Archäologie (DXCXV): Lend your ear to the 50th anniversary Sgt. Pepper remix and hear the difference // Imagine there’s no Sgt Pepper. It’s all too easy in the era of Trump and May
Der interessanteste Beitrag zum großen 2017-It was fifty years ago today-Projekt, den ich gefunden habe:
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Eine kritische Würdigung hier (Alexis Petridis im Guardian), die aber auch nicht leugnet, dass Giles Martin’s remix is a vast improvement on the old stereo version – more muscular, with an unexpected emphasis placed on Ringo Starr’s drums – although the original mono mix, also here, is the one with the Beatles’ fingerprints on it. - Wenn Sie irgendwo mal reinhören können, zögern Sie nicht: Der TitleTrack zB. brettert richtig los ...
Imagine there’s no Sgt Pepper. It’s all too easy in the era of Trump and May (John Harris, theguardian)
#SgtPepperPhotos: A Beatles Fan Is Hunting Down All the Original Photos of People and Images on the Sgt. Pepper’s Cover / Vintage Everyday
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Eine kritische Würdigung hier (Alexis Petridis im Guardian), die aber auch nicht leugnet, dass Giles Martin’s remix is a vast improvement on the old stereo version – more muscular, with an unexpected emphasis placed on Ringo Starr’s drums – although the original mono mix, also here, is the one with the Beatles’ fingerprints on it. - Wenn Sie irgendwo mal reinhören können, zögern Sie nicht: Der TitleTrack zB. brettert richtig los ...
Imagine there’s no Sgt Pepper. It’s all too easy in the era of Trump and May (John Harris, theguardian)
- Go back 50 years, and you perhaps hear early stirrings of those ideas, soaked in patchouli oil and put to tape at EMI’s Abbey Road studios. Try George Harrison’s Indian-flavoured Within You Without You: Try to realise it’s all within yourself/No one else can make you change. Or what about John Lennon’s response to the rebels of ’68 in Revolution (on the so-called White Album)? You tell me it’s the institution/Well, you know/You’d better free your mind instead. As for a picture of globalised utopia, after the Beatles had broken up, Lennon released that saccharine anthem Imagine, with its key line: Imagine there’s no countries.
And now? “If you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere,” says our new prime minister. If we do indeed live in the post-liberal times endlessly analysed in academic papers, it is the inheritance of the 60s that is in question. For sure, many of the changes that originated then have become irreversibly embedded in millions of lives. Attitudes to marriage, sexuality and matters of race are seemingly more liberal than ever; wherever you go, you’re never very far from the whiff of marijuana smoke.
But the dominance of post-60s individualism and globalisation is being weakened by the resurgence of collective identities meant to have withered away: class, nation, region. And if the events of 2016 and 2017 are anything to go by, political success now often goes to people whose values appear the polar opposite of the old counterculture.
Duty, nationhood, and regular trips to church: whatever values Theresa May affects to represent, they are surely redolent of a world that existed long before the 1960s (consider also her parliamentary record, which includes votes against equalising the age of consent, gay adoption and the repeal of section 28).
Last year, a New York Post article contrasted Hillary Clinton’s embodiment of the “campus 1960s” with the sense that Donald Trump was an unexpected throwback to the Rat Pack, those macho exemplars of everything the hippies wanted to sweep away. Trump, said the author, represented “pre-Feminist Man, the guy who brags about never having changed a diaper and expects subservience from his wives”.
Sgt Pepper arrived two decades after the second world war’s end: roughly the same historical distance that separates the Brexit/Trump age from the high point of the Clinton/Blair era. Given a 21st-century polish, the album’s music sounds as thrilling as ever, though with a bittersweet sense of a credo suddenly falling victim to a counter-revolution.
On the last track of the old side two, the bell-like piano chords that begin A Day in the Life used to sound like the death knell of all the inward-looking, fusty, moralistic ideas the Beatles came to do away with. How strange to tune in half a century later and find all that stuff back – with a vengeance.
#SgtPepperPhotos: A Beatles Fan Is Hunting Down All the Original Photos of People and Images on the Sgt. Pepper’s Cover / Vintage Everyday
gebattmer - 2017/05/26 20:14
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