With the Beatles

i'm not done with my big post, but the beatles (or more specifically, their music) have been popping up more than once during my week in notable ways so i figured i might as well write about it.

firstly, i saw across the universe, mostly because i was with my parents at the time and they dragged me to it, and because a friend of mine had a small role in it. regardless, i can safely say that it was one of the worst movies i have ever seen in my entire life. it was like a comic book version of the sixties combined with a vh1 countdown of the twenty cheesiest music videos of all time. julie taymor accomplished what i thought was an impossible feat—making the beatles seem uncool. the point where i would have walked out if i had come in my own car was a scene in which a girl named prudence locks herself in a room and then her friends sing "dear prudence" to get her to, uh, come out and play, and then when she opens the door everyone is standing in a room with cgi clouds painted over the walls lisa frank style:

so really, don't see that movie.

secondly, i came across a new work by artist steve mclaughlin called "run for your life," in which he compressed all of the beatles' uk lp's by 800% to fit into one hour-long mp3. i wasn't able to listen to too much of it before getting a headache, but it's kind of cool when you're able to figure what song is actually playing (i caught on towards the end of revolver). here it is:

steve mclaughlin- run for your life

some fans of the work went in and decompressed some of the songs back to their original tempo to produce some seriously bizarre reconstructions of the originals:

julia
revolution
and my favorite, i will

even though it's easy to write this off as someone with too much free time on their hands, and i will probably never have the willpower to listen to these again, i really like the idea of taking something as ubiquitous and influential as the beatles' catalogue and distorting it to the point where its original intentions are lost. it makes you wonder if there's a certain transcendent quality to the music itself (or any work of art, for that matter) that holds up regardless of its manipulation. also, the project instantly brought to mind one of my favorite works of graphic art ever, by the design firm Foundation 33. they took the lyrics of every beatles song and typed them out in chronological order, creating one massive body of text. i think the point is basically the same, but the experience of seeing the beatles' entire body of work as one concrete visual entity is even more thought provoking to me.




on the Foundation 33 website, they even have all the lyrics as selectable, copy-able, cut-able, paste-able text, so you can have your own conceptual fun...