“If I am not mistaken, the dramas we are moved to applaud are those in which the prophet resists priestly organization, the man of peace resists the king, the philosopher resists the dogmatists, the scientist resists the theorists, and in general, the wild, obsessed, inspired, gifted, talented individual resists everything that is smug, comfortable or respectable. I invite you to switch sides.” — Leonard Cohen, letter to his brother, 19621
I don’t remember what year it was, only the expectant silence and the scratch of worn upholstery on my legs as I perched on the “listening chair” in my father’s music room, which was filled floor-to-ceiling with albums, cassettes and reel-to-reel tapes, carefully organised and alphabetised. I can still see him reaching up to one of the shelves, and it was clear even to my young eyes that he didn’t need any organisational system to know exactly what he was reaching for.
I watched as he pulled down an album, slipped the record out and laid it on the turntable. He cleaned the vinyl and set the needle on the edge with a soft pop, then passed the sleeve to me with the reverence of a rabbi handing a young student a Torah scroll.
My father was a music historian, and the day he put Sgt. Pepper in my hands, long before I was anywhere near old enough to understand it, he gave me the only inheritance he’d ever pass on to me. He taught me that music was important, and that this music was equal in substance to the bookshelf of classics that filled a wall in the adjoining living room — volumes by Shakespeare and Milton and Whitman and Blake. In our house, there was no difference in stature, between Songs of Innocence and Hard Day’s Night, Paradise Lost and Revolver, Othello and The White Album. If anything, music, and especially this music, mattered more, which is probably just as well, since I spent far more time in my father’s music room than I did with that library of classic books
I didn’t understand, at the time, the full weight of that moment and of my father’s gift to me. I grew up and, like most of us, became a lot of things — among them, a wordsmith, a storyteller, a mythologist, and a student of human behaviour. Through it all, music... this music... was always there, in much the same way it’s there for all of us. We are, to borrow from Jane Austen, “intimate by instinct”2 with the music of The Beatles, as we are with the words of Shakespeare. Their music is woven into the fabric of who we are, why our world is how it is.
Many, many writers before me have talked about the importance of the music of The Beatles,3 and rightfully so. Most of us recognize intuitively that music has the power to bypass our rational minds and connect with the hidden mysteries of the human spirit. And the singular and even exalted status of Beatles music suggests that we recognise that it carries a special weight. A special magic, if you will.
Recognising the existence of that magic is different, though, from understanding its source. John once said that there are only about a hundred people in the world who understand Beatles music,4 and while he’s prone to exaggeration, I think he’s only slightly exaggerating here. I certainly don’t pretend to fully understand their music, and we’d be wise to be sceptical of anyone who claims they do.
The source of the music is, of course, found in the story of how that music came to be. And because the music of The Beatles — of Lennon & McCartney — is such a stunning artistic achievement, it's easy to miss seeing that the story of how that music was created carries weight of its own, independent of the music that came from it.
It’s a story that’s inextricably intertwined with the shimmering, tumultuous, world-changing decade we call the Sixties. And it’s a story that — in ways we’re mostly not consciously aware of — continues to shape our culture and our lives, as much as the music does, right up into the present day.
None of this was yet on my mind in November of 2021, when I, along with most of everybody else with an internet connection, sat down to watch Get Back, Peter Jackson’s eight-hour documentary that promised to rewrite the history of the breakup of the band.
Is there an exact moment when a passion... an obsession... flares into being? Somewhere between Mal setting down Ringo’s drum skin on the rainbow-lit Twickenham soundstage and the final notes of the Rooftop Concert, the spark that my father planted when he put Sgt. Pepper in my hand all those years ago ignited and became a wildfire. My life rearranged itself and stayed rearranged, around a soul-deep need to understand this music, and this story, more fully.
I started, of course, with the standard stuff, the books recommended on the lists of “best books about The Beatles,” and when I finished with those, I kept reading. And as I made my way through the canon of Beatles writing, I started to notice something... odd.
The history... the story... doesn’t hold together.
There are, of course, the expected inconsistencies — too many to count — between eyewitnesses and even between the four Beatles, who regularly contradict each other and themselves. That’s situation normal for any biography, but more than that, there are obvious gaps in the timeline, often at key turning points, where no one — not the writers nor the band — have much of anything at all to say. And in even the most “complete” books, there are major fallacies of cause and effect and basic errors of human psychology relative to the people involved. Oddest of all, none of the writers (nor anyone else, including the Fabs) seem to notice or express any concern that the story they’re telling is, upon closer inspection, a scrambled Aeolian clusterfuck of nonsense.
Books piled up on my kitchen table, their margins crowded with scribbled “??!!”s and “wtf?”s. Browser tabs multiplied, pages filled up with notes. It was the second half of the pandemic, and hidden away in my little house in the woods of midcoast Maine, far from the chaos of it all, I had time, especially in winter when the road into town ices up. The more I read, the less the story made sense and the more questions I had, starting with—
How did this even happen? Hundreds, maybe thousands of books, millions, maybe billions, of words written about The Beatles over the past sixty years, how is it possible that the story of probably the most influential and revolutionary music ever created is in such bad shape?
Okay, yes, the people involved did a lot of mind-altering drugs in the ‘60s and accurate recall is not what it ideally would be, but still, presumably the writers weren’t tripping when they did their research and wrote all those books. How is it no one seems to notice or care just how bad of a shape the story’s in?
Frustrated, but also increasingly intrigued at the mystery, I levelled up my research. The piles of books on the kitchen table multiplied and grew taller and more structurally unsound. Other, non-Fab projects were back-burnered, as I read more deeply, searching out less prominent, less canonical sources, making more notes, asking more questions.
Spring came, the ice melted and the road cleared. My questions took me to Liverpool, London and Hamburg, and then to Liverpool and London again and then again and then again. I sought out Cavern girls and Quarry Men, spent time in the white-gloved silence of the rare book room of the British Library in London, dug through the archives and tried the patience of the archivists at the Liverpool Central Library, the Museum of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University.
Out of the chaos, a pattern slowly emerged. I began to see that all of the problems with the story are actually a single problem. And that single problem is a lot bigger and a lot more heartbreaking... but ultimately a lot more beautiful... than I’d initially thought.
“There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular — though profoundly mistaken — definition of myth as falsehood.”5— Rollo May
Stories matter. We know this already, but it’s worth the reminder that stories are the fundamental organising principle by which we make sense of the chaos of the world. Our personal stories help us make meaning of the events of our lives. Our shared cultural stories are the fabric that binds us together. And our sacred stories give us hope that all of the chaos has some kind of purpose.
The story of The Beatles is both a shared cultural story and — as I’ve come to understand through immersing myself in it over these past years — a sacred story in ways that we’ll talk about a lot in this series. And for many of us, it’s so deeply woven into our lives that it’s a significant part of our personal stories as well.
When a story is big enough to have a significant, long-term impact on our world, it begins to defy ordinary ways of understanding it and enters into the realm of the mythological. Mythology is really the only way we have of making sense of stories that are too big for the more blunt-edged tools of history and journalism and biography.
The story of The Beatles, intertwined with the Sixties, is that kind of mythological story. That kind of myth.
In the nine episodes that will make up Part 1 of this series, I’d like to tell you the story of the story of The Beatles — because that story matters far more than you might think it does. We’ll also talk about how and why the story as it’s currently told is broken in ways that also matter far more than you might realize, and finally, what can be done to fix it and why it’s urgent that we do.
Further down the road, in the second and third parts of this series, we’ll attempt to re-tell the story of The Beatles in a way that I’ve come to believe is more accurate, more profound, and more beautiful than the story most of us have grown up hearing.
To do all of that, we need to start with a short primer on how mythology works and how it shapes our culture.
If you’re considering skipping past this section to get to the Fabs, that is, of course, your right and privilege, but know that if you do, you’re probably going to be annoyed every time I say things about The Beatles’ story being arguably the most important story in history and about how only they could have sparked the Sixties, and even more outlandish things — because it’s all going to sound like hypey exaggeration. And you’re also more likely to be outraged at a lot of the material we’re going to cover in later episodes, because you likely won’t have the context to get why it matters. So unless you really enjoy being outraged — which, to be fair, a lot of people seem to — I strongly recommend hanging out for this first bit. After this episode, it will be all Beatles all the time for the remainder of the series. (and a little bit of Elvis and Little Richard, too.)
Okay, so let's start with the word “myth,” which is a confusing and paradoxical word that’s evolved in modern English to have two exactly opposite meanings. It’s appropriate that both meanings apply to The Beatles, given that their story as it’s currently told is a funhouse hall of mirrors containing layers of paradox in which two or more opposing things are often true and not true at the same time.
The most common meaning of “myth” and the one you’re probably familiar with is that a myth is something believed to be true that isn’t true. For example, it’s a myth that you’ll catch cold by going outside in the winter without a coat, or that wearing garlic around your neck will ward off vampires.6 Of course the story of The Beatles is true in that it’s an actual event in our history. But it's also not true, in the sense that much of the story is not at all what it seems, and much of the story as currently told is so contradictory and nonsensical that it can only be described as fiction.
Paradoxically, the other, original meaning of “myth” is the exact opposite — a story that’s more true than ordinary truth. You’re probably most familiar with this meaning from the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell and psychologist Carl Jung. Whenever I use the word “myth” or “mythological story” in this series, this is the kind of myth I’m talking about.
This kind of ‘myth’ is much harder to define. Lots of very wise people have tried, with spotty results. So rather than defining what a myth is, it might be easier — and more helpful in understanding how all this relates to The Beatles — to define what myths do.
The simplest answer comes from philosopher/psychologist Rollo May. He suggests that a myth is a story that shapes history.7 That’s a good start, and I’d broaden it out a little and say that a myth is a story that shapes the lives of the people in a particular culture, past, present and future.
To understand how this works, let’s try an analogy.
To start with, imagine a straw — maybe one of those Crazy Straws that loops into funny shapes in the middle. Now imagine sucking water up through the straw. Contained within the straw, the water can’t help but follow the straw’s shape. It's the shape of the straw that determines the water’s path.
In this analogy, the water is the events of history, the literal things that happen. And the straw is the mythological story, the pattern that determines where and how fast the water flows. It’s the shape of the straw that determines what happens to the water as it moves through the straw.
While there are virtually always multiple myths at play in a culture, there’s almost always one that’s more important and more influential than the rest. Mythologists call this a foundational myth — which is a mouthful, but I have yet to find a more elegant term, so at least for this series, it’s the best we’ve got.8
A foundational myth is, paradoxically, the hardest kind of myth to identify because it defines a culture so completely that it’s hard to see. To get a clearer idea of what this means, let’s try a bigger version of our Crazy Straw analogy.
Imagine a great, tumultuous river — like the wild and wind-chopped Mersey — where the current, the water itself, is the events of history, and the riverbed through which the water flows is the foundational myth that shapes those events. We can’t see the shape of the riverbed beneath the surface, and we don’t usually give it any thought when we’re travelling on the river. But the riverbed is always there, always under the surface, always determining the flow and path of the river, shaping human behaviour, and in turn, the events of history, whether we realise it or not.
The power of myth is rooted in what seems to be an instinctual human need for pattern recognition. Imagine a world in which nothing — including the sun rising and setting, the changing of the seasons, the behaviour of people in your life, the flow of your day — follows any pattern at all, and everything changes randomly from moment to moment. There’s no reasonable way even the most rebellious, free-spirited person could function effectively in a world of total unpredictability. All of our mental, emotional and physical resources would be burned up just coping with the uncertainties of daily life. It would be the very definition of chaos.
Civilization couldn't exist in a world with no predictability either, because one of the most important functions of civilization is to provide a stable pattern in which a culture can grow and develop and in which humans can build their individual lives in a relatively predictable and stable community.
When I said earlier that stories are important because they help us to make meaning out of chaos, this is what I mean. All stories, but especially mythological stories, are at their most basic level, patterns, and we instinctively look for patterns in the world around us because patterns help us feel safe in a complicated world. This instinctive need for patterns might, in fact, point us to a better definition and purpose of myth — an established pattern that plays out predictably and repeatedly in a culture and thus gives the people of that culture a sense of stability and meaning.
This isn’t some vague theoretical abstraction. We can get very specific about how this works.
Once a series of events falls into the pre-existing pattern of a mythological story, the events themselves become predictable. We can start to notice, usually subconsciously, that whenever Event A happens, Event B tends to happen next. Because we’re hard-wired for patterns, we tend to subconsciously, shall we say... encourage those events to play out in a way that we're already familiar with.
Most of the time, our choices tend to follow the path of the least resistance, like a stick thrown into a river naturally follows the current. In this way, myths are self-fulfilling prophecies. For most of us, this kind of predictability is less scary than living a life in which we have no way to know what will happen next.
This tendency of humans to shape our behaviour into preexisting patterns is true of individuals, and it’s also true of entire cultures. When a whole culture falls into the pattern of a story, that story becomes a mythological story. And that mythological story — that foundational myth — then begins to determine the overall arc of that culture in the same way that the shape of a riverbed determines the flow of a river.
This is one of the reasons mythological stories are so important, and why they’re actually truer than ordinary truth. Mythological stories create ordinary truth, because pattern-seeking humans subconsciously shape our behaviour to follow the pattern of the mythological story at play. In this way, history follows mythology. Mythology shapes history. Which is why it's very hard — maybe even impossible — to understand history without understanding mythology.
If this is the first you’re hearing of all of this, you’re not alone. In our modern, so-called “rationalist” culture, we’ve almost completely lost our understanding of mythology in any form, much less the way it shapes the world we live in. But mythology doesn't stop shaping our world just because we stop paying attention to it, any more than an actual riverbed stops directing the flow of the river just because we’re not noticing it. And as we'll see, we’ve all paid a very high, and maybe even catastrophic price, for our collective mythological illiteracy — especially relative to the story of The Beatles.
When I say that mythology shapes our world, I’m drawing from actual experience. Part of what I do professionally involves drawing on the predictive nature of mythology to influence the way events unfold, whether the events in question are a court case, a piece of legislation, or just a general shaping of public opinion on an issue.
I’ve done this work successfully and, for a variety of reasons, quietly and under-the-radar for many years. And I’ve experienced, again and again, how when we identify the mythological story at play in a given situation, we can use it to predict — and to some extent, to shape — what will happen in the future, in the same way knowing the shape of the riverbed tells us how and where the river will flow.
Predictive mythology is an art, not a science. Unfortunately, it can’t predict winning lottery numbers, but it is highly accurate at predicting the overall arc of a situation or a culture. It’s also not always predictive, because life isn’t always predictable, despite our attempts to make it so. Things happen that disrupt our established patterns. Sometimes those disruptions are so big they completely change our lives in the same way that a massive earthquake can instantly disrupt the entire course of a river, creating essentially an entirely new riverbed.
When a massive riverbed-changing “earthquake” happens that affects an entire culture, it disrupts that culture so fundamentally that it forces the events of that culture onto a new trajectory. In this way, a new culture — in mythological terms, a new world — is created, and with it, a new dominant mythological story, a new pattern for the culture — a new foundational myth. In this way, a foundational myth is the imprint of that “earthquake” onto the culture. It sets the pattern for how that earthquake is experienced and understood moving forward.
It's tempting to call this kind of culture-changing earthquake a revolution — and we will use that word when we get to the Love Revolution of the Sixties. But oddly, for all of their — well, revolutionary qualities, revolutions rarely turn out to be earthquake-level, riverbed-changing events, although that’s usually the hope of the revolutionaries. Mostly, though, revolutions, for all their promise of radical change, end up mostly just changing who’s in charge rather than the underlying patterns of the culture. To extend our analogy, most revolutions don’t change the course of the river, they just end up replacing the captain of the boat. The names change, but the underlying story remains by and large the same.
The creation of a new foundational myth for an entire civilization, not just an individual culture within a civilization, is even more rare. It’s extremely unusual for an entire civilization to be disrupted so dramatically that an entirely new pattern is created in place of the old one. When I say “extremely unusual,” I really mean extremely unusual. Western civilization as a whole, in its entire history over thousands of years, has only experienced two riverbed-changing mythological earthquakes.
Two.
That’s it.
The cultural revolution of the Sixties — sparked by Beatlemania and shaped and led by The Beatles — was one of those two massive, riverbed-changing earthquakes, which is why it’s become a mythological story. It's become the foundational mythology of our modern world, not just in America and in Britain, but of all of the Western world and even beyond.9
That might be a startling claim, and obviously, I don’t expect you to take my word for it. We’re about to step through how and why the Sixties is what it is in some detail.
This isn’t a series about world history, except in the sense that it very much is, and I know we all want to get to the Fabs. But to get where we need to go with all of this, we need to start a little further back in the story than Beatles biographies usually do. Not too far back, though —just, y’know, back before the beginning of recorded history.
As we continue on, keep in mind that we’re not talking about history in the way we usually understand history — which is a good thing for all of us, because while I’m the daughter of an historian, I myself am not an historian. Mythology is about the big picture, not the fine detail, so we need to take a wide and extremely simplified view of history, using a very fuzzy, very soft gaze that blurs the historical timeline and focuses only on the really big, really important stuff.
As an analogy, think of what we’re doing in this episode as one of those pictures that’s made up of tiny individual images, and is only revealed in its entirety when we step back far enough to see the whole thing. Or better yet, one of those “magic eye” pictures where the hidden image only becomes clear when we soften our gaze and refocus from the details to a fuzzier perspective.
We won’t keep this fuzzy, simplified gaze forever. As we get closer to the story we’re all here for, we’ll focus that gaze in on the fine detail. And as a preview, when we focus mythology down to fine enough detail, it turns from mythology into psychology — because fundamentally, mythology is a way of understanding how humans act in relation to one another, as we’ve already alluded to with our discussion of the human need for patterns to give our lives stability and structure.10
So with all that said, let’s dive beneath the waves of the river in our yellow submarine, rewinding time in search of the very first-ever foundational myth of Western civilization, all the way back to the era before written history, when archeology tells us that paganism ruled the world.
“We make our destiny by our choice of the gods.” — Virgil11
By definition, we don’t have written records of the time before recorded history. We only have archeological remains — relics and ruins and gravesites and such. So we’re left to make educated guesses about what human culture was like in its earliest forms. And by earliest forms, I mean the proverbial caveman and cavewoman hunting mammoths and gathering by the fire.
While we don’t have written records of these very earliest pagan mythologies, we do have their art, mostly in the form of cave paintings and pottery. And that art seems to make clear that those mythological stories involved gods and goddesses who controlled both the forces of nature and the lives of the humans they ruled over.12
If our interpretation of the archaeological records is accurate, pagan mythology offered a one-to-one correlation between what the gods were up to and what happened in the human world. When the gods were angry, bad things happened in human events. When the gods were happy, humans were rewarded with good fortune. When the gods were having sex, the earth was fertile and everybody got lucky. When the gods weren’t having sex, the culture and everyone in it became less vibrant, less alive.
The stories of those gods became the mythological riverbed — the pattern — of the culture.
It’s worth mentioning that in some ways, pagan mythology was (and still is) a far more accurate model of how the world works than our modern rationalist worldview, in that it explicitly recognises that mythology shapes what happens in our lives, often very directly and literally.
The first-ever foundational myth of human civilization probably went something like this: “Life is hard. The gods and goddesses who control the world are more powerful than we are. We’re entirely at their mercy, and so just to be able to survive, life must be lived in a way that will, hopefully, please them — even though it’s not always clear how to do that. If we guess right, hopefully we’ll be rewarded with good weather, good crops and good luck. If we guess wrong, the gods will punish us for our mistake and bad things will happen to us and our tribe.”
You might recognise this way of viewing the world as, essentially, the domination of the strong over the weak. Early humans looked around and probably couldn't help but notice that they were weak and powerless against the forces of nature, and that whoever and whatever was stronger, physically, tended to win the day. And in an unpredictable world ruled by unpredictable gods, "might makes right” was likely the only predictable pattern available to structure daily life around.
“Might makes right” probably manifested itself not just between gods and humans, but in the domination of stronger humans over weaker humans. This part of the “might makes right” foundational myth probably began when the first human picked up a club and realised they could get their way by threatening to bash their neighbour over the head with it. That was the “might” part. And since the person holding the club was the one who got to tell the story of what went down, they naturally told the story putting truth and justice firmly on their side. That was the “right” part.
Let's fast forward several thousand years to the part of mythology that most people are familiar with. The ancient Greeks and Romans — Zeus and Aphrodite and Apollo and the rest of the gang on Mount Olympus.
By this time, things had evolved a bit. The Greek and Roman tradition created a complex mythology of the world as a cosmic soap opera in which humans were at the mercy not just of the forces of nature, as personified by the various deities in charge of those forces, but also at the mercy of the family quarrels of a deeply dysfunctional divine family of gods and goddesses — which again, might well be more accurate than our contemporary rationalist view of the world, if one takes “gods and goddesses” to be personifications of human character traits and emotions that the individual Greek and Roman deities were endowed with.
The ancient Greeks were an inquisitive, free-thinking people, and they did a lot of lifestyle experimenting. Would life be better lived on top of a pillar? What if we gave away all our possessions, stripped naked and locked ourselves in a barrel? How about if we said ‘fuck it,’ gave up entirely on pleasing the gods and just lived life according to our instincts? The ancient Greeks also, not insignificantly to our story, experimented a lot with gender roles, sexuality and domestic household arrangements, and in some ways, ended up a lot more enlightened in these areas than we are today.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Wacky lifestyle experiments aside, the dominant mythology in the classical Western world was really just a more complex variation of “might makes right” and it went something like this — “Life is hard. Honour the appropriate deities as best as we can, given we don’t actually know what they want, and maybe they’ll be kind to us when they're not busy with their own problems.”
This classical variation on “might makes right” held — again, looking with a soft gaze and with some evolution along the way — until 312 AD, when the Roman Emperor Constantine converted from paganism to Christianity, and subsequently declared Christianity the official religion of the Empire and thus of the Western world (because at that point in history, the Roman Empire and the Western world were more or less the same thing).
The ascendancy and spread of Christianity was Western civilization's first-ever riverbed-changing “earthquake,” albeit a very slow-moving one. Over the next several centuries, Christianity evolved into a disruptive force of such power — and I’m using “force” literally here — that it almost completely erased the pagan mythological tradition, replacing it with a new mythological story.
Released as a double album along with the Judaic Old Testament, this new Christian mythology became the new foundational myth — the new riverbed — of Western civilization.
Let’s be careful here, because misunderstanding looms large in this legend.
The new foundational myth that shaped Western culture once Christianity became the dominant religion had very little to do with the actual teachings of Jesus — at least insofar as we know what those are — and much more to do with the powers-that-be wanting to hold on to their power. And that wasn't going to happen without a little spin doctoring — not with Jesus having gone on about rich men not being able to get into heaven and the meek inheriting the Earth and taking care of the poor and the vulnerable and other seditious ideas.
What they came up with was more like a PR campaign cooked up by the publisher of the Bible without the consent of the author, and it went something like this—
“Life is hard. Y’all are insignificant peons and forces beyond your control, both divine and human, are going to tell you what to do with your life, mostly in the form of strict rules that are really hard to follow and threats about the awful things that will happen to you when — being a fallible human — you inevitably break them. That's part of God’s plan, so suck it up. But if you manage to obey the rules, keep your head down and work really hard, pray even harder, avoid the temptations of earthly pleasures (especially sex), and don’t get any ideas of rising above your social class or making trouble, your life here on earth is still going to suck, but it’s okay, because when you die, you’ll go to Heaven, where you’ll be rewarded with vaguely defined eternal bliss (but still no sex). Trust us, it’ll all work out. Eventually. Probably. Oh, and please don’t forget to drop some of the money you earned with that hard work into the collection plate on your way out the door.”
Again, this new foundational myth had very little to do with the actual teachings of Jesus, who taught more or less the opposite of all of this and probably wouldn't even recognise his actual teachings in the way they’d been repackaged for mass consumption.
Now, to me and probably to you, this new mythological story sounds like a hard pass. But to the people of the time, it landed altogether differently. This clever — some might say brilliant — rebrand of “might makes right” was essentially this: suffer now and you’ll be rewarded later.
The suffering part wasn’t new, of course — there’s always lots of suffering to go around in a “might makes right” world. It was the “rewards” part that made the new story a riverbed-reshaping earthquake.
The favour of the gods had always been capricious, in this life as well as in the afterlife, based on their passing fancies rather than on any sort of recognisable pattern. But now there was a better offer on the table — guaranteed rewards, for those who followed the rules.
To mix metaphors, the earthquake of “suffer now, rewards later” shifted the human experience from gambling in a casino to a steady job with a big corporation. The “might makes right” powers-that-be owned the corporation you worked for, just like they’d owned the casino. But now instead of trying to survive by playing the odds that you might get lucky at the slot machines, you could work hard, follow the rules, get a guaranteed paycheck and at the end of it — if you stayed loyal to the corporation — retire to an afterlife of heavenly bliss (but still no sex). No unpredictability involved, if you obeyed and played by the rules.
After thousands of years of attempting to please unpredictable gods in a random and chaotic universe, this new foundational myth was a significant upgrade, way better than stuffing yourself naked into a barrel. Life was still hard, but under the new “suffer now, rewards later” mythology, it got a whole lot more predictable, and as we know, humans like things to be predictable. Finally, people had a stable pattern they could count on and construct their lives around.
This new and improved version of “might makes right” — which we’ll shorthand as "suffer now, rewards later” — worked so well for so many people that, once it was installed as the new foundational myth of Western civilization, it stayed there for almost two thousand years.13
A lot of big, important stuff happened in those two thousand years, of course, But none of it changed the mythological riverbed of Western culture. Most of that big, important stuff — war, famine, plague, political upheaval, industrialization — was various iterations of “might makes right” and “suffer now, rewards later.”
The most important iteration of “suffer now rewards later” happened as Western civilization, over many hundreds of years, gradually became more secular.
As the Church began to lose its hold on political, economic and social power, the promise of a reward in the afterlife wasn’t nearly as motivating an incentive to conform to the system. And as the Industrial Revolution and the assembly line began to tempt even the working classes with its promise of material comforts and even luxuries, “suffer now, rewards later” began to morph into what we now call the Protestant work ethic — “life is hard, but if you spend almost all of it working hard and following the rules, you’ll be rewarded in your old age.” Instead of a place in Heaven, the reward for keeping your head down and conforming to the system bought you a pension and a retirement condo in Florida.14
The Protestant Work Ethic was a significant shift away from the Church, but you can probably see right away that it wasn’t a mythological earthquake or a new foundational myth. It was just “suffer now, rewards later” given a secular makeover.
There were, obviously, some problems with “suffer now, rewards later.” One problem was that while it seemed to work well enough for most people, it tended not to work so well for people who would prefer not to spend their entire lives suffering in a metaphorical corporate cubicle in hope of some vague reward at the end— which is why throughout history, it’s the artists, free-thinkers and rebels who have always been the ones to push hardest against the “suffer now, rewards later” foundational myth.
Much of this pushback came in the form of various countercultural movements and revolutions — to a limited extent, the Renaissance and the cultural upheaval of the French Revolution, and also the Georgian and Romantic movements in Europe and the American transcendentalist movement in the 1800s. And perhaps most familiar to most of us, the Jazz Age, the Roaring ‘20s and the Beatniks and the bohemian existentialist “cafe society” of the 1950s, just to name a few of the better known examples.
All of these countercultural movements contributed to shaping the world we live in today. But none of them came anywhere even close to posing a serious threat to “suffer now, rewards later” as the foundational myth of Western culture, the mythological “riverbed” through which our history flows, until... well, ‘ang on, we’re almost there. I can hear the faint sound of electric guitars in the distance...
For just a little while longer, though, we’re still watching the events of world history scroll by through the very fuzzy lens and the very wide perspective of mythology. And when we scan our soft-focus gaze along the timeline of the two thousand years since “suffer now, rewards later” became Western civilization's foundational myth, looking for anything big enough that it might have the potential to be a mythological earthquake that redirects the river of human history, my mythologist’s gaze lingers on World War II.
At first glance, though, it might not be clear why. All wars are by definition textbook examples of both “might makes right” and (for everyone but the war profiteers) “suffer now, rewards later.” So in this sense, World War II was more of the same ol’ same ol’ that had been going on for thousands of years.
What catches my attention is the scale of it. World War II was and continues to be — by a large margin — humanity’s most horrific “might makes right” story.
World War II engulfed the entire globe in a way no other war ever had. The technological advances and mechanised warfare that had been developed during the First World War significantly increased the brutality and death toll in the Second. And beyond the increased killing power of the actual combat was the gruesome increase in civilian casualties. With war had always come atrocities, but never before on the scale of the Holocaust. With war had always come destruction, but never before on the scale of the atomic bomb.
Despite this, World War II is probably modern history’s best advertisement for “suffer now, rewards later.” Even if you don’t know a lot about World War II, you probably know it’s often held up as history’s most dramatic and inspiring example of a whole culture setting aside short term self-interest, pulling together and making sacrifices for the common good — whether it was sacrificing one’s literal life on the battlefield or sacrificing conveniences and comforts and personal ambitions on the home front to help the war effort.
To be clear, I’m not in any way suggesting we shouldn’t have fought World War II. “Might makes right” isn’t always the wrong response, and neither is "suffer now, rewards later." There are times in the course of human events when the bad guys simply can’t be negotiated with. No one with half a brain, an elementary school understanding of history and any kind of moral compass would disagree that Hitler needed to be defeated and that it was going to take “might” to do it.15 And while “might makes right” tends to bring out the worst in human nature, the collaborative Allied effort of “we’re all in this together to stop the bad guys” was a shining example of the best of what humans are capable of, when we work together for a common good.
Still, the cost of that collaborative effort was staggering.
Not since Europe’s Black Plague had humanity been exposed to so much death, and never in such a short time span. Only a generation earlier, World War I had killed twenty million people on both sides. There was almost no time to recover from that before World War II began. Historians say it’s almost impossible to get an accurate causality count for World War II, but conservative estimates put the total at well over fifty million, including the six million people murdered in Hitler’s Holocaust and the approximately 200,000 killed in the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And unlike wars prior, the technological advances of mass media meant that the graphic details of the slaughter were communicated around the globe via film reels and radio broadcasts. By the end of World War II, almost everyone on the planet had been exposed in some way to violent death on a historically unprecedented scale.
One would have hoped the destruction and horror of World War II, the Holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bomb would have inspired people on both sides of the battlefield to rethink their two thousand-year devotion to “might makes right” and its spinoff, “suffer now, rewards later.” But that’s not what happened, because we humans really like patterns, even when those patterns lead to horrific consequences. And the winning side in any war especially tends to be fond of the pattern that resulted in them winning, especially when the cause was an obviously morally right one, as in this case.
All of which is why, as catastrophic as World War II was, it didn’t change the underlying “might makes right,” “suffer now, rewards later” foundational myth of our culture. If anything, the cause was so unambiguously just that World War II reinforced those foundational myths in a big, big way.
So why then, you might reasonably be wondering, are we talking about mass casualties and carnage when we could be talking about Flower Power and “Can’t Buy Me Love”?
The answer is, because World War II only reinforced “might makes right” and “suffer now, rewards later” for some of the culture, not all of it.
“Hallelujah! I’m alive! I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we have a little game? Let’s pretend we’re human beings, and that we’re actually alive, just for a while. What do you say? Let’s pretend we’re human.” — John Osborne, Look Back in Anger (1956)
In the wake of a major trauma and in the absence of any newer, better ideas, humans tend to reach for the comfort of the familiar. So when World War II ended, Western culture mostly coped with the trauma of exposure to massive violent death and devastation by doubling down on “suffer now, rewards later.”
Most adults numbed their death trauma by returning to the life they’d lived before the war, firmly grounded in “suffer now, rewards later” and the Protestant work ethic — the pattern that they were familiar with and thus felt safe with, pretending to themselves that everything was back to normal. And there was arguably no period in modern history that was more “normal” than the Leave It To Beaver, Father Knows Best “white picket fence” suburban American culture of the 1950s.
And in the post-war economic boom, at least in the US, the “mad men” of Madison Avenue were only too happy to leverage this “everything is normal” denial to encourage people to believe that buying things would heal the underlying pain — which in turn meant people had to work harder to afford more things to further numb the pain.
The adults coped by returning to the comfort of the familiar, but coping with the aftermath of World War II was an entirely different story for the kids who’d been born during and after the war.
Kids, it must be said, are never, ever down for “suffer now, rewards later.” We’re not born with a natural willingness to postpone happiness to a future date. That has to be taught, and it takes awhile for that foundational myth to take hold and do its work — for kids to become another brick in the wall, as it were. And since the adults were busy stuffing down their post-war trauma by insisting everything was “normal,” the kids were left on their own to deal with their reactions to the horrors and death trauma of the war.
I’m not suggesting 1950s parents were deliberately neglectful or didn’t love their kids the usual amount. It’s just that the emphasis back then was almost entirely on the physical, rather than emotional, well-being of children. As long as they were healthy and fed and clothed, the thinking mostly went, the kids were alright.
But the kids were not alright, because the kids are never alright in any war — and as we’ve talked about, World War II was not just any war.
For kids on both sides, there was, of course, the usual, expected trauma of growing up in the brutality and deprivation of wartime and the constant exposure to violent death. And then there was the usual wartime loss of stability, and the absent fathers and brothers that might never come home. And even if those fathers and brothers did come home, they were often not the same as when they left and never would be again.
But now for the first time, there were also the gruesome images of the Holocaust and of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the spectre of instant atomic annihilation, reinforced by — in America, at least — classroom “duck and cover” drills and the family bomb shelter in the backyard. All of it straight out of a child's nightmare. Deeply mythological, deeply apocalyptic. Deeply disruptive.
The trauma the kids were feeling couldn't stay contained in nightmares forever. And unlike today, there were no school crisis counselors, no self-help books that you could buy on how to help your child cope with images of mass genocide and the spectre of nuclear apocalypse. And with no widespread therapeutic help available, that trauma had to be expressed somehow, if an entire generation (and an entire world, because it’s not like the adults were okay, either) was going to keep from going — and I mean this quite literally — insane.
The electric guitars have finally arrived, albeit not quite those electric guitars. Because what those post-war kids did, in partnership with the artists and freethinkers and rebels who had more conscious awareness of their trauma, was to invent a way whereby they could scream at the top of their lungs to their heart’s content without having to overtly acknowledge their nightmares.
“I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.”16 — Jack Kerouac, On The Road
Early rock-and-roll is often called a revolution, and musically speaking, in many ways it was. But this is a series about mythology, and mythologically speaking, early rock and roll was not a revolution, at least not a riverbed-changing one. History shows us as much.
It’s easy to forget that the first wave of rock-and-roll only lasted a few years. By 1963, it had long faded and the charts were only slightly more interesting than they’d been before Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly and Elvis briefly raised the roof off the house.
History and musicology don’t give us an entirely satisfactory reason for the rapid fade-out of first generation rock and roll. Even with Elvis drafted into the Army, even with Buddy Holly’s death in a plane crash, even with Little Richard renouncing rock-and-roll for “suffer now, rewards later” Christianity, and Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis embroiled in scandals, and even with the racism and segregation that kept black artists from fully reaching a mainstream audience, it seems to defy reason that music as innovative and explosive as early rock and roll could die such a quick and ignoble death.
But in this matter, history is unambiguous — early rock-and-roll came and went like a glorious summer storm, churning up the waters and rocking the boats, but leaving the “riverbed” of the culture more or less unchanged.
Before we continue, let me emphasise that I’m well aware that the roots of early rock-and-roll are in part found in the music of African-American culture. When we get to Hamburg, we’ll talk more about how the Black roots of rock-and-roll factor into the story from a mythological — rather than a musical or historical — perspective, and how what The Beatles did with that sound was not a mere imitation or copy, and was instead significantly different from the originals they covered, and why that difference was crucial in turning original rock-and-roll into what it became.
But a reminder again, this isn’t a series on the history of music, nor is it a series on social justice or the Black experience. This is a series about the mythological importance of The Beatles and the Sixties to Western civilization. What we’re concerned with here is how early rock-and-roll manifested in the larger culture and how it affected “suffer now, rewards later” and ”might makes right.” And however the music arrived in their ears, history shows us that by far the biggest impact of early rock-and-roll on the larger culture came through the white, suburban teenagers of post-war America — the kids who, because of post-war economic prosperity, were the ones who had the extra spending money to buy all those records that first put rock-and-roll on the larger cultural map.
Contrary to popular belief, the concept of a teenager wasn’t new in the 1950s. Adolescence had been recognised as a separate life stage since the turn of the century.17 Rebellious teenagers were nothing new, either — juvenile delinquency had been a social issue (often a bogus one) for decades by the time the 1950s rolled around. Teenage sex and music that inflamed sexual passion wasn’t new, either. The morality police had been just as alarmed about ragtime in the Gilded Age18 and jazz in the Roaring Twenties and swing music in the between-the-wars era as they were about rock-and-roll in the 1950s.
The paradox at the heart of early rock-and-roll — and probably the main reason it wasn’t a mythological, riverbed-changing “earthquake” — is that despite their unresolved war trauma and atomic nightmares, those white suburban post-war American teenagers were also, by virtually any standard, the most fortunate, most affluent, most envied teenagers in the world.
Unlike Europe, where the war had actually been fought, America was in great shape after World War II. America was the only country to get out of the war without having its cities bombed — with the lone exception of Pearl Harbor, which for most Americans, was on an island far away from the mainland that most people had never been to and knew little about. America was the only country to get out of the war not in massive debt to... well, America, because America’s wartime and post-wartime manufacturing boom had made America so wealthy that it could afford to lend money to everyone else to repair all the war damage that America didn’t suffer.
American post-war prosperity meant American teenagers and their parents had money to spend on all those records and cool clothes and fast cars that became the envy of every other teenager in the world.
The power of early rock-and-roll — and it was undeniably powerful — is rooted in this paradox. It was part primal scream therapy, a cry for help from the kids still traumatised by the war and its aftermath, directly inspired by the African-American community that was still fighting a war of its own.
But paradoxically, early rock-and-roll also couldn't help but be the victory cry of the white suburban kids who popularised it — the children of the heroes who’d won that war and saved the world.
Musically, early rock and roll was a new sound, a new art form, and early rock-and-roll was scandalous in that it brought to the surface things that Western culture — and American culture in particular — would have preferred to keep hidden: the psychological damage done to the kids and to the culture as a whole, the anxiety about the bomb, and, of course, anything related to sex and especially teenagers having sex.
But early rock-and-roll was never going to change the “suffer now, rewards later” foundational mythology that had dominated Western civilization for two millennia. It just wasn’t built for it. There’s no reason for a world-changing revolutionary earthquake, when the world is at your feet. There’s no motivation for changing the riverbed of a culture, when that culture is earning you the adoration and envy of the entire world, and when you’ve got money in your pocket for the latest Elvis single and a full tank of gas for your souped-up T-bird convertible and a hot Saturday night date at the drive-in movie.
And any chance that early rock-and-roll did have to become any sort of world-changing revolution was lost, when the standard bearer of the whole movement obediently submitted to a crew cut and a draft notice from the United States Army — the literal embodiment of both “might makes right” and “suffer now, rewards later” — because his manager told him it would make him more acceptable and less threatening to the mainstream.
And if you’re thinking, wait, isn’t that what Brian Epstein19 did to The Beatles? — well, just hang on. In the next episode, we’ll get to why The Beatles shedding their black leather for tailored suits was fundamentally different from what Colonel Parker did to Elvis. And we’ll also talk more about why, although Elvis’ music may have been artistically revolutionary, neither his music nor Elvis himself was mythologically revolutionary.
By the end of the 1950s, with Elvis in the Army saying “yes sir” and “no sir,” and no one else with sufficient mythological and cultural power to reach into mainstream living rooms and lead a culture-changing revolution, both the victory party and the primal scream therapy was over. Early rock-and-roll faded with a whimper and most teenagers surrendered to cultural pressure and, with no other option, assimilated into the “suffer now, rewards later” lives of their parents’ generation.
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool
'Til you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules
— John Lennon, Working Class Hero20
An ocean away, the kids who’d grown up in post-war Europe were having a very different experience of the war and its aftermath. They didn’t have the luxury of a whole ocean between them and the violence, so even the teenagers in the countries that were on the winning side of the war weren’t feeling quite as full of swagger as American teenagers.
Unlike America, Europe was in very bad shape after the war — deeply in debt, with most cities heavily damaged by bombing raids on both sides of the conflict. There was the same post-war psychological trauma, of course — family ties broken, fathers and brothers dead or crippled with physical injuries or what was then called “shell shock” and what we now call PTSD. And of course, the children of Europe had the same apocalyptic nightmares — and as in America, there was little-to-no attention paid to their psychic wounds.
All of this was true in America too, but the children of Europe had extra trauma to deal with, the war having been fought oftentimes in their literal backyards. And air raid sirens not being merely practice drills, but warnings of actual bombs and fiery death coming from the sky. Children who’d been separated from their parents during wartime evacuations returned home — if they still had parents and a home to return to — disoriented, their sense of stability shattered and the inner and outer landscape of their childhood permanently altered.
All of it combined to create a post-war European culture — especially in Britain — that historians often sum up with a single word.
Grey.
And there was perhaps nowhere in all of post-war Britain that was greyer than a grimy, forgotten port city in northern England that, because of its strategic importance as the nearest port to America, was the second-most bombed city in the country.
We have at last arrived at our destination — though it wasn’t much of a destination in the late 1950s, and there weren’t yet any electric guitars, because the post-war teenagers of Liverpool couldn't afford electric guitars even if they’d been available, which they weren’t. The teenagers of post-war Liverpool couldn't afford much of anything, really, and even if they could, there wasn’t much to buy — rationing wouldn’t even end until 1954. And because of regional and class prejudice, northern England wasn’t a post-war priority for rebuilding, which meant the kids in this forgotten, grey northern city grew up playing in the ruins of the war, both literally and psychologically.
It’s easy to forget the sorts of experiences the children of Liverpool would have been exposed to during the war, whether firsthand or in the hushed voices of adults around the kitchen table. The extent of the devastation of the Blitz on Liverpool’s city centre is stunning by almost any measure. Joe Flannery, a close friend of Brian Epstein’s and an early acquaintance of the Beatles, who was a young teenager in Liverpool during the war describes walking through his neighbourhood after an air raid and coming upon “dozens of dead bodies laid out in rows like a gruesome flowerbed.”21
Experiences like this are common to children growing up in a war zone, and alien and unthinkable to the American teenagers who revelled in the confident swagger of rock and roll. And experiences like this were why, more than most, Liverpool teenagers were in desperate need of some swagger of their own, as well as some psychological release from their war trauma — which is why it’s probably no accident that they were the kids who refused to let early rock-and-roll die, even when it had long since faded away everywhere else, including in the US.
This is the world of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero.” And unlike American teenagers, Liverpool’s post-war teenagers had every reason to want a revolution. They took a hard look at the “might makes right” devastation from the war, and at the grey, restrictive “suffer now, rewards later” life their parents expected of them, knowing firsthand from the violence and death of their childhoods that the “later” often never arrives, and said, “yeah, no thanks, what else ya’ got?”
Meanwhile, in America, the frenetic rise and abrupt fall of rock-and-roll had left teenagers all shook up with no place to go. And just when things seemed like they couldn't get worse, an American president, young, handsome, charismatic, and promising a better, brighter future, was assassinated in broad daylight in the backseat of a Lincoln Continental.
On both sides of the ocean, teenagers — more of them than there had ever been at any other point in history because of the post-war baby boom — were seriously done with the bullshit.
Stories matter. When our personal stories fall apart, the fabric of our identity is torn. When our shared stories fall apart, the fabric of our shared cultural identity is torn, and by extension our connection to each other. When our sacred stories — the mythologies that give our lives shape and direction — fall apart, we lose our ability to fix any of it, because we lose the ability to think bigger than our individual circumstances and everyday lives. We lose the pattern that gives life its meaning and purpose. We lose our way forward.
Of all of the things early rock and roll was — a mating call, primal scream therapy, a cry for help, a victory dance — first and foremost might be that it was, in retrospect, the death cry of and for the old world.
This isn’t a criticism of early rock-and-roll, or a minimising of its influence. A death cry can be as powerful and as beautiful as an orgasm. That's the wheel of life. Yin and yang, light and dark, joy and sorrow, birth and death. One follows the other — that too is an old mythological story, maybe the oldest one of all. But it was an ending, not a beginning. It couldn't heal what was broken, it could only send a musical signal flare up into the heavens in hopes of catching the attention of something — or someone — who could.
“What was required,” wrote ‘60s culture commentator Jeff Nutall about the end of the 1950s, “was an explosive planted straight into the human consciousness to blow it off course.”22
All the pieces for that explosive were in place. The stage was set for the most powerful cultural earthquake ever experienced in Western civilization. For over two thousand years, “might makes right” and its demented offspring,“suffer now, rewards later” had shaped the events of human history. But all of that was about to change, when four teenagers from Liverpool with cheap guitars and a desperate hope of avoiding lives of “suffer now, rewards later” answered the SOS of early rock-and-roll and accidentally sparked a cultural revolution that blew up the old order and replaced it with something the world had never before experienced.
The world was about to meet The Beatles.
Until next week, peace, love and strawberry fields,
Faith
Leonard Cohen in a letter to his brother, 1962, quoted in “A Broken Hallelujah,” Liel Liebovitz, W. W. Norton & Company, 2014,.
“Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct.” Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
As a matter of readability, most writers choose not to capitalise the “t” in The Beatles. But the official Beatles website refers to the band as “The Beatles,” as since I think The Beatles ought to have the final word on how their name is formatted, I’ll be referring to them, always, as “The Beatles.” They have certainly earned the capital T, if anyone ever has.
“There are only about a hundred people in the world who understand our music," said John. "George, Ringo, and a few friends around the world.” Interview with John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Flip Magazine, May 1966.
Also from the same interview: “"Lack of feeling in an emotional sense is responsible for the way some singers do our songs. They don't understand and are too old to grasp the feeling. Beatles are really the only people who can play Beatle music." — John Lennon
Rollo May, The Cry for Myth, W. W. Norton, 1991.
I mean, probably. I’ve never actually tried it, tbf.
“It is not by its history that the mythology of a nation is determined, but conversely, its history is determined by its mythology. Rollo May, The Cry for Myth.
If you’re familiar with the work of Joseph Campbell, a foundational myth is different from Joseph Campbell’s “mono myth,” which he identifies as the “hero’s journey.” But this way of thinking about how mythology functions in a culture appears to be both overgeneralized and oversimplified. Cultures virtually never have just a single mythological story at play, any more than human beings have only one “story” that’s being told in our lives. Every culture has many mythologies at work, but usually only one dominant one — the foundational myth, which is why I think this is a more useful term. And more than that, the hero’s journey isn’t a riverbed-defining story — it’s a spin-off of “might makes right.”
When I say “Western” civilization, it means I’m excluding the cultures of Asia, Africa, South America and India from this discussion, not because the rules of mythology don’t apply to those cultures — they do — and not because the Sixties didn’t significantly and materially disrupt and shape those cultures — it did — but because those cultures aren’t my culture.
I strongly disagree that you have to be part of a culture to understand it, and in fact, it’s sometimes an advantage to be able to look in from the outside, And I also think a very strong case can be made that the Love Revolution affected virtually the entire globe, not just Western culture. But I don’t know nearly enough about those cultures to be able to talk about the impact of the Sixties on their history with any kind of authority.
That said, the rules of mythology are rules that apply to all of human civilization, and they apply in those cultures, too. If one were to take a close look at the patterns of history and mythology in their histories, I suspect we’d find the same earthquake-level change in the Sixties across all of human civilization.
Which is why so many mythologists start as psychologists, rather than historians..
The Aeneid, 6.743.
I’m aware that there’s a long-standing dispute among people who study that sort of thing about whether the earliest humans were hierarchical or communal, and whether early human culture was matriarchal or patriarchal. I don’t have anything useful to say about that because I’m not an anthropologist or an archaeologist. But either way, it’s not relevant for our purposes, because the mythological story of pre-history paganism was probably the same regardless of who was in charge of day-to-day life.
It might be tempting to offer the Renaissance as the second culture-changing earthquake in human history, and when it comes to scientific and intellectual thought, a case can be made. But remember, most people still couldn't read and didn’t have access to these intellectual and artistic breakthroughs. What they did have access to — every Sunday — is what the Church told them, and that was “suffer now, rewards later.”
It’s also worth noting that a lot of the great art of the Renaissance was commissioned by the Church as essentially marketing material, thus reinforcing rather than challenging the “suffer now, rewards later” foundational myth.
Chapter four in Stephen Greenblatt’s book The Swerve (W.W. Norton, 2011) offers a detailed look at the development of “suffer now, rewards later” as spread through the teachings of the Church, although the book as a whole misses the mythological element — as most history books do — and thus, in my opinion, vastly overclaims the impact of the Renaissance on the culture as a whole.
Which depending on one’s point of view is either Heaven or the seventh circle of Hell.
Japan, of course, was a less morally clear situation. Yes, they bombed Pearl Harbor, but we — and by “we” in this case, I mean America — retaliated by imprisoning innocent Japanese-Americans in internment camps and, even more devastatingly, dropping two atomic bombs on innocent civilians, which is why the romantic mythology of World War II tends to focus on the much less ambiguous “might makes right” of the Third Reich.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Viking Press, 1957.
For an excellent book on the history of the teenager, I recommend Jon Savage’s Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture: 1875-1945 (Penguin, 2008) It’s essentially the history of the first half of the 20th century told through the perspective of the teenage experience — including an extensive exploration of the effect of the death trauma on the post-war generation.
re: ragtime — "The counters of the music stores are loaded with this virulent poison which in the form of a malarious epidemic, is finding its way into the homes and brains of the youth to such an extent as to arouse one's suspicions of their sanity." The Etude (magazine), January 1900.
re: jazz — In 1921, Ladies Home Journal, published a plea to parents to save their children from the corrupting effects of jazz. It should sound familiar to anyone aware of these same protests being expressed in the 1950s relative to rock and roll. “Anyone who says that ‘youths of both sexes can mingle in close embrace’ — with limbs intertwined and torso in contact— without suffering harm lies. Add to this position the wriggling movement and sensuous stimulation of the abominable big jazz orchestra with its voodoo-born minors and its direct appeal to the sensory center, and if you can believe that youth is the same after this experience than before, then God help your child.” John R. McMahon, “Unspeakable Jazz Must Go,” Ladies Home Journal, November 1921, quoted in The Damned and the Beautiful : American Youth in the 1920's, Paula S. Fass.
I wasn’t able to find a consensus on the correct pronunciation of “Epstein,” so in the audio, we’re going with what seem to be the way most people think the family pronounced it, rather than the way the public and The Beatles pronounced it.
John’s “Working Class Hero” is a powerful articulation of the damage of “suffer now, rewards later” to the post-war generation that would ultimately become the Flower Children of the Sixties.
I have a soft spot for rawness of the outtake—
Also, relative to Spotify links, we will do some episode playlists when they’re warranted, but for now, it’s a song here or there, when one of their songs speaks especially strongly to something we’re talking about.
I’m going to link to Spotify, even though, like many of you, I’m horrified at Spotify’s poor treatment of artists and songwriters, and with their passing off AI music as if it’s made by humans. But Spotify is by far the most popular streaming platform, and we all know that whether I link to Spotify or not won’t make any meaningful difference to how Spotify treats its artists. And as we’ll see, there is greater good in giving you easy and quick access to this music that at least offsets the karma a little bit.
Joe Flannery, Standing in the Wings, The History Press, 2013.
Jeff Nutall, Bomb Culture, Delacourt Press, 1968.
