The Cathedral and the Shrink’s Office 'All Things Must Pass' vs. 'Plastic Ono Band'
Dualities are fascinating: Yin and Yang, Blur and Oasis, God and Satan, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and so on. You can analyze these contrasting pairs to apparent death, and yet they’ll spring up again, resurrected, presenting fresh puzzles. Whether you approach each duo as a harmonious conjunction of opposites or as a violent discord between irreconcilables, the process always manages to generate a spark.
In the present case, consider the difficult question of the greatest album by a former Beatle. Sure, you might find a few dissenters who would want to bust up the duality I’m about to present: they’d claim that Imagine is the best post-Beatles effort, and maybe a few daring reactionaries would cite Band on the Run. You could throw Lennon against McCartney and see what insights ensue, since that’s the principal Beatles duality in everyone’s mind, with Lennon as the emotionally raw rocker and McCartney as the consummate craftsman of orchestral pop.
Ultimately, that’s not where the true post-Beatles dialectic is to be found, to get pretentious about it. The real Beatles duality is Lennon vs. Harrison, best embodied by comparing Plastic Ono Band with All Things Must Pass, the two prime candidates for best album by a former Beatle. This may be the most fruitful contrast in all of pop music, really, since it’s a potential key to understanding what the ’60s cultural tribulations were really all about. Two roads diverged in a wood: Lennon went one way, and Harrison went the other. But which was the road less traveled by?
By: Sam Buntz
Source: Pop Matters
