The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back (2022)

https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/the-banality-of-genius-notes-on-peter

by wallflower • 3 years ago

154 75 3 years ago

noman-land3• 3 years ago

I loved this series a lot. Watching these classic songs just tumble out of them was very magical and electric.

ghaff2• 3 years ago

To be honest, I expected to like it more than I did. It just felt like a bit much after a while. I'll give the 2nd and 3rd episodes another go at some point.

Cockbrand• 3 years ago

It's really long, and at a few points (well, stretches) quite boring. But still very interesting and well made. It's just crazy to see how genius pours out of these lads, and how Paul tries to keep everything together and (spoiler alert?) finally succeeds. Also, the dynamics between the individual members, and with Yoko being the de-facto fifth member (in John's eyes) or just quite a distraction for John and generally nuisance (in the other's eyes) are very interesting to witness.

criddell2• 3 years ago

The way Jackson structured it (day-by-day) made it very amenable to watching a single episode over many days. My wife and I would watch a day or two per night and it took us a couple of weeks to watch the whole series.

noman-land3• 3 years ago

I try not to let my expectations influence how I interpret a work. I don't think it's fair to the work.

Maybe it's because I've loved the Beatles for a long time but I found every second of that film to be completely gripping. I could have watched another 8 hours.

The banality is what made it so fascinating to me. How classic songs, that have been drilled into my mind and into the fabric of culture for decades were just bits and pieces floating in the minds of a small collection of people, decisions and circumstances. They just bounce around and snowball until something comes out.

The end result sounds so utterly perfect that it's jarring and exhilarating to see some bored lads shooting the shit and suddenly a masterpiece just falls out of nowhere. Then they just go home and eat dinner. What the fuck.

kahirsch• 3 years ago

The 3rd part is a lot of fun. Billy Preston shows up and they start having a really good time in the studio. Then they decide to give a concert on the roof and the staff work to stall the police.

basisword• 3 years ago

The thing I loved about it was that it was no different than any other band practice or rehearsal or writing session. The process is pretty much the same from the unknown teen getting started, right up to the mega-famous Beatles.

ssklash• 3 years ago

This was my favorite part, the banality of it. The music they made was so transcendent and impactful, it feels as if it must have been made differently by some super-human geniuses. But all they really did was just kinda screw around until something they liked came out, and then they built on it.

I'll never be a Beatle, but it does feel validating that I can at least attempt to write music in exactly the same way they did, even if the results won't be quite as good.

te_chris• 3 years ago

Taste is the secret in most good art: what to put in and leave out.

lovemenot2• 3 years ago

What I loved is the dramatic irony.

Everyone who watches it already knows, note for note, the finished song being crafted. Only they don't. We get to watch the song's creators stumbling towards the light. We feel satisfaction as they approach the "true" sound.

As in a pantomime ("it's behind you!"), John says "attracts me like a cauliflower", and we all silently shout "like no other lover"

bitwize• 3 years ago

Silly ideas can sometimes yield musical dividends. Jack Harkness's theme from Torchwood has a distinct stuttering, marching rhythm; turns out the composer originally scored it for a scene where Jack crashed through a barn wall on a tractor to catch some bad guys and he set the tune to the rhythm of the phrase "here he comes on a ruddy great tractor".

noman-land3• 3 years ago

I found their approach to writing lyrics extremely interesting. They're not singing words in the beginning, just syllables and "word shapes". The music is dictating what the words should sound like, and they fill in the meanings behind the word sounds retroactively over time. The lyrics are being molded like a lump of clay where you don't know what you're going to end up with when you first start. Just pushing around clay until it looks nice. Hey, that kinda looks like a nose.

indigoabstract• 3 years ago

I liked the quote mentioned about the Beatles being "proof of the existence of God":

"It transcends everything. It’s much bigger than four kids from Liverpool. For me the Beatles are proof of the existence of God. It’s so good and so far beyond everyone else that it’s not them."

I hadn't heard that one before.

I think what the Beatles did can be called "riding the wave of fortune" or "being on a roll", but they somehow did it year after year instead of just a few times, like most people manage to.

criddell2• 3 years ago

year after year

I was surprised the first time I heard they recorded as a band for only 7 years. Their last album is so different from their first album, I find it astounding to think about what they accomplished and how much they grew in that time.

OfSanguineFire• 3 years ago

Their last albums are not only different from their first album, they are different from their mid period. Personally, my interest wanes after Magical Mystery Tour because one can’t hear the drugs any more, and it was the psychedelic element which made that, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper so great for my ears.

tomcam8• 3 years ago

And they had been together as a band for about seven years before they recorded.

ElFitz• 3 years ago

but they somehow did it year after year instead of just a few times

And without ever learning to read or write sheet music.

It’s just trivia, but it never ceases to amaze me.

tomcam8• 3 years ago

All four of them had keen ears, and could pick up anyone’s songs, almost effortlessly. That was thanks to their years playing 8 hour shifts in Hamburg. In their later work much of the time they didn’t know the names of the chords they were playing. And they didn’t really write down much at all. It’s very hard for me to reconstruct in my head how they could’ve created some of those crazy harmonies without at least scribbling down a bunch of note names.

sambapa• 3 years ago

The most important Beatle could - George. George Martin of course.

chasd00• 3 years ago

I don’t know a lot about the beetles but wasn’t the song strawberry fields forever what finally drove The Beach Boys drummer insane? Like he had spent so much time/effort on a new kind of music and the beetles just blew past him and all his work. Iirc he said that song was everything he dreamed of and it just poured out of the beetles effortlessly.

southwesterly• 3 years ago

Also, weren’t the drums in Strawberry Fields backwards?

2bitencryption• 3 years ago

The story you're thinking of is about Brian Wilson, the creative force behind the Beach Boys and one of the only real artists of the time who could arguably be considered a peer of The Beatles.

Personally I've never seen a really strong source for that story, only anecdotes. I think it's an oversimplification to say "Strawberry Fields" made Brian Wilson insane. Instead, he was in a mental decline already. The pressure of "Brian Wilson is a genius" was getting to him:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Wilson_is_a_genius

There's a similar story with stronger sources, though. If you want to know about Brian's state of mind around that time, listen to his song Heroes and Villains. Basically, Brian worked on this song like it was his magnum opus, trying to reach the level of Sgt. Pepper. Quoting from Wikipedia (sue me):

For Wilson, the single's failure came to serve as a pivotal point in his psychological decline, and he adopted the song title as a term for his auditory hallucinations.
In the September/October 1967 issue of Crawdaddy!, journalist and magazine founder Paul Williams wrote that the song "originally had a chorus of dogs barking, cropped when Brian heard Sergeant Pepper, and was in many ways - the bicycle rider - a far different song."[39]
Wilson held onto the final mix of the song for about a month. On the evening of July 11, 1967, he was told by his astrologer (a woman named Genevelyn) that the time was right for the record to be heard by the public. Without informing Capitol, Wilson called his bandmates and, accompanied by producer Terry Melcher, traveled by limo to personally deliver a vinyl cut of the record to KHJ Radio.[72] According to Melcher, as Wilson excitedly offered the record for radio play, the DJ refused, citing program directing protocols.[77][78] Melcher recalled: "Brian almost fainted! It was all over. He'd been holding onto the record [and] had astrologers figuring out the correct moment. It really killed him. Finally they played it, but only after a few calls to the program director or someone, who screamed, 'Put it on, you idiot!' But the damage to Brian had already been done."[79]

And this is all the tip of the iceberg. To have an even better understanding, you'd need to listen to the Smile! sessions, and the eventual 2004 "completed" recording of Smile!.

Personally, I think Brian was a genius (well, is; he's still alive, though not looking too good these days, sadly). But unlike The Beatles, who were four friends with an unbelievably tight bond (even after their breakup), Brian had no one else in the Beach Boys who could match him. And I think it was a weight on his shoulders, and that combined with the drug use (and likely a stroke at some point, which is obvious if you ever hear him speak post ~1968) brought his downfall.

lovemenot2• 3 years ago

I don't know much about the beech boys, but didn't the bassist from the Beatles, once admit to admiring the beech boys' sound?

JKCalhoun2• 3 years ago

Poor Brian didn't have a partner like McCartney.

A composer appears to benefit enormously from a "second set of ears". It seems an artist gets too close to their creation and they lose perspective. The naive partner hears it for the first time and sees clearly how a bridge naturally follows.

tomcam8• 3 years ago

It’s also proof of the existence of Liverpool. In modern times it’s hard for us to understand how musical that area was in the 1910s-1950s. Paul’s dad was a musician with pretty wide interests, but more to the point, there were music halls everywhere. Regular people just banged out songs on the piano day after day in many of the homes there. Before skiffle and rock ‘n’ roll there was vaudeville, plenty of it. It was an incredibly musical culture.

n42• 3 years ago

Does anyone know where I can learn more about this microcosm?

Gud• 3 years ago

I would say it still is!!

I’m in Liverpool right now for work and live in the city center. There are bars everywhere playing live music, 7 days a week. Everyday is Saturday in Liverpool.

I have never seen anything like it!! Liverpool is a very unique place. Liverpool seems to me to be a blend of poor, downtrodden Englishmen and (presumably) middle class foreign exchange students. A perfect storm of musical creativity.

temporallobe• 3 years ago

I’ve thought about their composition skills a lot though the years, being a musician myself. I’ve come to the conclusion that they are more than the sum of their parts. After they broke up, each of them were still pretty good and popular artists, but the magic was gone. None of them were particularly virtuosos on their instruments either, but, TOGETHER, there was a catalyst between them that sparked pure songwriting gold, and each of them knew exactly how to add to the song to make it just right. Add to that Martin’s genius of production and his own musical talents, and that’s what made them magical. As I watched in this series kind of fumble their way through some of the compositions, I initially often thought the ideas were less than stellar, but then I witnessed the magic of them building the song, together, eventually molding and shaping it into something beautiful. I’ve been in bands myself and have experienced some of this myself, and also imagine many other bands work that way, but The Beatles had an extra spark most others did not. Only a few other bands in history have had that spark and you could really feel it, e.g., Nirvana, Queen, Led Zeppelin, early Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd. I don’t think we’re likely to ever have that kind of magic in popular music ever again.

strunz3• 3 years ago

Paul was most certainly a virtuosic bass player, and both he and John could be called virtuosic singers. At least by rock music standards.

musicale2• 3 years ago

I don't actually know what other (classic rock or other) bands are famous for actually writing songs together - that's an interesting question. Pink Floyd? Rolling Stones? Eagles? AC/DC? U2? Aerosmith? Metallica? Bee Gees? Fleetwood Mac? R.E.M.?

There are some amazing pop songwriters and producers though. For example it's hard to beat Max Martin's string of hits (e.g. 25 #1 songs in the US.)

Also many successful singer-songwriters from Bob Dylan (and earlier) up to the current remarkable success of Taylor Swift.

telesilla• 3 years ago

I don’t think we’re likely to ever have that kind of magic in popular music ever again.

I think there are still very special amazing songwriters to come, the world is ever-changing and there are still stories to tell and songs to tell them through.

acl777• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/nHh9U

dang• 3 years ago

Discussed at the time (of the article):

The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30113080 - Jan 2022 (145 comments)

cr4zy• 3 years ago

Another great session of George and John recording Oh My Love [1] shows what I think of as embracing rough but promising ideas along with balanities like tuning guitars, learning chords, etc... The Beatles engaged in this process much more than most musicians, despite it meaning most the stuff they played sounds relatively bad compared to playing tunes they'd practiced a bunch before. Is this due to work ethic or some love of creation? Idk, but it is fascinating to see the sausage get made.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yksV7YVuqdg

topper-123• 3 years ago

The Let it be album is also from this session, thought Abbey road was the album that was released by the Beatles. Let it be was released later (after the band broke up) as a money grab from the studio without autorization from the Beatles (except maybe Lennon). Paul really disliked it because of the bad mixing and post-production applied by Phil Specter.

Some years ago they re-released Let it be, renamed as Let it be Naked. This time it was remixed and authorized by the remaining Beatles and ... it's really good. Much simpler, much clearer and without the soul-less violin sounds from Phil Specter.

I can recommend giving it a listen and compare it to the original Let it be album.

elSidCampeador• 3 years ago

I much prefer the Let It Be...Naked album to the original Let It Be, to the point where I haven't heard the songs from the latter in a long time. In my head at least, the former album is the definitive one.

zeroonetwothree• 3 years ago

I like the original more. Maybe just because I got used to it. Mere familiarity effect dominates music.

elondaits• 3 years ago

* Phil Spector.

hettygreen• 3 years ago

For those that are interested in seeing artists conjure up hit songs, check out the documentary "Billie Eilish: The World's A Little Blurry". There are some scenes showing Billie and her brother sitting on a bed in their parents' house coming up with lyrics and melodies for songs that would go on to sell millions, win grammys and totally change their lives.

I'm a huge beatles fan, and while Get Back shows sparks of creativity - for the most part it, it shows a few childish rich dudes high as all hell dicking around in front of cameras in a super-weird situation that they put themselves in trying to document themselves writing an album.

The World's A Little Blurry on the other hand shows two siblings battling through some tough shit and turning it into gold on a shoestring recording budget.

maxverse• 3 years ago

I'm not very familiar with Billie Eilish's music, but any interview I've seen her brother Finneas has been really great. Seems like a cool dude and a great musician.

strunz3• 3 years ago

You may want to read the article you're commenting on, which posits the very opposite of what you're contending here

6stringronin• 3 years ago

Meh, the hardest part I'd the mixing and mastering and getting it heard. They don't seem to do that themselves

empath75• 3 years ago

I like Billie Eilish's music and think her brother is a decent producer, but you can't really compare the two in terms of song writing. I don't think there's a single Billie Eilish song that people are going to remember in five years, let alone after 50 years. I did enjoy this video about how they made bad guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpx2-EMfdbg

But there are literally _thousands_ of videos of producers making songs on youtube now.

paulryanrogers2• 3 years ago

If the Beatles started at the same time as Eilish then do you think they'd be remembered 5 years later? 50 years?

webnrrd2k• 3 years ago

I don't know -- I liked her James Bond theme a lot, and I'd bet that it will be around a long time.

xpe• 3 years ago

Independent of the subject matter, the writing is superb. It doesn’t need fancy words because it speaks clearly.

dmbche• 3 years ago

Agree - I'm not a beatles fan but this article was riveting

michael1999• 3 years ago

There was nothing banal about it — more illuminating, and authorial. The editing was almost vicious towards Yoko in the the first episode, but perhaps that was just her. And the queer energy all over, MLH and Preston captivated by John, John enjoying the attention and flirting just enough to encourage it. The vanity and conflict. Jackson has a sharp eye and found the magic.

WalterBright• 3 years ago

I'm curious what Ringo & Paul's comments on the movie would be.

PorterBHall• 3 years ago

Yoko Ono is often blamed for breakup the Beatles, but watching Get Back, it seems clear to me that the person who really broke up the Beatles was Brian Epstein. His death — and their grief — hangs over this documentary, especially in the way that McCartney tries to be both band mate and task master in keeping the group together. I have always favored John over Paul, but this made me appreciate Paul despite his faults.

The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back (2022)

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