Review: The Beatles’ ‘White Album’

The power of rock and roll is a constantly amazing process. Although it is Bob Dylan who is the single most important figure in rock and roll; and although it is the Rolling Stones who are the embodiment of a rock and roll band; it is nonetheless Our Boys. The Beatles, who are the perfect product and result of everything that rock and roll means and encompasses.

Never has this been so plainly evident as on their new two-album set. The Beatles (Apple SWBO 101). Whatever else it is or isn’t, it is the best album they have ever released, and only the Beatles are capable of making a better one. You are either hip to it, or you ain’t.

The impact of it is so overwhelming that one of the ideas of the LP is to contain every part of extant Western music through the all-embracing medium of rock and roll, that such categorical and absolute statements are imperative. Just a slightly closer look shows it to be a far more deliberate, self-conscious, pretentious, organized and structured, coherent and full, more perfect album than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Sgt. Pepper’s applied the concept of the symphony to rock and roll, adding an incredible (and soon overused) dimension to rock and roll. Nothing could have been more ambitious than the current release: The Beatles is the history and synthesis of Western music. And that, of course is what rock and roll is, and that is what the Beatles are.

Rock and roll, the first successful art form of the McLuhan age, is a series of increasing hybrids of musical styles, starting from its basic hybrid of country and western music and black American music (blues, if you will). That merger represents the distantly effected marriage of the music of England and Africa, a yin and yang that could be infinitely extended.

Not only the origin of rock and roll, but also the short history of it can be seen as a series of hybridizations, the constantly changing styles and fads, as rock assimilates every conceivable musical style (folk, blues, soul, Indian; classical, psychedelic, ballad, country) not only a recent process, but one that goes back to the Drifters, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and so on. Rock and roll’s longevity is its ability to assimilate the energy and style of all these musical traditions. Rock and roll at once exists and doesn’t exist; that is why the term “rock and roll” is the best term we have, as it means nothing and thus everything — —and that is quite possibly the musical and mystical secret of the most overwhelming popular music the world has known.

By attempting such a grandiose project with such deliberation and honesty, they have left themselves extremely vulnerable. There is not the dissemblance of being “our boys” from Hard Day’s Night, nor the disguise of Sgt. Pepper’s Band; it is on every level an explanation and an understanding of who and what the Beatles are.

As usual, the personal honesty is met with an attack. (The secret is that innocence is invulnerable, and those who rush too quickly for the kill, are just themselves dead.) On the level of musical ignorance, I read the very first review of this record that appeared; it was in the New York Times. In about 250 words the “critic” dismissed the album as being neither as good as the Big Brother Cheap Thrills LP nor as the forthcoming Blood, Sweat and Tears album. You come up with only one of two answers about that reviewer: he is either deaf or he is evil.

Those who attacked the Beatles for their single “Revolution,” should be set down with a good pair of earphones for a listen to Side Four, where the theme of the single is carried out in two different versions, the latter with the most impact. And if the message isn’t clear enough, “Revolution No. 9” is followed by “Goodnight.”

To say the Beatles are guilty of some kind of revolutionary heresy is absurd; they are being absolutely true to their identity as it has evolved through the last six years. These songs do not deny their own “political” impact or desires, they just indicate the channelling for them.

Rock and roll has indeed become a style and a vehicle for changing the system. But one of the parts of the system to be changed is “politics” and this iscludes “new Left” politics. There is no verbal recognition required for the beautifully organized music concrete version of “Revolution.” A good set of earphones should deliver the message to those we have so far been able to reach. Maybe this album would be a good gift for them, “with love from me to you.”

***

As to the Beatles, it is hard to see what they are going to do next. Like the success of their earlier albums and the success of all others in this field, whether original artists or good imitative ones, the success of it is based on their ability to bring these other traditions to rock and roll (and not vice versa, like the inevitable excesses of “folk-rock,” “raga-rock” and “acid-rock”) and especially in the case of Dylan, the Stones, the Beatles and to a lesser extent all the other good groups in rock and roll, the ability to maintain their own identity both as rock and roll and as the Beatles, or as Bob Dylan, or as the Rolling Stones, and so on.

Thus, the Beatles can safely afford to be eclectic, deliberately borrowing and accepting any outside influence or idea or emotion, because their own musical ability and personal/spiritual/artistic identity is so strong that they make it uniquely theirs, and uniquely the Beatles. They are so good that they not only expand the idiom, but they are also able to penetrate it and take it further.

“Back in the USSR,” this album’s first track, is, of course, a perfect example of all this: it is not just an imitation (only in parts) of the Beach Boys, but an imitation of the Beach Boys imitating Chuck Berry. This is hardly an original concept or thing to do: just in the past few months we have been deluged with talk of “going back to rock and roll,” so much that the idea (first expressed in the pages of Rolling Stone) is now a tiresome one. because it is, like all other superficial changes in rock and roll styles, one that soon becomes faddish, over-used and tired-out.