guest Dullblogger J.R. Clark, who sent in these thoughts on the hit song and video "Black Beatles." If you're not a fan of contemporary hip-hop music or the Mannequin Challenge, you may be unaware of “Black Beatles,” the recent Billboard Hot 100 number-one single by brothers Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi, the duo known collectively as Rae Sremmurd (Ear [...]
The Beatles in musical context, 1963-1965
Guest Dullblogger Justin McCann, a freelance writer, musician, and self-described “inveterate lurker” on Hey Dullblog, offers these observations on the Beatles’ musical context in 1963-65. Please give him a warm welcome. As innovative as the Beatles were, their rivals — the Stones, The Who, the Kinks, Bob Dylan et. al. — were often just as inventive and you can read about them [...]
Deconstructing The Beatles, the movie
Enjoying your magical mystery tour...? Against all odds, and perhaps against our better judgment, life seems ever-so-slowly to be returning to normal. This morning I received an email from musicologist Scott Freiman, who lectures regularly on the Fabs, dissecting some of their most interesting albums in front of a live audience. Now Freiman's lecture on the White Album has been [...]
Election reflections, Beatle-inflected
Like many Americans, I’ve found this week emotionally exhausting. In the aftermath of this election, blogging about the Beatles seems ridiculous, so I offer these reflections with the hope that they may be helpful. However angry we may be, may we return no one evil for evil. May these times make us stronger and more determined to oppose injustice with love, and [...]
What John Lennon Thinks of Donald Trump
In the last few days, two people close to me have said they’ve found John’s “Gimme Some Truth” to be a tonic right now, even a cathartic. But this is the Lennon song that came to my mind, a day or two after the worst cataclysm to befall America since 9/11, and I’ve been listening to it several times a day. Coming [...]
McCartney Opens Sacramento Stadium with a Bang
My view from the cheap(ish) seats. Paul McCartney opened Sacramento’s Golden 1 Center on October 4 the same way he closed down Candlestick Park two years ago – with a nonstop volley of songs. The opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night” sounded, and tens of thousands of fans started screaming. The overall mood, though decidedly more decorous than the heyday [...]
American Bystander #3 is available
If George were alive, he'd totally dig this magazine. I try to keep my non-Beatles activities separate from this blog, for obvious reasons. And being from the Midwest, I have a positive horror of self-promotion. (This has been exactly as helpful to my career as you might expect.) But several readers have asked me to tell everybody about my dayjob, [...]
Eight Days A Week
A room and a room and a car and a room: At least this room has wheels. Well, I finally went to see the much-anticipated Eight Days A Week last night at 10:00 in the p.m. Why so late? Because I've been working eight days, etc etc. I know the story, backwards and forwards, and so do you. So going [...]