John Lydon: It’s so mad, it’s so daft, it’s so completely off the wall—it’s thoroughly enjoyable…
Interviewer: But don’t you think he’s completely wrong?
John Lydon: No, he’s not wrong.
--from the back cover of Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces
***
Devin McKinney attended his own “school of rock” through an obsession with the Beatles, a band that broke up when he was four. He attempts to relay the lessons he learned from their ongoing afterlife in his new book Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History. If you thought there was nothing new to say about the Fab Four, then this strange hefty book is for you. And in its own way, it opens up Abramovich’s question again, “what does this book tell us about the state of rock?”
It’s a difficult book to describe. The first comparison that came to my mind was with the work of Greil Marcus, who draws up bizarre but provocative “secret histories” of pop cuture. McKinney’s book likewise fits the contradiction that John Lydon saw in Marcus’ Lipstick Traces, which managed to link the Sex Pistols with the Dada movement, certain medieval heretics, and the French Situationists: it’s mad, daft, and off the wall, but not necessarily wrong.
However, not everyone is as amused by the imaginative leaps you can find in Marcus or other “cultural studies” books; for some, all that remains is the daft touch. For example, Geraldine Bedell writes her review of the book in (again) The Guardian: “it doesn't matter that many volumes have been written about them, that even small children still know their songs, that they were early icons of the media age and must now be presumed well and truly mined for significances. Not to the cultural-studies people it doesn't. For them, the exhausted nature of the subject is merely an excuse for more disquisitions in the stratosphere, for exercising their literary muscles on planes of experience increasingly detached from reality….it's not that there are absolutely no ideas here, though there are fewer than McKinney thinks, but they're so swaddled in portentous prose that it's impossible to get at them.”4
Whatever the final judgment might be on “cultural studies,” Bedell takes the same sort of swipe at subjecting the Beatles to an academic tome as Abramovich does at the notion of creating a curriculum for rock. (After all, the book has the imprint of the Harvard University Press, which isn't generally considered a "school of rock.") However, Ed Park of the Village Voice sees it much differently. He calls the book “audacious, idiosyncratic ….If this is a history, it's a poetic one, driven by smart, breathless connections rather than a need to gather all the facts.”5
The poetic approach Park sees is what likely drives Bedell mad, or at least any academic expectations she had. The book opens with a background anecdote about “Yellow Submarine,” where Paul McCartney recalls how the song came to him as he was drifting off, half asleep. Other short comments on “Yellow Submarine” open each of the chapters of the book, offering a structuring device built around this dream-song. And indeed, that feeling permeates the book: McKinney is offering a Finnegans Wake-like commentary to the Beatles and the Sixties, not just a compilation of facts: “What the Beatles touched off was dreamlike in particularly deep and intricate ways. Their mania became a huge, open arena for the unregulated discharge of submerged energies—their own, and the audience’s. Within it the symbolisms of desire, fear, and foreboding ran wild. Under its proscenia, acts were committed which could not be consciously acknowledged for what they were. And under its sway, the dreamer had no power over its components, its direction, or its outcome”.6
Next page: “We promised you everything..."
