Rob Sheffield’s Dreaming the Beatles is a fresh look at the most popular band ever

By Jeremy Gordon

A few years ago, a slightly charming, slightly cocky meme claiming that Migos were better than the Beatles started making the rounds on the internet. Whether it was intended as a joke or not, the comparison sparked a small conversation among long-running internet provocateurs about how canon divides and reshapes itself from generation to generation. Of course it made sense that today’s kids might like and appreciate Migos — whose influence on modern rap is diverse and prolific — more than the long-gone Fab Four, the beloved patron saints of white parents the world over .

The Beatles indeed were that asset and their influence on music spanning genres and decades cannot be overstated. But their exaggerated presence in the Western canon also means that it becomes exhausting to read new exaltations of their merit, in the way that a photo gallery of particularly cute dogs can be a little dry. A corgi’s smile is pure; Revolver still Breton; the sun is shining and Trump’s piss band is real. When are you going to tell me something I don’t already know?

Which makes it almost surprising that Dreaming of the Beatlesa new book by the music critic and Rolling Stone columnist Rob Sheffield, is a charming, informative and fresh read about the beatles. It’s not easy to find something new to say about the most lauded, over-covered and over-canonized band of all time. The exact reason the Beatles have endured is that it really is as simple as listening to one of their songs, no prose required.

Dreaming of the Beatles is equal parts history and cultural criticism, as Sheffield draws from dozens of sources to describe the story of how the Beatles came to be, before writing about why any of them matter. The book follows them from genesis to dissolution: delves into the band’s reported mythology, such as the real identity of “Sexy Sadie,” how many times “Ob La Di, Ob La Da” was recorded in the studio, and how which Paul. McCartney announced his departure from the band in a press release. That raw material is best incorporated as fuel for Sheffield’s imaginative riffs. “I love those stories, even when I don’t believe a word of it — I eat that stuff up,” he writes. “All that out-of-nowhere delusion doesn’t come close to solving the mystery, though. As interesting as the inside story is, I’m always more fascinated by outside story—not where the songs came from, but where they ended up and how they live in the world they helped create.”

Decades into his writing career, Sheffield remains – most importantly – a fan of the music he writes about. His previous books Love is a mixtape and Talking to the girls about Durant Duran celebrated the joy and mystery that accompany the music we love, a reminder that to enjoy music you need to love the process of listening to it. The Beatles, perhaps the greatest example of personality-driven guitar music, have plenty of music for Sheffield to obsess over. Dreaming of the Beatles it’s an engaging read because Sheffield’s confidence in declaring what’s really going on with the band doesn’t rely on rote recitation or accidentally devolve into banal fan fiction.

A chapter on “Strawberry Fields Forever” is an excellent example. It begins with an apparently non-Beatlesque Ozzy Obsourne anecdote about why he loved the song, followed by a few biographical pages about how it was written. John came up with the basic acoustic sketch while on hiatus from the band in Spain. “The time he spent alone in Spain forced him to confront feelings he usually kept at bay, and the song that poured out was so powerful that even he couldn’t forget it or treat it as as a joke,” Sheffield writes. After singing it to the rest of the Beatles, there was a moment of “stunned silence” before McCartney replied: “It’s absolutely brilliant”.

The story then turns back to the songwriting rivalry between Lennon and McCartney, who followed up “Strawberry Fields Forever” with his own “Penny Lane,” which takes a similarly nostalgic view of a childhood location with “inquisitive lust” instead of Lennon’s melancholy. It was both a competitive response and a love letter to his friend, and he introduced them to different approaches to composition. “While Paul is chasing his men down Penny Lane, John is a mile away, hidden in the tall grass of Strawberry Field,” writes Sheffield. “His voice is shocked with pain. His childhood followed him everywhere, leaving him stuck in an adult life where nothing is real. He doesn’t want to be saved.” This little literary flourish brings us deeper into his analysis – you imagine John, sitting alone in his Spanish taxi, preparing to write a masterpiece.

The essential joy of Dreaming of the Beatles it’s these connections made between historical events, the history of the mythological band, and the song itself—it’s brilliant, insightful, sometimes humorous writing, unclouded by irony or cynicism, about a great all-cap band. There’s room for a lot of detours: he discusses whether the Beatles had the best debut album song ever (he’d argue they did), the many artists who drew inspiration from the band (from Ella Fitzgerald to Rae Sremmurd) and the eternal Beatles vs Stones debate. And because so much of this reference material can be corroborated ourselves — now I know there’s this performance video for McCartney’s infinitely miserable solo hit “My Love” — it’s more fun to follow along than if we should have taken him at his word. how interesting all this is.

The Beatles were one of the first bands to make a mark with an almost dangerously passionate fan base; one i listen Live at the Hollywood Bowl, a live record littered with hundreds of overwrought screams, is enough to remind you how much they cared. Later, much space is given to discussing the Beatles’ relationship with women – their fans, mothers, romantic partners both real (Yoko, Linda) and invented (the seductress in “Norwegian Wood”). “They invented a form of rock and roll where guys who want to be girls (be as real as girls, as honest as girls, as deep as girls, as cool as girls, as rock and roll as girls) was central to male identity,” Sheffield writes. “They sold the world out of that fantasy.” That might be the book’s thesis – how the Beatles championed the legitimacy of female emotions, a legacy that extends to modern acts like Harry Styles, who inspire gleeful paroxysms whenever they insist that teenage girls should be taken seriously.

Sheffield’s writing about this is compelling, although a wrinkle is excluded from this premise. In recent years, Lennon’s history as a domestic abuser has been repeated more prominently in the media. How it escaped association with Beatles music all these years is a reflection of society’s standards and how men were or were not shamed for their bad behavior depending on which way the wind was blowing. Lennon has been open about his past since 1980. “I used to be cruel to my woman and physically – any woman,” he said. Play boy that year. “I was a hitter. I couldn’t express myself and hit. I’ve wrestled men and hit women. That’s why I’m always about peace, you see. The most violent people are those who go after love and peace… I will have to be much older before I can publicly face the way I have treated women since I was young.” Shortly after, he would be killed by a deranged fan.

It is literally impossible to know how this part of Lennon’s past would have been viewed if he had lived and been serious about making amends, and of course it is complicated to fit long-held views with newly cited evidence. No Beatles fan gets a copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with a caveat that, hey, Lennon’s “Getting Better” — “I used to be cruel to my woman / I beat her and kept her away from the things she loved” — is true. I imagine most fans, male and female alike, probably haven’t faced this complexity. Although neither Beatles are portrayed as saints—Sheffield talks about Lennon’s absenteeism as a father as well as their respective affairs—the exclusion of this particular history from the book characterizes, for better or worse, the limitations of writing about people’s lives. from the distant future, when recorded history can only tell us so much.

That Lennon’s history has not penetrated the thought process of many Beatles fans is a reflection of something larger than the sphere of Sheffield or any cultural critic. But it says something about their appeal, teased in the book’s title: More than a collection of facts, The Beatles were a dream. Their interpretation is up to you.

This post by Rob Sheffield Dreaming of the Beatles It’s a fresh look at the most popular band ever to appear on SPIN.