Love - The Beatles

To true music fans there can hardly be a more controversial album than the remix of The Beatles' unofficial greatest-hits catalogue into the 2006 album, Love. Remixed by George Martin, the Beatles' former arrangement manager, and his son Giles Martin, the album was created for a Cirque du Soleil show in Vegas. The father-son team digitally mastered the original tracks to stitch together a rich musical tapestry. The end result of their hard work is an hour and eighteen minutes of pure joy, distilled down and processed into pure Soma.

Yeah, its kind of like tearing apart da Vinci's notebooks in order to make the world's best paper-airplane.

Okay, now you're with me.

I love this album, and the reason I love it is because I don't love The Beatles. Don't get me wrong, I like them and I've never heard a song of theirs that I disliked, but I have no infatuation for the mop-headed early songs or the virulent late catalogue. It's all great stuff, but I don't ever actually want to listen to it, and until I first heard Love I didn't understand why. Now I do.

My parents grew up in the era of The Beatles, but neither were actually music-lovers, and as such I grew up in a house mostly devoid of music, with the exception of the ever-present background noise of our television. By the time I actually came into my own, I was listening to music that was either inspired by The Beatles, or, more likely, inspired by music which was itself inspired by The Beatles. Elliot Smith, The White Stripes, even Ben Folds, all owe something to the boys from Liverpool.

Which brings me back to the matter at hand. Love is not so much a Beatles album as it is an album inspired by The Beatles. When the Martins "modernized" The Beatles' music, they were adding into it a series of rhythms and progressions that have, at their root, the same music they are effecting. It's difficult to describe because this is either an act of full-circle completionism, or simple incest, depending on how one looks at it.

While The Beatles' enduring influence allows for this modernization to be completed farily easily, since it is really just a matter of turning it all back in on itself, there is still a question of ethics for the purist. None of the sound effects heard in Love come from outside of The Beatles' catalogue. Every sound, including the wailing organ solo halfway through the trip, comes either from the songs themselves or from the extensive unpublished catalogue of cutting-room-floor scraps. But it is not the music as Lennon intended, and this raises a question. Since all of the techniques are just evolutionarily removed from the original music, are the tracks actually improved by this tampering? Would an Orangutan be made better by cross-breeding with a human?

I say yes, and I say it for everyone who thinks The Beatles are cool, but couldn't care less about actually owning any of their songs.

Love is all I need to get into The Beatles. (1) It isn't the same music and that's the point. If I am going to care about the original catalogue, I need to have it prepared for me, translated out of Middle English into something that I can understand and relate to. I don't feel bad about it; I'm not dissing the great all-fathers. I just don't like it. It's old. It sounds like shag carpet and lava lamps. When I listen to Abby Road I can feel the callouses on my feet toughen and I crave sandalwood. It's old, and I don't like things that are old.

But Love is new, wonderful, and exciting. And it's all I need. At least, from The Beatles.

(1) See what I did there?