The Beatles Love

I have to apologize to the two people who received excited IM messages on Friday when I was about 4 minutes into the first track on the new Beatles repackaged-hits collection Love. I was in a certain mood, one that accomodated hearing an acapella version of "Because" that segued into what I thought was a sign of things to come from this album---a mashup (of sorts, not exactly Girl Talk but whatever) of Ringo's drums from "Golden Slumbers" with the opening guitar stutter and twang of "Get Back." I paused my iTunes during the middle of the song, and spent most of the rest of the afternoon excited to go back and listen to the rest of the record, which I assumed would be more of the same---goofy-but-fun reimaginings of old Beatles moments, presented as new things that would make me reimagine the original songs all over again or something. Yeah, well then I actually sat and listened to the whole record. You guys should seriously try this approach to music appreciation, because this time, it showed me that Love is what I should have realized it was the whole time---another retrospective of the band's material with little to separate it from a shitty DJ mix that I would make to play at a wedding reception.

Only the rub this time, you see, is that the same songs are now part of a soundtrack, to which a highly regarded troupe of lithe, asexual Europeans and Asians wriggle around on sticks for the amusement of Las Vegas tourists, who also, like anyone who buys this CD, are in the midst of wasting their money on trifles and diversions. Any mashing to be done on Love is blindingly obvious and definitely George-influenced (I think he spearheaded this cross-promotional mess), like looping Ringo's brilliant drumming and the droning sitar from "Tomorrow Never Knows" under one of the worst and least listenable Beatles moments of all time---George's pseudo-mystical and definitely annoyingly nasal Indian naivete from "Within You Without You," and again, mixing "Here Comes the Sun," one of the most beautiful moments in popular music history, with the atonal glob that is "The Inner Light." And I know you're thinking the same thing---how brilliant it is to combine two songs that use sitars and two more that George did. The brave thing to do would be to release "Norwegian Wood" without the sitar accompaniment, because it would be much, much better. Elsewhere on Love, though, all you get is songs segueing into one another by means of beat-matching dissolves, the sort of lame shit that I used to do on Final Cut Pro and post on this blog for free. I know that other bands misinterpret their own legacies all the time and continue to embarass themselves (I'm looking in your directions, Who and Rolling Stones), but I seriously never thought the Beatles would do a circus soundtrack before signing a fucking iTunes license.

I suppose this is the opposite of a typical blog post, because I'm advising pretty strongly against buying this. It's a public service announcement---don't take the cheap way out and buy it as a Christmas present for that Beatles fan you know, because if they've got their wits about them, they'll sell it on eBay. And if you're interested in reappropriated Beatles music done in novel, or not so novel ways, check Stars on 45's disco medley or "Beyond the Valley of A Day in the Life" by the Residents, both of which I wrote about here, and both of which do much more fun and amazing things, respectively, with the same source material than Love does. And then a plug and another plug, too.