Have You Heard the Word?

As promised, what follows is the key to the 2009 "Year of the Beatles" Zimmerman Christmas letter. To recap: 50 Beatles references—plus two extra credit selections. Pencils down, people . . .

1. Do you want to know a secret? Do You Want to Know a Secret?
2. “You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead” Two of Us
3. Tell me what you see! Tell Me What You See
4. A splendid time is guaranteed for all . . . Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite
5. Happy ever after in the marketplace? Ob-la-di Ob-la-da
6. It’s all too much for me to take . . . all the world’s a birthday cake. It’s All Too Much
7. She became a legend of the silver screen. Honey Pie
8. “They’re gonna make a big star out of me!” Act Naturally
9. It felt a little like she was leaving home (bye, bye). She’s Leaving Home
10. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! She Loves You
11. “I wanna hold your hand.” I Wanna Hold Your Hand
12. “Keep your hands to yourself!” I’m Down
13. “It’s getting better all the time!” Getting Better
14. He’s been traveling here, there and everywhere. Here, There and Everywhere
15. Some days it seems he’s gone halfway across the universe. Across the Universe
EXTRA CREDIT!!! He is developing a fab new style. "Fab 4" or When We Was Fab (George Harrison)
16. “Dear Sir or Madam, could you read my book?” Paperback Writer
17. “Don’t bother me.” Don’t Bother Me
18. Soon we’ll be away from here; step on the gas. You Never Give Me Your Money
19. The world going by your window. I’m Only Sleeping
20. I should have known better. Should Have Known Better
21. Like pigs from a gun. I Am the Walrus
22. “We can work it out!” We Can Work It Out
23. Dig it! Dig It
24. Though we ran and hid our heads, we both got sick and wondered if we might as well be dead. Rain
25. La la la, la la la la la. From Me to You
26. She’d love you to. Love You To
27. In a strange (very strange) turn of events ... Penny Lane
28. Boys—what a bundle of joy! Boys
29. Your voice is soothing, but the. words aren’t clear. I’m Looking Through You
30. Paperback writer Dave ... Paperback Writer
31. I’m so proud to know that she is mine. Good Day Sunshine
32. Dave would post to Twitter and Facebook every little thing he does. Every Little Thing
33. He ... seems to think “Everybody’s trying to be my baby.” Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby
34. “I’m a loser.” I’m a Loser
35. I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in to stop my mind from wondering where it will go . . . Fixing a Hole
36. All it needs is love ... All You Need Is Love
37. But we decided to let it be. Let It Be
38. Christ, you know it ain’t easy; you know how hard it can be. Ballad of John and Yoko
39. Tomorrow never knows ... Tomorrow Never Knows
40. Get back, Loretta! Your mama’s waiting for you. Get Back
41. We ran for our lives ... Run for Your Life
42. Dave wakes up every day to Lacey shouting “Good morning! Good morning!” Good Morning, Good Morning
43. ... And gets home every afternoon to find Lucy at the door, clutching forks and knives to eat the fish medley. Little Piggies
44. It helps that there’s a place where we can go ... There’s a Place
45. You say it’s your birthday? It’s my birthday too, yeah! Birthday
46. I guess you could say we get by with a little help from our friends. With a Little Help from My Friends
47. We do appreciate your being ‘round. Help!
48. All you need is love; love is all you need. All You Need Is Love
EXTRA CREDIT!!! Happy Christmas! Happy Christmas (War Is Over)
49. Here comes the Son! Here Comes the Sun
50. Love, love, love. All You Need Is Love

That's it! If you hit If you got more than the bold, italicized headings, we'll call you a fan. If you got thirty or more, you may want to see your doctor about treatment options for Beatlemania. Hope you have enjoyed the show! Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band (Reprise)

Come Together, Right Now: Exploit Me

Perhaps my fondness for the Beatles is slipping into dogmatic obsession, but I'm really bugged by the sloppy sublicensing their music is currently being subjected to. Adweek picks up on my ennui: first was the lame homonym substitution by Target of "Good Buy" for "Goodbye" that stripped the song "Hello, Goodbye" entirely of its poignancy; now comes a diaper ad that, pardon my french, craps all over the song that the Beatles considered important enough to invite all their friends to perform with them for a worldwide satellite broadcast: "All You Need Is . . ."--wait for it--"Luvs.(tm)"

Come on, people, now. This is the Beatles song that most explicitly articulates John Lennon's worldview; only "Imagine," perhaps, gets more straightforward. Someone gave Luvs(tm) the right to this travesty, and that someone ought to have his or her face rubbed in it.

Someday Tupac and U2 are going to have to endure this kind of sacrilege of their canon too. I'd like to see Bono, in fact, fight the power here: "The diaper industry stole this song from the Beatles; we're stealing it back."

The 1960s: Two Cinematic Views

Last weekend I saw two movies (I don't have kids): Across the Universe and Hairspray. I was dying to see one and had been hoping to avoid the other (I'm married). It occurs to me now (I'm a little slow on the uptake) that both movies were musicals, both visually adventurous, and both were painting a particular picture of a bygone era. Both pictures, however, were startlingly different in their approach. I actually left the theaters liking the one I expected to dislike and being mildly disappointed in the one I'd been dying to see. Go figure.

Hairspray is, in a sense, no surprise. It was originally scripted in 1988 by John Waters, providing Ricki Lake with a breakout role nearly twenty years ago. This one features the perky and irrepressible Nikki Blonsky as Tracy Turnblad. The film takes place in Baltimore, Maryland, circa 1962, and is built around the Corny Collins Show, a local dance show featuring the "nicest kids in town," a nicely ironic musical number tells us to set the general tone of the film. Once a month is "Negro Day," when the normal cast (including host Corky) cede the stage to an all black dancing troupe. Tracy makes it her goal to (a) join the cast of the show because she loves to dance and (b) "make every day Negro Day" because she's a fundamentally decent human being. Two problems with her plan: (a) she's overweight and (b) the TV producer is a racist. Hilarity ensues.

Across the Universe is a history of the 1960s through the music of the Beatles and the lens of a handful of young people coming of age. It's like A Hard Day's Night meets Rent. Liverpoolian Jude (get it? "Hey Jude"--hah!) leaves England in search of the father he's never met, who happens to do maintenance work on the campus of Princeton University. Jude meets his dad but, more importantly, meets Max (get it? "Maxwell's Silver Hammer"--hah!) and, soon enough, Max's sister Lucy (get it? "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"--last one, I promise). Jude and Max leave Princeton behind to live in the city with sexy Sadie, Jo Jo, Prudence and a bevy of other young bohemians, and when Lucy's Army boyfriend dies, she joins them. Jude and Lucy fall in love, but they have different visions of how to change the world: Lucy says she wants a revolution, while Jude thinks nothing's gonna change his world. Romantic complexity ensues.

It struck me as I watched Across the Universe that there's not nearly as much idolatry of the 1960s these days as I experienced growing up. The culture, in many ways, has moved on to the 1970s--That 70s Show enjoyed a long run on network television and dominates the rerun schedule where I live, and Momma Mia's theatrical ode to ABBA debuted long before Across the Universe was even an idea. But perhaps we now have enough distance from the 1960s to see it as more than its reductions. Hairspray makes a legitimate claim on the early 60s with Tracy's spunky, Sally Fieldesque can-do-ism changing Baltimore for the better. Tracy's mother, Edna, historically played by a man in drag (first Divine and now John Travolta in an uneven performance), keeps the mood constantly light and airy, and the wonderfully innocent Christopher Walken, who is clueless to the romantic manipulations of a brilliantly vampish Michelle Pfeiffer, keeps the laughs coming with his joke shop and his mattress made of whoopie cushions. By 1962 the Civil Rights Movement was in full force, a young, spunky, Sally Fieldesque president and first lady were in the White House, the Beatles had (relatively) short hair and peppy, bouncy lyrics, and the 1960s were still a decade of possibility: a time when it made sense to "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." Now go get em, kids.

Flash forward to 1964, when the Beatles stepped into the cultural void left by the assassinated John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War dragged on, and the Civil Rights Movement started to weather internal strife and more forceful conflicts. Young people began experimenting with drugs and free love and political alternatives to the social order (T. V. Carpio's "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" is a must-download track), and the champions of the social order didn't like it. The collective patience of the culture wore thin, and the world headed for a crash. the cultural crash was given a soundtrack with Dana Fuch's rendition (as Sadie) of "Helter Skelter," Bono's unsatisfying "I Am the Walrus" and Joe Cocker's forced "Come Together," but the emotional breakdown that inevitably follows careless relational experimentation and uncivil war was accompanied by the jaded "I Want You/She's So Heavy" and "Happiness Is a Warm Gun," reinterpreted brilliantly by Joe Anderson as Max, and the less satisfying "Oh Darling" by Sadie and Martin Luther as an otherwise wonderful Jo Jo. Even the very funny Eddie Izzard kept the mood cynical and tired in his wildly creative "Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite," which I'm sad to say is not on the soundtrack.

Across the Universe ends on a hopeful note, with performances of "Don't Let Me Down" and "All You Need Is Love" evocative of the Beatles' rooftop performance of Let It Be, but it's worth noting that Let It Be was essentially a postmortem for the Beatles; by its release they had disbanded.

The thing is, both these pictures of the 1960s are wildly exaggerated, but both are essentially true. The decade started in wild, unfettered hope and ended in tired protest and rote experimentation. No wonder the 1970s were so lame; everybody was burned out from trying to change the world.

At least they tried, I guess. If you're looking for a fun, feel-good film, go for Hairspray. If you're looking for a more melancholy retrospective of a troubling time, get Across the Universe. But if you want to know the 1960s, you'll need to see them both.

American Idiot Meets American Idol

OK, I'll admit it: I watched American Idol. I've not watched it before, thinking myself above that sort of thing, but this year I got sucked in. I was irritated that Melinda Doolittle didn't win but satisfied that Jordin Sparks did. And I'll admit it: I think Simon Cowell always tells the truth, and I respect him for it.

But that's not why I'm writing this post. I'm writing this post because I am still trying to figure out why the Beatles were on such prominent display on the American Idol finale. Songs from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band showcased winners from previous seasons and showed why, for example, Carrie Underwood ("She's Leaving Home") has outpaced Taylor Hicks ("A Day in the Life," in which Hicks, in shiny silk shirt, stuck his finger to his temple and "pulled a trigger" to emphasize the line "He blew his mind out in a car") in the hearts and minds of the American Idolatrous public.

But that's not why I'm writing this post. I'm writing this post because I am still trying to figure out why Greenday chose American Idol to showcase their version of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero." It seems like a clash of competing idolatries: Idol is to Disneyworld what Greenday is to Lollapalooza. Idol doesn't swear. Greenday swears a lot; John Lennon, in "Working Class Hero," swears a lot.

I went along with it when Celine Dion sang alongside Elvis Presley earlier in the season, when Idol gave back. The whole thing made sense in American Idol World; it was acceptably surreal. But this mashup of power punk meets anti-establishment icon meets quintessential American mystique was supremely surreal and just left me confused.

I've had a hard time respecting Greenday; in the early 1990s they were just another punk band singing ephemeral lyrics about generic punk themes--leave me alone, I know I'm a loser, that sort of thing. They were immature even at their most mature; the surprisingly poignant "Good Riddance" was an acoustic farewell song with melancholy, sentimental lyrics, but it was sung too fast and with too much edge, like a high schooler auditioning for the Homecoming entertainment committee who had a semester left to learn nuance.

Greenday lost prominence for a while but then resurfaced in the last couple of years with American Idiot. Punk had lost its prominence as well, so now Greenday are the godfathers of the genre. And they've grown up; they're writing angry songs in place of their earlier self-indulgent songs. They've effectively taken on the Bush administration and won a great deal of critical acclaim. They're now important. And apparently they've discovered John Lennon.

But that's not why I'm writing this post. I'm writing this post because Greenday chose "Working Class Hero" as a fitting tribute to John Lennon (which it is) but also as an appropriate offering to the "Save Darfur" project (which it isn't), and they chose to draw attention to it on national television on American Idol--which makes no sense.

American Idol is a twenty-first century manifestation of the Horatio Alger vision for America: here even the poorest, the most downtrodden, can with pluck and fortitude become something great. Even an obscure, working-class neopeasant with a good singing voice can become an American Idol.

Of course, Jordin is the daughter of a former professional football player; Blake Lewis (this season's runner-up) has performed with Sir Mix-a-Lot; Melinda toured with the Winans; and even the song-contest winner, Scott Krippayne, has a long resume within the Christian music industry. These are not singers minding their own business who stumbled into greatness. They're not working-class heroes; they're industry insiders who became American idols.

So, in a sense, the joke's on us. And I find myself wondering whether Greenday was trying to make that point. People unfamiliar with the song "Working-Class Hero" will probably remember the line "A working-class hero is something to be," but they need to remember that the prophetic message of the song is more insidious: "You're still f---ing peasants, as far as I can see."

Take a Great Song and Make It Better

I know I should be posting something spiritually reflective about my time at the 2006 Urbana Student Missions Convention, but right now I'm distracted by what may well be my favorite Christmas gift this season. The thing is, it was a gift that my wife got.

Perhaps you've heard of the Beatles, the single-most important band in the history of rock music. They broke up in 1970, and only two of them are still living, but every couple of years they reassert themselves as possibly the best band ever. In recent years they've released a three-volume anthology of rare recordings that revealed the craft of their songwriting, and they've licensed their songs for repurposing by the best and brightest contemporary artists in films such as I Am Sam. But in 2006 they outdid themselves by approving a Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil show built around their music. I haven't seen the show, but thanks to the largesse of my lovely wife, I've now heard the soundtrack, and it may well be the thing that finally gets me to Vegas.

On the surface of things you wouldn't expect anything particularly novel out of this CD. It appears to be a relatively standard mix of Beatles songs throughout their near-decade of recording. But then you put it in the player, and you're shocked out of your anticipated singalong adventure when the Beatles wait an extra two or three beats between singing "Because the world is round, it turns me on" and the repeat: "Because the world is round." All the instrumentation is mixed out of the vocal track, and we're left with a haunting intro that gradually gives way to an incredibly potent mashup of seemingly random Beatles samples turning "Get Back" into a musical car chase.

The music on "The Beatles 'Love'" disk is infused with a new energy and poignancy that shows the debt that today's most promising musicians owe these guys and defines longevity and timelessness by example. Songs that were innovative in their day are made even more innovative by the respectful, visionary efforts of producer George Martin and his son Giles. If you know the Beatles' music, download "Because" and "Gnik Nus"--an experiment in backmasking that reveals a great new melody. If you don't know the Beatles music well, download the tout sweet "Get Back" and "Lady Madonna," which borrows from "Hey Bulldog" to add a new grittiness to one of Paul McCartney's funkiest songs.

OK. Next time I'll post something spiritual. I promise.