Birth­day: The White Album Turns 40

As part of Pop­Mat­ters’ week-long cel­e­bra­tion of the 40th anniver­sary of the Bea­t­les’ self-titled dou­ble album, we’ve asked Bill Gibron and Zeth Lundy to dis­cuss the record’s impor­tance and impact, and why it con­tin­ues to res­onate within pop­u­lar cul­ture some four decades later.

Bill Gibron:

But what does it all mean some 40 years on? Can any­thing akin to clar­ity come from some­thing that, by all accounts, should have been shaved down to the clas­sic sonic cliché—i.e., a sin­gle “good” album? In many sig­nif­i­cant ways, The Bea­t­les rep­re­sents the end of the coun­ter­cul­ture. It sig­nals the moment when the mean­ing was drained out of flower power. It pissed on the predilec­tion to “tune in, turn on, and drop out” and pro­vided the band with the first of many cat­a­lysts for their even­tual bad vibe breakup. Unlike every­thing else in their aston­ish­ingly short career (they hit it big in ‘62, and were a pro­fes­sional post­script a mere eight years later), there seemed to be no pur­pose, no rhyme or rea­son to the album’s exis­tence. Like the hit or miss com­pi­la­tions at the begin­ning, there was an absence of theme, a lack of styl­is­tic cohe­sion. Unless you want to con­sider back­wards glanc­ing exper­i­men­tal­ism a model, this was merely a col­lec­tion of tunes.

But what a brazen, ballsy anthol­ogy it is. When­ever some­one sug­gests that The Bea­t­les be pared down to a stand-alone LP, the inevitable debate arises—what to get rid of? Do we junk Ringo’s two con­tri­bu­tions (the self-penned “Don’t Pass Me By” and the clos­ing lul­laby “Good Night”), or mar­gin­al­ize an already under­ap­pre­ci­ated George (who, by this point, was back­log­ging an impres­sive list of soon to be clas­sics). Sure, “Wild Honey Pie” seems like a joke the band for­got to let its fans in on, but in the con­text of the two songs sur­round­ing it—the reggae-fied “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “The Con­tin­u­ing Story of Bun­ga­low Bill”—it makes frac­tured genius sense. Nat­u­rally, there are many who point their still stri­dent “no Yoko” fin­gers and find noth­ing but noise in Lennon’s self-indulgent sound col­lage “Rev­o­lu­tion 9”, and yet what it rep­re­sents (the zenith of the boys attempt to grow beyond their mop-top mer­chan­dis­ing) gets lost in the lambasting.

Hav­ing retired from tour­ing two years before, the Bea­t­les were both inspired and sti­fled by the stu­dio. In that regard, The Bea­t­les often sounds like a set list for an aban­doned tour, the roller­coaster real­i­ties of a band that could han­dle almost any aural approach with amaz­ing skill and dex­ter­ity. As the afore­men­tioned noise track sug­gests, the mate­r­ial here feels raw and unfin­ished, few tunes tak­ing on the fully formed awe of “A Day in the Life” or “Penny Lane”. It’s as if each mem­ber of the group, locked in his own lit­tle world while exiled away in India, decided that there was noth­ing left to fight for—at least, not as pop cul­ture icons. Instead, it was going to be about the art from here on in, no mat­ter what form or fig­ure it decided to take. Amidst all the quit­ting and com­plain­ing, the stu­dio ses­sion strug­gles and indi­vid­ual inspi­ra­tions, it was time to upend the untamed excesses of their Mag­i­cal Mys­tery media image and return to their roots.

It’s no sur­prise then that, after this pro­fes­sional purga­tive, the boys only had a cou­ple dozen songs left in them. Yel­low Sub­ma­rine would see a quar­tet of pais­ley plied out­takes, while Abbey Road and Let It Be became the pro and con of the band’s rekin­dled spir­its. After climb­ing the Ever­est that was inter­na­tional iconog­ra­phy, and stand­ing on the world’s high­est precipice in rapt deter­mi­na­tion on what to do next, the Bea­t­les decided to do some­thing totally unheard of. Instead of play­ing it safe, or retrac­ing their steps into retire­ment, they resolved to step up to the edge, and jump. It was more than just a leap of faith though. It was, per­haps, an attempt to leave their Earthly shells behind and finally find the spir­i­tu­al­ity their jour­ney to Rishikesh failed to pro­vide. The Bea­t­les does have the aura of leg­ends lost in a void of infi­nite vari­ables. That they decided to explore all of them before finally falling apart stands as the rea­son the Bea­t­les remain time­less. It’s also why this record is con­sid­ered a classic.

Bill Gibron
17 Novem­ber 2008

Zeth Lundy:

But The Bea­t­les is, aes­thet­i­cally, its own regres­sion, a regres­sion into the tropes, tru­isms, and motifs of rock ‘n’ roll’s creviced shell. It’s a chameleon of form, hol­low­ing out the foun­da­tions of Chuck Berry and the ghosts of British music hall, mov­ing from faux reg­gae to pas­toral folk, from reduc­tive blues jams and pro­gres­sive proto-metal vamps to whis­pered bal­ladry and late-night lul­la­bies. The Bea­t­les both sum­ma­rized the splin­tered British music scene of the late ‘60s, with tongue firmly in cheek, and served as a crib sheet for its ori­gins. Self-referential, per­verse, and imp­ishly stock-taking, The Bea­t­les is the first post-modern pop album: it nes­tles into form and frac­tures it, mak­ing the famil­iar sud­denly fan­tas­ti­cal, for the first time and for all time.

At this point, in late 1968, the Bea­t­les had changed the course of pop music count­less times over, and now they were pre­dict­ing the paths it would fol­low in the future. The endear­ing mess that is The Beatles—producer George Mar­tin has con­ceded that they “should have made a very, very good sin­gle album rather than a double”—forecasts upcom­ing ego-driven sprawls of con­cept like the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St., Ste­vie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, Fleet­wood Mac’s Tusk, and the Clash’s Lon­don Call­ing , all of them shar­ing a per­fec­tion wrought from a tapes­try of imper­fec­tions. Albums could be what­ever they wanted to be, for bet­ter and for worse, self-editing and artis­tic restraint be damned. (I would also argue that Lennon’s con­tri­bu­tions to The Bea­t­les, mostly dis­par­age­ments of hyp­ocrites and author­ity fig­ures, were the begin­nings of punk, at least in attitude.)

The Bea­t­les circa 1968 (© Don McCullin)

The album’s sprawl, dis­so­cia­tive and in search of a greater pur­pose, also pre­dicts the anything-goes, DIY method­ol­ogy of late-20th cen­tury indie rock and bed­room pop—indeed, a record like Guided by Voices’ frac­tured Bee Thou­sand (1994) is a direct descen­dent of The Bea­t­les‘ slack­ened tac­tic. The Bea­t­les destroyed the notion that pop records had to be made in one room of a pro­fes­sional record­ing stu­dio by a uni­fied col­lec­tive. In fact, the album was made in simul­ta­ne­ous pieces, within dif­fer­ent rooms at Abbey Road and nearby Tri­dent Stu­dios; many songs were recorded by a frac­tion of the band, while oth­ers were com­pleted entirely by one Bea­tle alone. And so although The Bea­t­les is a peren­nial fan favorite (if you were bring­ing one Bea­t­les album to a desert island, why wouldn’t it be the gen­er­ous one with 30 tracks?), it is actu­ally the least Beatles-esque of all their albums. As Bob Spitz wrote in his mas­ter­ful 2005 biog­ra­phy of the band, “The new reper­toire, almost to a song, had lost its col­lab­o­ra­tive aspect…the writ­ing process would forgo the crit­i­cal feedback—the sug­ges­tion of a phrase, a few bars, or a mid­dle eight—that helped shape a Lennon-McCartney song in the past.” (It’s also impor­tant to note that by record­ing so many songs, the band was effec­tively get­ting closer to the end of its con­tract with EMI. The Bea­t­les was the first of the group’s albums to be released on its own Apple label, rather than Parlophone/Capitol—yet another con­nec­tion that can be drawn to the bur­geon­ing indie trends of later decades.)

For­mally, there­fore, the songs on The Bea­t­les aren’t always up to clas­si­cist snuff. The puzzle-piece func­tion­al­ity of a song like “Hap­pi­ness Is a Warm Gun” replaces the com­po­si­tional neat­ness of a past song like “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party”, to pick an arbi­trary exam­ple (or even a more sim­i­lar exper­i­ment like “A Day in the Life”, which still attempted to emu­late the exis­tence of a mid­dle eight with its pasting-together of sep­a­rate sec­tions), while tracks like “Hel­ter Skel­ter”, “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”, and “Yer Blues” eschew any sort of for­mal inge­nu­ity in order to sat­isfy more pri­mal urges. This isn’t to say that these songs are infe­rior exam­ples of the Bea­t­les’ genius, but for the first time (per­haps the only time) Bea­t­les songs were being dic­tated by mood, imagery, and/or instinct rather than by com­po­si­tional intellect.

To put it another way: The Bea­t­les appeals to us on a gut level. It’s pop music that’s unhinged and pre­sump­tive, excitable and unashamed, blessed with the unpre­dictable acu­men of a mood swing. This is an incon­gru­ous menu of music, and our brains duly inform us that it shouldn’t make any sense, that it is all too much, a con­se­quence of our glut­to­nous desires for more. But it does work, against our bet­ter judg­ment: it is a place where ambiva­lent polit­i­cal sen­ti­ment can rub up against a sen­ti­men­tal show­tune dis­trac­tion, where dec­la­ra­tions of car­nal and spir­i­tual love can exist in close prox­im­ity. It works because it wills itself to work, and because the child inside us deems it so.

Zeth Lundy
17 Novem­ber 2008