As we enter the late 2020s, the legacy of the Beatles\u00a0\u2014 history\u2019s biggest band, by any measure\u00a0\u2014 is facing a final reckoning. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the group\u2019s last surviving members, are now eighty-four and eighty-six, respectively. This should remind us that what might be called the \u201cBeatles generation\u201d is reaching the end of its natural lifespan, its icons departing the stage to become musty archival heritage. All things, as the late George Harrison once acknowledged, must pass.<\/p>\n
Partly as a result, the second half of the decade looks set to be a heyday of fabology (that is, critical appraisal of the Fab Four). But many of the retrospectives, gratingly, will seek to claim the Beatles for the cause of cultural liberalism. The last few years have seen a rash of books by \u201ccentrist dad\u201d media figures, from Ian Leslie\u2019s John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs to Stuart Maconie\u2019s With a Little Help From Their Friends (the titles sum up the soggy, middlebrow bias of these texts). Even more ominously, a blockbuster Beatles biopic is now in production. Directed by Sam Mendes, a filmmaker who churns out vaguely progressive-nationalist fare in the vein of 1917, Britannia, and the James Bond movies Skyfall and Spectre, \u201cThe Beatles\u00a0\u2014 A Four-Film Cinematic Event\u201d will likely trigger a British Invasion for the TikTok era when it drops in April 2028.<\/p>\n
The battle for the soul of the Beatles, and their sociopolitical significance, is well and truly on then. On the one hand, there is something understandable, even appropriate, about attempts to locate the band at the cuddlier end of capitalism. The first mass-marketed boy group, the Beatles undoubtedly began as front men for the consumerist strain in postwar social democracy. A bolder thesis is that they saved American capitalism from itself at a crucial moment in the mid-1960s, pacifying a populace that had been destabilized by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and John F. Kennedy\u2019s assassination, and helping to downgrade a radical zeitgeist into a harmless hippie bacchanal that ultimately served the socioeconomic status quo rather well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As we enter the late 2020s, the legacy of the Beatles\u00a0\u2014 history\u2019s biggest band, by any measure\u00a0\u2014 is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":863902,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216],"class_list":["post-863901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=863901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/863902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=863901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=863901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=863901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}