Dad loves the Beatles (and he was there at the time – in the “young in the 1960s” sense, I mean, not as a member of their immediate entourage); so do I, so does my daughter.
She and one or two good friends have started
swapping ‘classic’ recommendations for Beatles, Bowie and, heck, even the
Velvet Underground; it’s interesting to me to observe this from a distance and
to see what she’s making of it all; she’s grown up in a household full of music
and talking; naturally the teenage years are about self-authorship, a sort of
existential threshold - consult Mark McConville’s ‘Adolescence: Psychotherapy And The Emergent Self’ if you don’t believe me or just spend an hour or so
journalling and thinking back.
I’ve recently written a 5,000 word piece about the Beatles, John
Lennon’s difficult teenage years, Beatles literature, other 1960s rock and roll
and – more intangibly - what it means to love and appreciate popular music in a
world where there’s an actually-existing popular music canon which stretches
back, by this point, a half-century and more.
I’m seeing if I can get this Beatles article published
somewhere. I’ve got a couple of ideas about that but if the publications I’m
thinking of “don’t think it’s quite right for them” (rejection letter
euphemism!), I’ll self-publish it at this website on 8th December.
If you have to ask why that date, you’re clearly not serious about the Fab Four
yourself – and that’s okay, other beat combination groups are available, plus it's okay (arguably better) not to like pop music at all: for the late Roger Scruton, conservative philosopher par excellence, it's "the endless repetitive background which is rapidly driving both music and silence from our world."
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