Happy Xmas (War Is Over)

Over a decade ago, I worked on a project called the Well-Tempered Songbook. It was a countdown of the top 48 popular songs that had an impact on me – not an easy list to compile. Here is one of them.

Photo by Fleur on Unsplash

The White Album came with large format photographs slipped into the record sleeve. The pictures felt like they didn’t belong there. What were four large photographs doing inside a record album, especially an album that was so unimpressive visually in every other respect? I had culturally absorbed that the musicians were important. Even my father who had no interest in popular music had still gone out and bought Sergeant Pepper’s on reel-to-reel when it was released.

They were The Beatles – an odd name for a band, with something the tiniest bit irritating in the spelling. But those were the days of Beatlemania, and I was almost hopeful of liking them, of being connected to that. I do remember liking, but only sort of, the cartoon for the Yellow Submarine, perhaps simply because it was a cartoon, and I was a child.

But they kept their distance in their way, all four of them. They were pleasant but strangers in their movies and in song. Aloof. Laughing only for each other. I was missing something the others heard.

Or saw.

The headshots in the album were unlikely. The band members didn’t seem happy to be photographed. One of them looked doe-eyed and vacant. He hadn’t shaved for the picture, and his beard stubble stood out. Another had an oversized shirt collar that mocked regular clothing in a way that felt disrespectful. As a young child I wouldn’t have dreamed of ordering people by who I liked the most to least, but if I had, then I suppose the “Quiet One” would have been up at the top of my list by virtue of seeming the most respectful and conventionally handsome. Then Ringo. Then doe-eyed Paul. 

The last one, the “Smart One,” I simply didn’t like.