“Geek The Beatles: 'Let It Be' Recombined Reality Bites” plus 3 |
- Geek The Beatles: 'Let It Be' Recombined Reality Bites
- Gallagher to be in Beatles movie
- Gallagher to be in Beatles movie
- The Beatles to be transformed into zombies
| Geek The Beatles: 'Let It Be' Recombined Reality Bites Posted: 10 May 2010 08:07 AM PDT
Forty years ago, Let It Be closed out a decade of The Beatles' artistic and technological influence. It's a period that has yet to be matched in popular culture. Wired.com will explore the band's lasting impact in a new occasional series called Geek The Beatles, anchored to the band's momentous anniversaries in 2010. Let It Be, released May 8, 1970, shortly after the band members called it quits, transformed The Beatles from a functioning band into a dysfunctional multimedia brand. The songs on what became the group's last official full-length album were vault-raided and controversially remixed by mad producer Phil Spector from a heap of discarded and bitterly divided sessions, and featured little to no input from band members John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. A Beatles documentary, released a week after the album, was similarly retconned, conceived as a "bioscopic experience" that would help sequence the genes for the intrusive reality television we take for granted in the 21st century. In the last gasp of the optimistic but lethal '60s, however, reality film killed the pop radio stars. "By the time we got to Let It Be, we couldn't play the game anymore," Lennon said in the exhaustive biographical series The Beatles Anthology. "We'd come to a point where it was no longer creating magic, and the camera being in the room with us made us aware of that. It was a phony situation." The original concept for the Let It Be film would sell instantly today: Inconspicuous but ever-present cameras document the greatest pop band of all time as it composes, rehearses and then performs and records its next album in front of a live audience. "You can glide in with your cameras," an earnest but frustrated McCartney said in the film. "Go places that TV cameras don't go." But the film bowed to the Beatles' momentous reality: The band, like the decade that it so thoroughly informed, was finished.
What remained after The Beatles' recombined Let It Be killed on the charts but flopped in theaters was not a band, but a brand. That evolution heralded a coming, contentious age of creator-owned businesses, increasing copyfight litigation, remix culture, band-brand revolutions, crappy tech and more. Here are nine — number nine, number nine — ways the breakup of The Beatles, as well as the twin iterations of Let It Be, hallmarked tectonic shifts in media culture, using the album's song titles as points of departure. You know, just to twist the anniversary knife a little.  Furious at Phil Spector's orchestrated remix of Let It Be, McCartney remixed his own with Let It Be... Naked in 2003. Dig It: Spector recombined what he found and heard, and produced a hit album. But Let It Be's overwrought orchestration, spliced in by Spector, so angered McCartney that the bass player eventually remixed his own version of the sessions, resulting in the stripped-down 2003 release, Let It Be… Naked. The Long and Winding Road: Spector's orchestration on the piano ballad "The Long and Winding Road" particularly pissed off McCartney. The swollen strings and choral accompaniments marred The Beatles' musical style so egregiously, McCartney argued, that he cited Spector's "intolerable interference" as one of six reasons he gave Apple Corps. for dissolving the band shortly after the album and film's release. Nevertheless, the single sold more than a million copies in a few days, and eventually topped the charts in May. Let It Be: Like the rest of The Beatles' immeasurably influential catalog, the songs from Let It Be have been covered by more bands than you would probably want to count, unless you were a serious Beatles geek. Bands like The Replacements and Green Jello released their own albums called Let It Be, while Laibach covered The Beatles' final album in its entirety. Julie Taymor anchored her periodic musical drama of the same name to Lennon's philosophical chant "Across the Universe," one of Let It Be's finest songs. Let It Be's title track alone has been revised by a score of artists as different as Nick Cave and Chevy Chase. And what looks like a chorus of Russian sailors simply murder the tune in what YouTube user Attmay calls the "worst cover of a Beatles song ever" (embedded right). The song — a woeful tale of anxiety over the Beatles' breakup — has also become a convenient regular on reality-programming phenomenon American Idol. Kris Allen performed "Let It Be" on the show's ninth inexplicable season, and the song was later ported to iTunes, with proceeds going to the disaster-relief effort following Haiti's catastrophic earthquake. Oscar-winning singer Jennifer Hudson did the same thing with the same song. Instant karma is going to get somebody. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Gallagher to be in Beatles movie Posted: 10 May 2010 06:56 AM PDT Liam Gallagher is to make a movie about the final years of The Beatles. The former Oasis frontman's new film production company is developing a biopic based on a book by the Fab Four's 'house hippy' in the late 1960s. Richard DiLello's memoir The Longest Cocktail Party tells of the 'wild rise and fall' of The Beatles' company Apple between the heady days of 1968 and the band's break-up in 1970. The Oasis singer's older brother Noel is also a fan of the work, first published in 1972, which he described as 'brilliant'. Gallagher's film company, In 1 Productions, will collaborate on the project with leading UK independent Revolution Films, it has been confirmed. A spokesman for In 1 Productions said: 'This will be a film with humour and affection, providing an insider's look at what it meant to be a young man caught up in the wild swirl of the music business, celebrities and the tail end of the swinging 60s in London.' It is understood that further details will be announced at the Cannes Film Festival later this month. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Gallagher to be in Beatles movie Posted: 10 May 2010 06:49 AM PDT Updated: 23:41, Monday May 10, 2010Liam Gallagher is to make a movie about the final years of The Beatles. The former Oasis frontman's new film production company is developing a biopic based on a book by the Fab Four's 'house hippy' in the late 1960s. Richard DiLello's memoir The Longest Cocktail Party tells of the 'wild rise and fall' of The Beatles' company Apple between the heady days of 1968 and the band's break-up in 1970. The Oasis singer's older brother Noel is also a fan of the work, first published in 1972, which he described as 'brilliant'. Gallagher's film company, In 1 Productions, will collaborate on the project with leading UK independent Revolution Films, it has been confirmed. A spokesman for In 1 Productions said: 'This will be a film with humour and affection, providing an insider's look at what it meant to be a young man caught up in the wild swirl of the music business, celebrities and the tail end of the swinging 60s in London.' It is understood that further details will be announced at the Cannes Film Festival later this month. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| The Beatles to be transformed into zombies Posted: 10 May 2010 06:42 AM PDT Film bosses have snapped up the rights to a book which casts the Fab Four as flesh-eaters, Paul Is Undead. The book, by Alan Goldsher, is being brought to life by movie company Double Feature whose bosses produced hits such as Pulp Fiction and Erin Brockovich, according to leading film blog Deadline. In the book a zombie John Lennon kills his bandmate Paul McCartney and the rest of the group who all come back as the undead. They kill and eat the brains of fans while trying to evade their nemesis, zombie killer Mick Jagger. The appetite for zombie productions has been increasing in recent years, with a stream of classic novels being reinterpreted with brain-hungry characters. Natalie Portman is working on an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Stacey Sher, of Double Feature, said: ''I am a huge Beatles fan like the rest of the world and Alan's mash-up, which really showcases his love of music history and his appreciation of the zombie world, is a fun, funny read. ''How can you not love a book where Jesus agrees with zombie John Lennon, that the Beatles are in fact bigger than him?'' She said they would be looking for financial backing and casting the film soon. The Beatles are being reinterpreted for the screen in another film which is in production as Disney recreates the 1968 animated movie Yellow Submarine. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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