3 November

We’re very close to a time when there will be no living Beatles. I think that will be jarring for us as a culture because they marked the real escalation point I post about a lot, where adult life was replaced with adolescent culture. That’s what Beatlemania was. It’s meant they’ve always felt just there, and the rock stars that followed them the same, causing widespread grief 50 or more years after their prime, at death. Compare for example the death of somebody like Louis Armstrong. A giant in his day, but when he died in 1971 mainstream culture had long moved past him. There was sadness at his passing, but it wasn’t leading news bulletins. People saw it as the passing of something that was already long in the past. But try to imagine a world where none of these Beatles staring out at us from pictures exist any more. It’s jarring, like reality shuddering. They feel eternal, not because of their art, but because they were the vanguard of teenage music culture replacing adult life. A culture that refuses the passing of time, that refuses ageing, succession, of making way for what comes after. The Beatles have never felt ’in the past’, because time stopped passing in the usual adult way. Nobody thinks of them as what the remaining 2 actually are - elderly men. In their 80s. They seem eternally young. Again, that’s not their art, it’s our culture.