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October 06, 2005

something in the way

I am listening to and trying and failing to like a cd called Beatles ReGrooved. I admit I am a Beatles snob. That is to say I like my Beatles music performed by The Beatles, not by George Martin, not by Frank Sinatra, not by The Muppets, not by Rufus Wainwright, not by Muzak.

Years ago I watched a show on PBS in which Leonard Bernstein lectured on Beethoven. Bernstein said that the hallmark of Beethoven's genius was that when you listen to his music, you can't imagine one note being different--it's absolutely perfect as written. I guess that's how I feel about The Beatles: I can't imagine anything they wrote or sang being sung differently by anyone else. It's all fine the way it is, thank you, and I don't need it tarted up or plained down or synthesized to remind me how important it is, and was, to my life. I remember as a teenager feeling personally offended by my father's record of the Boston Pops renditions of Beatles songs. As if they were nothing more than tuneful. As if it wasn't the most important music ever written. (You get the idea.)

The Husband likes the cd quite a lot and said something kind of poetic about it: that the new arrangements open up the music, expand the songs to encompass meanings that they didn't before. He gave me a copy of it so I could hear for myself. And while I really like that he said that, and how he said it, and how it made me think, and that he burned me a copy thinking I would like it, when ReGrooved's insipid version of "Two of Us" began playing the other morning on my way to work, I ejected that cd and put in Luce instead. I think the artists of Beatles ReGrooved should go pick on Green Day.

Posted by JudyLa at 04:07 PM | Comments (0)