Why We Remember the Beatles and Forget So Much Else
Over Christmas, when the Beatles catalogue finally got released on several music-streaming services, Spotify notably among them, a few of us waited to see not whether anybody wanted the old songs but which ones they would want. Would the audience in 2016 make smart choices, or confused ones, about music already a half century old?
Well, not only was there an audience out there—many millions have already streamed the Beatles songs—but, more important, with an eerie wisdom-of-crowds instinct, the choices it made did perfect justice to the spread of talent in the band and its distinctive interminglings. On Spotify’s list of the top-ten most-streamed songs of the Christmas weekend, there were, the Independent in London reported, three all-Johns (“Help,” “All You Need Is Love,” and “Come Together”), three all-Pauls (“Let It Be,” “Yesterday,” and “Hey, Jude”), two fifty-fifties (“Love Me Do” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand”), one George (“Here Comes the Sun”), and one cover (“Twist and Shout”). It was a perfectly balanced and insightful list.
This much justice was done and wisdom shown because simply, more than fifty years after their first appearance, the Beatles remain a part of our available past. What they did, how they did it, and who among them did it best—all this is still familiar to millions of people, with many of them apparently under thirty-five. It’s a heritage whose basics require only minimal introduction, even to the not-entirely-obsessed.
By: Adam Gopnik
Source: The New Yorker
