No modern musical act is as well documented as the Beatles. From the first days of Beatlemania, the Fab Four’s short decade together (not to mention their pre- and post- Beatles activities) have been scrutinized to death. Every holiday season brings a new crop of books purporting to be the definitive account of some facet of John, Paul, George and/or Ringo’s life, as if 50 years after their split there were still stones — book-length ones! — left to be unturned.
Don’t get me wrong — I love the Beatles. I even took a university-level course on the group during my undergrad (along with a course in the history of rock & roll taught by the same teacher. It was the most relevant class to my eventual career. S/o Colleen Eccleston). But I’m always sus about any project purporting to shed new light on some well-worn era of the band’s career.
But Get Back, the new Peter Jackson documentary (yes, the Lord of the Rings guy), which follows the Fab Four as they toil away on what will ultimately become Let it Be, flips my cynical take on the Beatles industrial complex.
It’s great and it actually does dig up new info (in the form of footage) that rewrites the previous narrative around the group’s demise. It’s also, essentially, eight hours of watching the Beatles write, rehearse, occasionally argue and quite often goof around in the studio (there’s a concert at the end too). Yet it’s totally engrossing, even (anecdotally) to casual Beatles fans. Using the hours and hours of previously unseen footage, Jackson not only finds a narrative throughline, he also does what music fans and critics have been trying to do for almost 60 years: crack the code on the band’s creative process.
In this way, Get Back is a lot like another doc that captured folks’ attention back in 2020. The Last Dance follows the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls on their long (and winding) road to winning their sixth NBA championship. As a general rule, I do not give two fucks about most professional athletes/sports franchises, but I found The Last Dance totally engaging in much the same way that I find Get Back.
Both series give viewers a behind-the-scenes look at groups working at the absolute top of their field. In the 90s, the Chicago Bulls basically were the Beatles of basketball with a team so stacked with talent — Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman just to name the topline — that they couldn’t help but dominate the game, casting a long shadow for the entire decade, much like the Beatles did on the pop charts and among their peers in the 60s. If you want to take this comparison to its ridiculous extreme, you could see Jordan as Paul, Pippen as John, Rodman as Harrison and coach Phil Jackson as Ringo.
A lot of Get Back’s biggest revelations have already been highlighted. But one of the more subtle, and in my opinion revealing points made in both it and The Last Dance is the amount of work that both the Beatles and the Bulls were still putting into their respective crafts so late in their careers. Sure they’re talented, but they had to work that talent. That’s why you see Paul pushing his bandmates and Jordan needling his teammates to keep pushing themselves. People talk about the 10,000-hour rule. Well, these guys put those hours in and then some.
The other related point made is that neither the Beatles nor the Bulls can be distilled down to one individual. Popular culture likes to shine a light on individual genius, often ignoring the multiple actors — both active and passive — who’ve had a hand in helping that individual achieve greatness. (This also tends to cut women and BIPOC out of the picture, but that’s a topic for another newsletter.) You see this a lot in the tech industry where billion-dollar companies are reduced to a single person. Steve Jobs is gets deified, whereas Steve Wozniak is the eccentric who put on a music festival. But Jobs needed Wozniak just as much as Wozniak needed Jobs. Artists and athletes are no different.
Jordan looms large over his teammates, but he absolutely needs them to win, something he’s not the least bit too proud to admit. Ditto McCartney who may be the Beatles ringleader, but seems to inherently understand that his bandmates — his friends — are the key to true greatness.
Both the Beatles and the 90s Bulls were ultimately undone by competing priorties, egos and and the pressure that comes with being the best at anything over a long period of time, including but not limited to the fishbowl nature of being the subjects of these documentaries. Fittingly, even while legends grew, subsequent work could never quite match the legacies that these two series basically capture being set in stone.
Kool Kids Self-promotion Club
For the Toronto Star, I got to write about the new Chastity record and the connections between Brandon Williams’ music and Southern Ontario’s long tradition of suburban punk and hardcore with bands like Alexisonfire, Moneen, Protest the Hero and Silverstein. I also got to speak with Ellis and Stefan Babcock from Pup, both of whom co-wrote songs on the record, for the piece. “There’s so many people trying to do the ’90s and not doing it well,” Babcock told me. “Brandon is taking what made that era of music great and putting his own unique twist on it.”
Kool Kids Music Recommendation Club
For a brief period at the beginning of the 2010s, Vancouver’s Apollo Ghosts were the band to beat in the Canadian DIY underground. Across three LPs and numerous EPs and singles, they made increasingly ambitious lo-fi indie rock (an oxymoron, yes but an apt description nonetheless). Anyway, main Ghost Adrian Teacher has made small moves to resurrect his old band over the last few years, but it seems we’re only now —finally! — getting the proper follow-up to their 2012 swansong, Landmark. Pink Tiger arrives in March, but until then we have the warped jangle pop gem “Spilling Yr Guts” on which Teacher pays tribute to the unheralded role of desperation in art: “When you’ve got fuck all inside you, you’ll finally have something to say.”
100 Gecs upcoming Toronto date is increasingly looking like it will be rescheduled/canceled for a third time. Sigh… At any rate, 10000 Gecs, the enfants-terrible-of-hyperpop’s hotly-anticipated followup to my favourite album of 2019 is supposedly dropping soon, with “mememe” serving as proof. The track is less chaotic than in the past but it shows that stickier hooks and bigger stakes can't subdue the duo’s equilibrium shaking vibes.
Dijon’s debut, Absolutely, caught my ear (and a lot of other folks) at the end of 2021, to the point that I included it on my list of the best records of the year. Aside from bringing in sounds from a bunch of different genres (Americana, R&B, hip-hop, folk), it’s got a unique live-off-the-floor feeling to its production that brings the songs to vivid life. The songs have been meticulously planned out, but everything feels so spontaneous and alive. The Los Angeles musician, who was part of the duo Abhi//Dijon in the mid-2010s, just dropped the 25-minute Absolutely film which captures him and his collaborators playing live in a living room/soundstage. It feels intimate, spontaneous and joyful and I can’t get enough of it.
Toronto punks Pup have a rep for rippin’ pop-punk gems filled with existential angst and “Robot Writes a Love Song, the latest single off their upcoming fourth album, The Unravelling of PUPTHEBAND, delivers the latter with a twist on the former. The song tells the tale of a computer killed by the overwhelming nature of human emotions while the band indulges in some sweet vocal harmonies, as opposed to their usual shouted gang vocals over restrained-for-Pup guitar riffs. Anyone thinking the band have gone soft though should look no further than the other song they dropped from the record, the far more characteristically rockin’ Waiting.
Brooklyn’s Proper. write hyper-anxious emo from the perspective of a queer black man moving in predominantly white spaces (ie: indie rock). So it seems somewhat inevitable that the trio would find a kindred spirit in Bartees Strange who produced Proper.’s third album, The Great American Novel, which comes out in March. Both of the record’s first two singles, “Red, White, and Blue” and “Milk and Honey,” sound thicker and more thought out from an arrangement perspective than 2019’s I Spent the Winter Writing Song about Getting Better, maybe the result of Proper. writing as a unit as opposed to mastermind Erik Garlington teaching his bandmates all their parts.
Shoegaze and dream pop have well-earned reps for self-seriousness so it’s always nice to find artists playing in those sandboxes that actually sound like they enjoy what they’re doing. South Korea’s TRPP (not to be confused with Toronto r&b group TRP.P) do just that on their self-titled debut album, mixing and matching bits of all the interrelated sounds that can broadly be filed under “beautiful noise.” The hypnotic “Yeah” originally appeared in a longer form as “Yeah (Round and Round)” on the soundtrack to the SK television show Inspector Koo (which is available on Netflix btw). I’m not sure why they shortened it for the album — generally speaking, album versions are where you really stretch out — but I think it showcase’s everything that makes the band stand out in a crowded field.
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
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