The Baffling Success of Beatles 1

In November 2000, the world was a boring place. The YK2 disaster never came to pass, the dot-com bubble peaked, Concorde crashed, and the presidential election generated no excitement until nobody could figure out who won. The Cold War was ten years in the past and 9/11 was a year away, so all was quiet on the western front.

Amidst this historical snoozefest, a classic defunct band repackaged their greatest hits again and put them on a single CD. Releases of this type are common ways of milking an undead musical cow. The names are familiar: The Very Best of, Greatest Hits, and The Essentials. Normally the public doesn’t care, seeing these albums as shameless money grabs. But on November 13th, 2000, the public forgot their cynicism and went to the stores en masse to buy a collection of songs they’d already paid for.

Of course, only one band commands that level of respect: The Beatles.

Background

At the end of 2000, Beatlesville was just as sleepy as the rest of Western Civilization. Five years earlier, in 1995, the surviving Beatles gathered for Anthology, an official oral history to tell their story in their own words while also creating ‘new’ Beatles songs from unfinished John Lennon demo tapes. The timing proved immaculate for heartbreaking reasons. Shortly after Anthology aired, George Harrison was diagnosed with cancer; he would succumb to the disease in November 2001.

With Anthology behind them, few expected a major Beatles anything for several years. Smaller projects walked out the door, like the remastered Yellow Submarine movie with a special remix album in 1999.

So when the new compilation album 1 was released, it seemed like another tidying up project.

The public disagreed.

The Album’s Construction

1 has a simple premise: it is a collection of songs which hit Number 1 on the charts. For any other band, this would be a short album of specialties. For The Beatles, this was a smug flex: they presented no fewer than 27 songs without needing to pad their brief. The album runs 79 minutes 38 seconds, just under the 80 minute information limit of CDs. In another show of confidence, The Beatles didn’t pull songs from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, their best-selling studio album, to fill out the roster. Other classic albums like Rubber Soul and The White Album are also unrepresented.

Though the compilation’s concept was simple, the inclusion criteria was not. Ostensibly, songs needed to hit Number One on either the UK or US charts during the band’s lifetime to make the playlist. By this standard, early classic Please Please Me should be on the album, but it is not as it did not chart on the UK’s Record Retailer chart. Strawberry Fields Forever, arguably the best Beatles song ever, is also AWOL because it only hit number two in the UK while its partner song Penny Lane is presented and accounted for because it hit the top of the American chart in 1967.

Once the songs were picked, they were assembled in chronological order, remastered and released.

It Sold How Much Exactly?

Beatle-savvy consumers waltzing into record shops on November 13th 2000 would have found the songs on the new compilation thoroughly redundant. All 27 songs were on the previous compilations 1962-1966 and 1967-1970, nicknamed The Red Album and The Blue Album after their respective border font colors. It should be noted those albums are also some of the top sellers in the band’s catalogue. Not only were these 27 number ones on those existing best-sellers, the previous compilations came with an additional twenty-seven songs for listeners to enjoy.

In other words, 1 cut The Red and Blue albums’ tracklist exactly in half.

The public didn’t care.

In five weeks, 1 became 2000’s best selling album, the fourth best-selling album of the decade in Britain and promptly went on to become the 21st best-selling album in British history. It debuted at number one in the US and sold 1.2 million copies before Americans learned the identity of their 43rd president. The rest of the world reacted similarly. Today, it is on the best-selling albums list for the following countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Portugal, United Kingdom, and United States.

Sorry Eminem, the Real Slim Shady just stood up.

Are You Kidding Me?

Okay, we have a banal mystery on our hands. Why in the name of God did this album—which may I remind you contained no new songs and offered listeners no compelling reason to buy it—outsell everything The Beatles already outsold?

I suspect the answer is in two parts. First, The Red and Blue albums this new record supplanted were two double albums. As Ringo Starr himself said in Anthology, “there’s a lot of information on a double album.” Popular as those albums are, overwhelming consumers with choices isn’t a recipe for success and there’s no doubt 1 is a more streamlined record.

Second, 1’s listening experience is more than a match for the classic albums the band created all those years ago. In my Sgt. Pepper post, I was of the opinion that that album is far superior to other Beatles albums because listening to it from start-to-finish is part of the album’s appeal. Like Pepper and Abbey Road, 1’s listening experience is a complete story: the story of the Beatles.

From their first rudimentary hit Love Me Do to The Long and Winding Road—a song whose creation was so acrimonious that it was used as evidence for unfair business dealings in Paul McCartney’s 1970 legal motion to dissolve The Beatles—1 takes the listener on the whirlwind romance that was Beatlemania. Placed in perfect sequential order, the listener is reminded that the Beatles fired off hit single after hit single (I Want to Hold Your Hand, Can’t Buy Me Love, etc) despite being worn down emotionally and physically (A Hard Day’s Night, Eight Days A Week, Help). And still, the Beatles effectively created modern music culture by implementing classical music in their songs (Yesterday, All You Need Is Love), finding subject matter besides romance (Paperback Writer, Eleanor Rigby, Yellow Submarine), and then, after eight years of mega stardom, simply walked away (Let It Be).

Conclusion

Never in the history of popular music has such an unassuming album achieved such staggering commercial success. Logically, 1 offered nothing listeners didn’t already have. Emotionally, it was the most streamlined, comprehensive listening experience of that most famous of bands.

A Number One indeed.

Do They Know It's Christmas: The Music Industry's Finest Travesty

London, England, October 23rd, 1984. Surrounded by club music, mullets and Thatcherite excess, Bob Geldof was an artist in decline, and he bloody well knew it. As lead singer for the Boomtown Rats, his band slid down the charts and hit songs were further away than ever. He considered trying his hand as a solo act, but if he couldn’t make it in a band, why would anyone want him without a band?

The future seemed grim indeed.

That evening, as he pondered his falling fortunes, Geldolf and his partner Paula Yates turned on the BBC news. Immediately, Geldolf found himself staring down the tenth level of hell. Journalist Michael Buerk was doing a live report from Ethiopia. The famine ripping the country to pieces was then in the middle of killing anywhere between 300,000 to 1.3 million people. Buerk’s BBC News team were the first to raise widespread awareness to the tragedy.

Geldof was horrified. For him, the worst part was watching the young volunteer nurse Claire Bertschinger distribute what little food she had to around 300 people, condemning the rest to certain death. Suddenly, Geldolf’s first-world problems seemed very small indeed. The report spurred him to help those emaciated figures right there and then.

His initial idea was to write a song and record it with the Boomtown Rats. But there was just one problem: the Boomtown Rats were yesterday’s news. Even if he wrote the best song ever (unlikely), his influence just wasn’t big enough for any charity record to do anything. If he wanted to make a real impact, he needed friends in higher places.

In finding such friends, Geldof’s partner Paula Yates proved instrumental. At that time, she presented the music show called The Tube. On November 2nd, one act appearing on the show was Ultravox, who were then at the top of their game. Ultravox made a name for themselves pioneering a sound akin to heavy metal on synthesizers while rivaling Kaiser Wilhelm II in terms of dodgy facial hair. The lead singer was Midge Ure, a Scotsman with whom Geldolf previously worked. Geldolf called his partner and asked to speak to Midge so they might arrange a meeting.

Ure skipped Buerk’s initial report, but he quickly cottoned on to Geldof’s passion for doing something to help. In short order, Ure and Geldolf settled on an idea: a charity Christmas pop song to raise awareness and funds for the starving people of Ethiopia.

Their charity act would be called Band Aid and their song would be called Do They Know It’s Christmas.

Like Invading Russia Month From Now.

On paper, a charity Christmas song was brilliant, but the logistics quickly smacked both men in the face. For one thing, they had just four weeks to make a song out of literally nothing, rope in dozens of highly sought after pop stars, get all of said pop stars into the same room, and make a complete song using donated studio time. It would be the musical equivalent of invading Russia in winter.

Undaunted, the duo went to work. First, Geldolf scribbled lyric ideas in the back of a taxi on his way to a meeting with Ure. (Cover songs were out because they would need to pay royalties, decreasing donations.) The lyrics on offer amply matched the horrifying state of affairs: the contrast between the gluttonous Christmas feasting in the West, and the unimaginable horror in Ethiopia, painted a powerful picture. Ure could see the darkness Geldolf wrote out, but felt he couldn’t improve them. One idea was to use the word ‘Ethiopia’ rather than the final version’s ‘Africa’, but the excess syllables ruined the rhythm track. Nevertheless, they had complete lyrics and that was enough. Next, Ure had to shove a square peg in a round hole by bolting Gelfolf’s abrasive lyrics onto a Christmasy-sounding melody.

Remarkably, that’s what he did. In short order, Ure had a synth-pop demo committed to tape, complete with his own rubbish guide vocal. Now, he could invite fellow A-List musicians into the studio to do a proper job. Among the first recruits were Simon Le Bon (and the rest of Duran Duran), Sting (fresh from divorcing The Police and then launching a successful solo career) and the band Spandau Ballet (whom Geldolf recruited by accosting guitarist Gary Kemp in an antiques shop).

While Ure worked to make a song that sounded even vaguely appealing, Geldolf put his considerable powers of persuasion to work by ensuring even more talent appeared and that no excess costs went into the making of the record. That meant persuading (read: commanding) his record label to distribute the record for free and demanding music magazines give them free advertising space.

It also meant corralling someone into making a record sleeve. Geldolf approached Peter Blake, a renowned artist whose resume included the cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. In a few short days, Blake sketched out the most arresting artwork of his career. The final sleeve looked like The Nutcracker meets Dante’s Inferno: stylized Western children wearing fancy clothes are surrounded by toys and food…and they make no notice of two starving Ethiopian children photographed in the foreground.

Finally, Notting Hill’s Sarm West Studios—Bob Marley’s old stomping grounds—gave Geldolf’s supergroup exactly 24 hours of free studio time to make this song on Sunday November 25th, 1984. Most records take months or even years, so meeting the deadline inevitably meant an all-nighter.

Could they do it?

Recording Day

When that Sunday morning arrived, Geldolf and Ure arrived into Notting Hill at 8am with the media—who were no doubt curious to see if the promised cast of A-Listers would actually turn up. Surprisingly for pop stars with the scheduling rectitude of paper airplanes, they all did. To keep everyone’s egos in check, Geldolf arranged a large group photo to appear in the next morning’s papers and to have the whole group of around 40 artists sing the end chorus (FEED THE WORLD! LET THEM KNOW IT’S CHRISTMAS TIME AGAIN!) as a team building exercise.

After that, some parts of the recording went by easily. Phil Collins was asked to lay down a live drum part to replace the demoed drum machine. His first take impressed Ure and Geldolf but Collins felt he could do it better a second time. The second take was somehow an improvement over the fantastic first take. In short order, the drums were finished.

Other parts were much harder. Remember, Ure was producing and so had the unenviable job of asking each vocalist to record a line or two which he would then cut-and-paste together to make the final song. Production was further complicated because Geldolf offered musical inputs which Ure found annoying; Geldof’s suggestions were closer to the rough melody he first presented but didn’t match what the song turned into.

Also not helping was the absence of a big star: Boy George (Karmakarmakarmakarma chameleon!!!). Geldolf somehow flagged down the phone number to George’s hotel room…in New York. He immediately called to berate Boy George for being asleep five timezones away. Boy George was then ordered to haul ass down to JFK airport and take a Concorde to London. Remarkably, this ranting worked. Boy George wangled his way onto the final New York to London Concorde of the day, and showed up in Notting Hill at 6PM to record his part.

Once the artists finished recording, Ure stayed up all night mixing the record. He left the following morning, in his words, “never wanting to hear that record again”. The universe denied his request. The song promptly sold a million copies in its first week, stayed at number one all the way through to Christmas, raised 8 million GBP, forced Margaret Thatcher to waive the usual Value-Added Tax associated with such records, and shamed prominent American artists into producing their own charity record—We Are The World.

A Commercial and Charitable Success, But Artistically?

Immediately, Do They Know It’s Christmas earned mixed reviews. Most agreed the song’s melody was catchy but also syrupy. All agreed the participants were there for the right reasons. The lyrics on the other hand were a different story. Certain cultural commentators who gave them a read found them to be racist, colonialist, inaccurate and downright condescending.

Indeed, the whole image of “Band-Aid” was enough to short-circuit the mental capacities of some critics. Not only did the thoroughly white Bob Geldolf and Midge Ure have the effrontery to put on a charity single, but in their quest to help a group of starving Ethiopians, they also roped in mostly white male artists to perform on it. This criticism would haunt Geldolf the following year when he staged the epic Live Aid concert and subsequent charity efforts. This whole shindig is about helping various African peoples, so why not call upon African artists and their rich variety of talents to help? Geldolf found this reasoning utterly spurious: as far as he was concerned, the unvirtuous music-buying public would only pay to see the select 0.00000001% of artists who had titanic star power. As such, that’s who he needed to put on the bill, imagery be damned.

Nevertheless a question still remains: is Do They Know It’s Christmas a racist dumpster fire covered in greasy synthesizers or a positive (if flawed) charity song? It’s a tough call, so to settle it once and for all, let’s break down the lyrics line-by-line and give them a final, unbiased score.

What Were These Airheads Singing?

Atop the song’s clanging synth bell intro, Paul Young starts off with the first verse.

It's Christmas time, and there's no need to be afraid/At Christmas time, we let in light and we banish shade

So far so good, nothing to see here. Boy George, after zipping across the ocean to contribute, sings the next verse:

And in our world of plenty we can spread a smile of joy/ Throw your arms around the world at Christmas time.

This line is a tad dodgy. ‘In our world of plenty’ was a self-evident truth in the West. Those who objected need only to have looked at the Berlin Wall imprisoning half of Europe or, better yet, the starving people of Ethiopia to quell their doubts. But what about ‘we can spread a smile of joy’? It’s also true because it’s hard to smile when basic meeds are not being met. Or as Bertolt Brecht put it, ‘grub first, then ethics.’

Anywho, the late George Michael comes in with the next line.

But say a prayer/Pray for the other ones/At Christmas time

Another banal lyric. How many attendees of a Christmas Eve church service are beseeched to be more charitable, especially when the suffering of others is as plain as day?

If George Michael didn’t sing an offensive lyric, maybe the next pair of vocalists, Simon Le Bon and Sting, sang something stupid:

It's hard, but when you're having fun/There's a world outside your window/ (Sting joins in here) And it's a world of dread and fear/ Where the only water flowing/Is the bitter sting of tears.

Disregarding the pun of Sting singing the lyric ‘sting of tears’, here’s where the song enters truly sketchy territory. Le Bon and Sting are chastising the listener for having a ball while immense suffering is going on anyway. The unhappy world they paint thus far is vague, but easily imaginable.

By this point, Bono of the then-rising band U2 joins Le Bon and Sting to complete the image of a Christmas Carol-esque hellscape.

And the Christmas bells that ring there/are the clanging chimes of doom

After this verse, the song gets in more trouble. Le Bon and Sting fall away and Bono steps up to belt out his solo verse, the wording of which initially made him flinch:

Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you!

Read casually, it would seem Band Aid is condoning the suffering of starving people, but that complaint misses the obvious. Namely, upon seeing images of carnage on the news, most people’s first instinctive reaction is ‘Thank God that’s not me’. Geldolf gives you no room to hide.

If the next verse didn’t exist, I think the message of Bono’s line would have been clearer, but here’s where critics of the song hit their mark. After Bono, a large chorus of vocalists sing the following:

And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas time/the greatest gift they'll get this year is life

Dear God. Where to start? First off, Africa’s the world’s second largest continent, not a rinkydink country, so the crude stereotyping feels more prevalent here than elsewhere. Further to that, “the greatest gift they’ll get this year is life” is infuriatingly ambiguous. Life? Is that it? They already have life, and it thoroughly sucks. What’s frustrating is if Ure and Geldolf tweaked the melody enough to put in ‘Ethiopia’ rather than ‘Africa’, the verse would hit much harder. The issue they’re singing about is specifically confined to that country. If they somehow pulled that off, they’d get away with the next line.

Where nothing ever grows/No rain nor rivers flow

In the context of the famine, the line is painful, accurate, and highlights the issue directly. If food were growing and water plentiful, then obviously this song wouldn’t need to exist. But courtesy of the screwed up previous verse, it paints a needlessly bad image of an entire continent that echoes the grotesque attitudes of the past.

Accurate or not, the story in the song leads the vocalists to ask:

Do they know it's Christmas time at all?

Technically the answer’s yes because Ethiopia has one of the oldest Christian communities in the world and they know damn well it’s Christmas. However, I always felt criticizing the song’s rhetorical question missed the spirit of what the single was trying to do. Christmas is about celebration and joy (Jesus entered the chat after all). However, if your world is more Old Testament than New Testament as it were, then it sure doesn’t feel like Christmas.

The next few lyrics are a baffling call and response, with Jamaican singer Marilyn and Heaven 17’s Glenn Gregory doing the ‘call’ and Paul Young doing the ‘response’.

Here's to you/ Raise a glass for everyone/ Here's to them/Underneath that burning sun/Do they know it's Christmas time at all?

I don’t know what the hell’s going on here. It sounds like they’re toasting and acknowledging the Ethiopians but then they ask the title question again, contradicting everything. I think if they had more time they would have put something else here but whatever.

Thankfully there are no more verses. Instead we get a full chorus outro with a impassioned plea from every Band Aid participant:

Feeeeeeedd the woooooorld/Feeeeeed the wooooorrrrld/Let them know it's Christmas time again! (repeat until fade out)

Anyone who objects to the idea of ending world hunger is a total sociopath so I’m not gonna entertain criticism of that line. As for ‘let them know it’s Christmas time again’, it has weird echos of the Three Shepherds learning of Jesus’s birth so it’s not too bad but the other verses knock it down a bit.

Conclusion

On the problematic art scale, where does ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ find itself? Answer: in a little bit of trouble.

Writing off the whole song as colonialist or condescending is blatantly wrong, and anyone who says otherwise should know better. That said, the song’s real lyrical problems can be isolated to one key line, the lyric about snow in Africa. It’s weird, distracting, and has a deleterious effect on the verses latched to either side of it. Bono’s chiming scream about ‘thank god it’s them’ takes on a sinister meaning, and the famine-specific verses that follow look like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness set to pop music.

However, I firmly believe history and context are crucial in any form of art criticism, and history has a few important things to say here. Namely, Geldolf had to write an original pop song with syllables that fit together in less than four weeks. Further to that, what matters in pop music is not the lyrics but the melody. Listeners aren’t responding to the text itself but the vocal melody underneath it. As Ure revealed in later years, the word Ethiopia simply didn’t fit the musical tune they’d written. The unintended consequence was a lyrical misunderstanding that I suspect would have been rectified if they had more time available to them.

And history has something else to say: both Geldolf and Ure have stated the quality of the song doesn’t matter because nobody personally profited from it. In his autobiography, Midge Ure is unequivocal: “it is a song that has nothing to do with music. It was all about generating money...The song didn't matter: the song was secondary, almost irrelevant.” In an 2010 interview, Geldof put a more humorous take on it:” I am responsible for two of the worst songs in history, with the other one being ‘We Are the World.’”

Do They Know It’s Christmas was the first mega-charity song and no other song has matched it since save We Are The World. Geldolf and Ure captured lightning in a bottle, which means someone got electrocuted along the way.

The Legend of Korra's Two Fatal Flaws

My favourite television series of all time will not surprise anybody who grew in the 2000s. It’s not the Sopranos, not The West Wing, and not Breaking Bad. No, the winner is Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Not only is Avatar (no relation to the blue mess of the same name by James Cameron) the best children’s series of all time (sue me), its popularity is enduring, enjoying an enormous renaissance in 2020 when it came to Netflix. The show, which originally ran on Nickelodeon from 2005 to 2008, ticks so many boxes for perfect family-friendly entertainment. Grounded fantasy elements? Check. A clear beginning, middle, and end? Check. Compelling characters with fascinating narrative arcs? Check. A show that takes itself seriously? Check. Avatar’s success is difficult to replicate and its continued success has of course left fans hungry for more.

To satisfy fans, Avatar’s creators, Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, created a sequel series to Avatar, The Legend of Korra, the subject of today’s media detour.

What Is The Show About?

The Legend of Korra is set seventy years after the original series took place and centres on the new Avatar, Korra. For those unfamiliar, the original show’s main character—12-year-old Aang—was the Avatar. In this fantasy world, The Avatar is able to control and manipulate, or ‘bend’ to use the show’s terminology, all four elements (air, water, earth, and fire) whereas all other ‘benders’ are only able to bend one element. Due to their enormous power relative to everyone else, the Avatar is tasked with maintaining balance between the four elemental peoples in the world. When the Avatar dies, they’re reincarnated to a person in the next nation along in the aforementioned elemental order. Since Aang was an Air Nomad, his successor, Korra, is from the Water Tribe.

Like the previous show, The Legend of Korra’s seasons are about Korra’s efforts as the Avatar to restore balance in the world. But unlike the previous series, which was always building up to a final battle between Aang and the evil Fire Lord, The Legend of Korra opted to tell its story over four shorter seasons with a new antagonist for each season.

Initial Thoughts

Immediately, we can see the strength of this approach to the sequel series. Firstly, a seventy year time jump ensures that all the previous characters would be dead or elderly. Many sequels struggle to match their predecessor because they are aiming for the same feel as the original. The Legend of Korra (mostly) avoids this issue by stating unequivocally that the previous protagonist is dead and that a new Avatar has arrived. Secondly, the long time-jump freshens the fantasy world the series is set in. Seventy years is a long time, and the creators opted to show technological and sociological progress that took place in the world as a way of showing progression.

A second strength of the long time-jump is the ease of introducing the new main character. The creators’ pitch for Korra’s character was simple: the opposite of Aang. Aang was 12, male, and the reluctant hero type. Korra is 17, female, and eager to embrace her role as the Avatar. This opportunity for a role-reversing main-character simply didn’t exist in the original series, and it was a smart call to take advantage of it with the sequel.

A third deviation was creating seasons that were de facto standalone arcs compared to a single story told over those seasons. This allowed Korra to battle different antagonists and expand the world-building elements which might serve as inspiration for future projects.

However, despite these initial strengths benefiting the show, The Legend of Korra has definitely earned mixed reviews from Avatar fans. Some criticisms are fair, others are not, and I feel that if one is going to criticise Korra, they need to do it without saying “the original series did it better”.

So what storytelling decisions did Dimartino and Konietzko make that ultimately turned out to be sub-optimal? Was it hundred, thousands? No, just two. But they’re two very important nodes in the creative network of ideas.

Major Flaw #1: The Pacing

The Legend of Korra moves at a blinding speed and the plot relentlessly moves forward without pause. Slow moments that reveal who the characters really are can be frustratingly sparse. In lieu of stopping, characters are constantly on the move, constantly battling their antagonists, constantly working to uncover a mystery, constantly navigating the treacherous world around them, and constantly learning more information about the fantastic world they live in. On and on it goes.

Some of these pacing problems aren’t the fault of the creators, but the format. The creative team had anywhere between 12 and 14 episodes spanning 23 minutes each for a season of Korra. Nickelodeon previously gave them 20 episodes per season for Avatar. Objectively, this means the sequel series is telling a smaller story, which is fine. I can’t stress this enough: a reheating of the previous series would have been dreadful and uninspired.

But the natural consequence of this format change is the pacing speeds up and plotpoints brickwall the episodes to the exclusion of all else. In fact, during my first time watching The Legend of Korra, I was surprised when certain episodes ended where they did. The fast pacing ensured that many episodes ended on what felt like a cliffhanger at best or felt cut off prematurely at worst.

A fast-paced show isn’t necessarily a problem. Indeed, one small upside from the fast pacing is the fluidity and excitement of the action and battle sequences. All are animated beautifully and make for a fantastic viewing experience. What makes the pacing problematic is the sheer amount of stuff running through that fast pacing. Each season has to, at minimum, set up the new antagonist, set up the new conflict for Korra to resolve, and add onto the existing material from previous seasons. None of that includes anything else the creators want to throw into the jumble.

And if reading complaint that has clued you into the second big flaw with The Legend of Korra, then you might already know what’s coming next.

Major Flaw #2: Too Many Characters.

This, right here, is the show’s Achilles Heel. The Legend of Korra has far too many characters and nowhere near enough screen-time to give all of them proper arcs, including Korra herself. To give you an idea on just how bloated this ensemble cast is, consider who they added to the mix when creating the story. Every character I name ought to be considered a ‘main character’ in the sense that they appear in at least ten episodes out of the fifty-two total.

First and foremost, there’s Korra herself, but a solo show with no secondary protagonists would be boring. To rectify this, the creators ensured Korra was (mostly) accompanied by three other leads, Mako, Bolin, and Asami. However, Korra needs an airbending teacher and there’s only one, Tenzin, son of the previous Avatar. Tenzin has three children Jinora, Ikki, and Meelo who help with the training. Whilst this is happening, Korra meets the police chief, Lin, the daughter of an original Avatar series character. However, this gang of good guys soon faces their first group villains, the Equalists, run by the mysterious Amon and his faithful Lieutenant. And this is just the crux of season one, spread out over 12 episodes.

If you count the names in the previous paragraph, we have no less than 11 recurring characters and that’s just season one. That’s nearly one main or recurring character for every episode of the season. Characters from the subsequent seasons would stick around just as long. Since my example excluded all subsequent seasons, I failed to mention Korra’s father, uncle, any of the subsequent antagonists, any of the cameos by older characters, or newcomers like Opal, Kai, and Lin’s sister, Suyin. There’s simply not enough oxygen for all of them.

Here’s why this is a problem: A story, regardless of the medium, is like a pizza that needs to be fairly divided between its characters. Too few characters will wind up eating bigger slices of pizza, leading to irrelevant details and nonsense filling the void where another character should be. But, as in Korra’s case, too many characters sharing the pie means that each slice is smaller and smaller, and divided in such a way that no character is satiated. Not helping Korra’s case is that the pizza itself is smaller (fewer episodes per season than the previous Avatar series). A proper story gives all its characters the right amount to eat so nobody goes hungry and nobody projectile vomits from overeating.

As you could probably guess, the effect of this decision to include so many characters metastasised on the show’s stories like an unchecked tumour. For one thing, in order to fit all the story-arcs in, the characters, by necessity, split off from the group and undertook many side adventures by themselves. It meant these ‘friends’ were not together very often throughout the entirety of the show. This in turn meant the relationships between the characters were minimal at best or rushed at worst. It also meant that each character’s individual arc had to be spread out very thinly over several episodes. Characters would get small windows to give you a glimpse at their compelling motives within, only for you to move along to the next character like you’re scrolling though a TikTok compilation. You can look, but you better not touch.

And of course, the number of characters needing to be squeezed in meant the already faster pacing feels even faster.

Conclusion

For my money, The Legend of Korra got it right 8 times out of 10, which is impressive for a sequel series. The characters ( despite their overpopulation) were interesting, the action was amazing, the animation absolutely was breath-taking, and the music was beyond compare.

In many ways, The Legend of Korra was a victim of its own success. Its action was thrilling, but too fast paced to really be appreciated. Its characters expanded on their original series counterparts in interesting ways, but you never had time to explore them to their fullest potential. The ideas were all there, but never had the chance to fully mature.

The Legend of Korra showed us why Avatar stories deserve to be continued, but also taught us what should be avoided in the process.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band

A book I had considered reviewing for the site was Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by the late historian Tony Judt. Judt’s book is easily the go-to guide to the subject if ever you were curious, though it clocks in at 830 pages. But do you know what caught my attention more than anything? The cover.

Take a look.

Can you spot what’s unusual? I’ll spoil it for you, it’s the Beatles. Though the band received scant mention in the book itself, I am always blown away by the fact that the Beatles, and only the Beatles, make it into a general history book. How was it that John, Paul, George and Ringo found themselves sharing cover space with Berliners tearing down the wall?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a massive Beatles fan. They’re a band that few if any people dislike. Younger generations may not go apeshit when hearing their music the way the Boomers did, but we’re not fools—these guys are second to none.

So, I’m gonna talk about the most famous Beatles record, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The Beatles Again.

By November 1966, when Pepper’s recording sessions began, the Beatles were at war with their fame. From 1963 on, an entire generation of teenage girls screamed, pissed themselves, and fainted upon seeing them. The band had to crank out a breathtaking two albums (14 songs each) and two singles a year when they weren’t constantly touring or else filming movies.

By 1966, the Beatles were becoming more interested in their recording studio, the now famous Abbey Road. The studio was a safe haven from the barrage of fans who constantly hounded them outside the walls, and Abbey Road’s technical potential had yet to be unleashed in their music. Of course, the substances the band were indulging in informed their musical tastes as well.

It was these separate elements that contributed to Pepper’s predecessor, the much-loved Revolver. Songs like Eleanor Rigby, Yellow Submarine, and Tomorrow Never Knows tower over popular music even to this day.

But the gap between Revolver and Pepper really was something else. The literal gap (Revolver was released on August 5th 1966, and Pepper seemed to take a then-ungodly ten months to appear on June 1st, 1967) matched the metaphorical gap. The old mop-top Beatles were truly dead (and taxidermied on the cover of Pepper). The music that emerged had a sophistication that the straightforward collection of tunes on Revolver couldn’t match.

The Pepper sessions began with, ironically enough, a song that didn’t make the cut for the record—it was deemed too good and so released as a single. That song would be Strawberry Fields Forever, John Lennon’s psychedelic ode to a Salvation Army Home in Liverpool. Its four-and-half minutes featured everything and the kitchen sink including a swarmandal, an orchestra section, backwards cymbals, the world-famous flute intro played on the Mellotron and one allegedly hidden message. It is the greatest tribute to one’s hometown ever made…with one exception.

Lennon’s songwriting partner Paul McCartney had penned his own tribute to their hometown. McCartney’s piece was Penny Lane, the name of a street in Liverpool which is now a massive tourist attraction. The street signs reportedly had to be nailed to the buildings because fans kept stealing them. The song Penny Lane isn’t as complex as Strawberry Fields Forever but it certainly features a full contribution from the band as well as a slick trumpet part played by David Mason.

Both songs were released as a single in early ‘67. In those days, singles were never included on albums because that would be “conning the public”, in the words of producer George Martin. He claimed releasing those songs as a single was the biggest mistake he ever made—and do you know what? I totally believe him.

In short, Sgt. Pepper, named by Rolling Stone as the greatest album ever made, was released without its two best songs on it.

I’ll let that sink in.

The Album Proper.

The album begins with the sound of a pit orchestra warming up and an audience getting settled—sound effects culled from Abbey Road’s extensive recording library. Then Ringo Starr crashes into the opening of the title track on his drum kit. The crunchy rhythm guitars soon give way to a wailing lead guitar part supplied by George Harrison. The Master of Ceremonies, McCartney, introduces the band (“the act you’ve known for all these years”) before a special French Horn quartet comes in to entertain the crowd. Lennon, McCartney and Harrison welcome the audience into the show with the backing chorus while Starr and the horns keep them move.

Harrison’s fiery guitar returns over McCartney’s bellowing introduction of “the one and only Billy Shears”. The horns fade and a loud sample of a screaming crowd erupts into a musical segue, leading the band to announce the arrival of “Billy Shears.” Billy Shears a.k.a. Ringo then steps forward to sing his song, With A Little Help From My Friends.

The recording of With A Little Help From My Friends was a mostly straightforward affair once the musical segue had been achieved. Starr, never having been much of a songwriter, relied on Lennon and McCartney to write him a tune for the album, which they duly procrastinated on. Eventually, when the finished lyrics were presented to Starr, he had a complaint. Originally, the lyrics said “what would you think if I sang out of tune/would stand up and throw ripe tomatoes at me?” Starr loathed that lyric and wagered (probably correctly) that were he to sing it, he would be dodging tomatoes for the rest of his life. It was hastily amended to “would you stand up and walk out on me.”

Starr reportedly had other problems, not with the lyrics but with his singing. Starr has, by his own admission, never been a confident singer. For the final bellowing note, “…with a little help from my ffffrrriiieeeenddssssss!!!”, it took McCartney, Lennon, and Harrison cornering him into the vocal booth until he did it.

With the first two songs joined as one via a crossfade, the stoned Boomer audience of ‘67 believed that the Beatles, under their Sgt. Pepper guise, had created a “concept album”—something totally new. Lennon disagreed in later years, citing his next offering as proof that the songs “could have gone on any other album”.

Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds is a committed group effort led by Lennon. The lysergic Lowery organ notes at the beginning, alongside Lennon’s heavily tape-altered voice, helped paint the most colourful lyrics ever committed to a sound recording. It’s easy imagining Lewis Carroll nominating the song as Wonderland’s national anthem. Speaking of Wonderland, some thought Lennon took a detour to that location when searching for the lyrics.

In addition to flanging effects on just about every instrument and vocal track, Lennon’s title had the curious initials LSD, the very name of the substance which he consumed on a regular basis. The inspiration seemed obvious, but the band firmly rejected this druggy interpretation. Right up until his death, Lennon maintained the lyrics referred to a painting his four-year-old son Julian created in school of a classmate named Lucy. (Such a girl did indeed exist and so does the painting.) Still, nobody who listens to the song could reasonably claim that LSD didn’t going into the making of L.S.D.

Afterwards we go from the ultimate acid trip song to the ultimate song about self-improvement, Getting Better. McCartney, with a little help from Lennon, was the primary composer of this straightforward rocker about a reformed douchebag. The narrators cheerfully describes his old life as an “angry young man” who “used to be cruel to my woman/I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loves”. The disarming verses are juxtaposed with Harrison and Lennon supplying chipper guitar licks and happy-go-lucky backing vocals. On top of the rhythm track, Harrison threw in a tambura while Starr added congas.

In a glorious twist, the song about self-improvement was lost on Lennon during the recording of the backing vocals. Lennon, who often brought pillboxes into the studio to keep him awake, accidentally took a different pill—LSD (I think there’s a theme here). After a few takes, Lennon complained of feeling unwell to producer George Martin, blissfully unaware of the band’s chemical diet. Martin, in a feat of remarkable innocence, took Lennon up to the roof for some fresh air lest he be attacked by the swarm of fans keeping a constant vigil outside the studio gates.

When McCartney and Harrison inquired as to the whereabouts their AWOL bandmate, Martin’s description somehow alerted the other Beatles to what Lennon did. They made a mad dash up the stairs to the roof before Lennon accidentally committed the dumbest suicide in history.

Getting Better is followed by the claustrophobic-sounding Fixing A Hole. Unusually, Fixing A Hole was not recorded at Abbey Road, but instead in a rubbish studio called Regent Sound. Fixing A Hole features McCartney playing harpsichord on an airless recording while Lennon, taking up bass duty, and Starr fight to have the song’s low-end be heard over the terrible acoustics. Only Harrison’s underrated lead guitar lines can be heard over McCartney’s whimsical lyrics about who knows what. Some thought Fixing A Hole was about heroin (which McCartney denied). Rather, McCartney seems to be talking about the “mind wandering” of creativity. Fixing A Hole helps anchor Pepper in place, but adds little in terms of innovation.

The same could not be said for the next track, She’s Leaving Home. This track was heralded as the standout upon Pepper’s release. Though it has faded a bit over the years, the maturity of the storytelling in the song’s three and a half minutes is still mind-blowing. McCartney sings of a girl who runs away from home (a common occurrence in 1967, as wayward youths made their way to Haight-Ashbury). Yet rather than follow the girl on her adventure, McCartney, with more help from Lennon on the Greek chorus, instead focuses on the parents who struggled to comprehend why she ran away. Lennon and McCartney’s portrayal of the parents is sympathetic, a feeling backed up by the string nonet—and no other instruments. McCartney asked freelance arranger Mike Leander to compose the beautiful score due to George Martin’s busy schedule. Martin conducted the orchestra, although he felt slighted by McCartney going with another composer at the time.

There’s another heart-warming twist to this song. McCartney was primarily inspired by a girl named Melanie Coe, whom he read about running away from home in a newspaper. It turns out the Beatles actually met her! Three years earlier, Coe met the band while they went on a tv special. Coe later told people that the song got almost everything right. Talk about authenticity!

Side One concludes with another strange Lennon offering, Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite!. While filming a promotional video for Strawberry Fields Forever in Sevenoaks, Kent, Lennon and Harrison went into an antique shop. There, Lennon found an old poster from 1843 promoting a circus act. Filled to the brim with antiquated Victorian language and fanciful advertising for Pablo Fanque’s fair, Lennon immediately bought the poster.

Later, when he was feeling a bit low creatively, Lennon copied more or less what was on the poster for the lyrics of his next song. Hardly original. However, when it came to creating the sound of the song, originality dominated the day. Lennon wanted to “smell the sawdust” from an old fairground, so Martin exhaustively played a variety of organs while sending engineer Geoff Emerick on a wild excavation to find old fairground recordings and calliope music to get the right feel for the song. It is one of the most complex recordings the Beatles ever made. Lennon initially hated the result, but shortly before his death he called it “pure”, presumably meaning he changed his mind.

After Side One’s musical theatre, drug trips, whimsical self-improvement, family dramas and a detour to Queen Victoria’s summer holiday, what could possibly open Side Two? Answer: George Harrison.

Within You Without You, recorded without any participation from Harrison’s bandmates, features every Indian instrument under the sun. From sitars to tamburas to tablas all played by a variety of specialist musicians, Harrison’s burgeoning interest in Indian music and Hinduism could no longer be contained. The song’s philosophical lyrics, sung by Harrison in a curious drone voice, only added to the mystical feeling of the track. Harrison, mildly fed up with the whole Beatle thing by that point and not totally on board with McCartney’s alter-ego band idea, ironically helped Pepper’s thematic concept with this Beatles deep cut. The song runs for just over five minutes, making it the second-longest track on the record.

The song would prove divisive among critics, but not among Harrison’s bandmates, who showered it with acclaim. Even the hard-to-please Lennon was impressed. Within You Without You’s praise among the band and George Martin contrasts sharply with Harrison’s initial offering, Only A Northern Song. Written as a whinging and bitching exercise about his junior role within Northern Songs, the Beatles music publisher, the band and Martin hated Only A Northern Song with a vengeance. It wound up on the throwaway Yellow Submarine album. Harrison seemed a bit insecure about his superior Indian-flavoured tune, and so he requested that a laughter sound effect be tacked on to the end of the song.

Sgt Pepper continues with When I’m 64, another McCartney composition. The song was actually one of the first McCartney ever wrote, and used to be played when the band was in residence in Hamburg, West Germany. When it was deemed fit for purpose and brought out for Sgt. Pepper, it was originally going to be the B-side to Strawberry Fields Forever before finally being shoved onto the album.

The sound of McCartney pretending to be sixteen and wanting to be sixty-four with his girlfriend created an endearing quality that’s only enhanced by the musical feel McCartney wanted—1920s music hall. Complete with a clarinet and woodwind section scored by Martin, When I’m 64 is pure vintage. Lennon was ambivalent about the track, but the band gave it their all regardless. I bet that if someone threw the song into a vaudeville playlist for a gag, only real Beatles fans would notice. It certainly adds to the illusion that Pepper is a mishmash performance of diverse musical acts.

Lovely Rita comes next, an act of pure and banal fiction complete with a jaunty piano solo played by Martin. McCartney found the American name for traffic wardens, meter maids, both inspiring and delightfully alliterative. So he cooked up this ditty about a guy who falls in love with a meter maid, takes her out, gets back to her place aaaaannnddd…sits on the sofa with her sister. What a bummer, dude. Recording the track was a fun affair, both for the Beatles and the band next door. Locked away in the adjacent studio, Pink Floyd was recording their equally psychedelic debut album. Pink Floyd met the Beatles later in the session, no doubt interrupting their silly recording antics. Scattered throughout the track is a harmonium-like sound. It wasn’t an instrument but the band blowing on a strip of the cheap, godawful linoleum toilet paper EMI so generously provided for their studios. Lennon and Harrison added to the naughtiness by making series of high-pitched moans and groans before calling out “leave it” to conclude the track.

In later years, a real traffic warden claimed she was the inspiration for the song. McCartney denied it and Lennon concurred saying, "he [McCartney] makes ‘em up like a novelist.”

The final leg of Pepper begins with a Lennon tune, Good Morning Good Morning. Long hated by its creator, it’s hard to see what caused Lennon’s ire. The sound of a cock waking up the farm is swiftly followed by a roaring brass band, backed by Starr’s punchiest snare sound on any Beatles recording. Lennon’s lyrics reflects the sense of creative stagnation he felt living in suburban Weybridge. The song’s title came from a cereal commercial jingle, and the lyrics referenced a soap opera he was into called Meet the Wife. On top of all this frustrated music, McCartney, rather than Harrison, adds a stinging guitar solo while Lennon commandeers the sound effects library to create a unique finale.

Starting with a chicken, a sequence of animal noises plays over the rhythm section, each “devouring the one that came before it”. So a cat is eaten by a dog, the dog by more dogs, and so on. What turns the idea from barely creative to jaw-droppingly original is how the last animal sound, another chicken, is synced up to segue into the next track.

The reprise of the title track begins with a guitar mimicking the sound of a chicken being strangled. Then Starr’s impatient kick drum and an off-the-cuff Lennon remark lead McCartney counting into one minute and eighteen seconds of blitzkrieg rock ‘n roll. Sgt. Pepper’s band is making their final bow. The sound effects of the crowd further add the illusion of the album being a live show. The brevity of the track is what makes it good, especially considering how nicely the track segues into the best album finale in history.

A Day In The Life is the pinnacle of the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership. Lennon’s soft acoustic guitar, accented with maracas played by Harrison, strums away carelessly while McCartney’s piano and thumping bass line join in over Lennon’s lyrics.

His everyman lyrics are concerned with he saw in the newspaper. “I read the news today/oh boy.” A bored observer of the world, mildly intrigued by what he sees, is soon joined by Starr’s toms. The tom drums hit with the force of a timpani in a grand concert hall. Then the song takes its famous twist with the line “I want to turn you on.” Lennon’s proclamation is followed by the voice of roadie Mal Evans counting out the bars while a giant orchestra swells up into a soundgasm of tremendous force before abruptly segueing into a middle-eight sung by McCartney over a cheery piano part. McCartney’s jaunty verse contrasts sharply, and wondrously, with Lennon’s barely concealed lethargy. McCartney’s character concludes his morning when he “went upstairs and had a smoke/and somebody spoke and I went into a dream.” Lennon’s harmonising voice takes us through air before we land back on the final newspaper verse. This time, 4000 holes in the roads of Blackburn, Lancashire, warrant our attention before the orgasming orchestra returns. Then, at the highest point—of the orchestra swell, the song, the album, maybe even the Beatles’ entire career—a triple piano chord strikes with the force of Jupiter’s thunderbolt.

And then, that’s it. The 50+ seconds of echo stemming from the three piano chords being played simultaneously hangs in the air to conclude the album…sort of. At the end the piano echo, a brief high-pitched whistling, audible to the dogs listening to the album with their owners, is followed by a gibberish track of nonsense jammed into the run-out groove. For those without an automatically retracting stylus, the sound of the Beatles losing their minds would go on forever and ever.

Conclusion.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band really does live up to the hype. A work of art conducted by talented artists all cooperating with each other is truly a force to be reckoned with. Like most incredibly successful works, it led to the artist’s undoing. The Beatles never truly delivered a united album after Pepper, though the post-Pepper albums still crush it in terms of genius. Pepper’s carefully chosen crossfades gave it the feeling of being a complete whole, a novel rather a collection of short stories. Albums weren’t like that prior to Pepper and most subsequent albums aren’t either.

Whatever the combination the Beatles employed, there is a good reason Pepper stands as a masterpiece of writing and music, now, forever, and always. It has a focus lacking in most novels, a brevity not found in most movies or TV shows, and a musical sophistication not found in most music.

This is how art is supposed to be done, and that explains why this rock band from Liverpool made its way onto the cover of Tony Judt’s history book. Plenty happened in Europe in the seventy-five years since the end of World War II, but Sgt Pepper reminds us why the Beatles have a seat at the table with De Gaulle, the Iron Curtain, and the end of Communism.

They affected as many if not more lives.

A Proposed List of Books That Do Not Currently Exist And The Ingredients To Make Them

Today’s blog post will be a fun exercise.

Big disclaimer: the following books do NOT, to the best of my knowledge, currently exist, but could some day. Also listed are the requirements a hypothetical author would need in order to make these books credible. Commissioning editors are free to take these ideas and run with them, provided they put my name in the acknowledgements. At present, I have neither the access nor the foundational knowledge to write these books myself. At best, I have a clear vision for them.

So without further ado, here is a list of 6 books that do not currently exist but absolutely should.

1 Queen Elizabeth II: A Life

What’s It About and What’s Needed: The premise is simple. This book would be the authorised biography of the late Elizabeth Windsor, Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Such a book would be given the seal of approval by her son, King Charles III, and use all materials related to the Queen’s reign currently under lock and seal in Windsor Castle. At present, such a book has not been commissioned by Buckingham Palace. Several fine unauthorised works have been written, but are lacking that final secret sauce. The hypothetical author would interview not only the Queen’s family, but her former ministers and Palace staff to corroborate the official archived documents. That the book would be free of rumours, scandal-mongering, and other tell-all bullshit normal attached to books about the royal family goes without saying.

2 Covid-19: The Complete Story

What It’s About and What’s Needed: This book would tell the definitive story of the coronavirus pandemic with sufficient levels of hindsight to make it a proper work of history. Everything from the first reported outbreaks in China to the vaccine production would be covered. In order for this book to be authentic, the author would need to be a virology expert and a skilled non-fiction writer, a tall order indeed. The materials they would need include whatever verifiable evidence from China can be located (which might well be impossible), the response of prominent government officials in multiple countries, access to what plans were in place from the WHO, access to the vaccine producers, not to mention the skill and nuance to navigate the ocean of misinformation that flooded our minds during the pandemic.

In my current conception, the book would share similarities to the documentary works of Ken Burns. Burns’s talent is to take nebulous subjects with no clear protagonist, like baseball and Prohibition, and tell the whole story intercut with interviews from appropriate experts. Obviously Burns is a documentarian rather than an author but similar books exist such as Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies, the definitive “biography” of cancer.

3 Hogwarts Redux: A New Beginning

What It’s About and What’s Needed: The premise of this one is simple. Instead of a sequel to Harry Potter, this 7-part book series by J.K. Rowling (and nobody else) would be a new story set at Hogwarts. The main characters would have little or nothing to do with the old characters beyond a few carefully chosen relationships. Perhaps these hypothetical new characters would be sorted into Hufflepuff. Perhaps the villain could be a Gryffindor. Maybe Harry Potter could appear as a mentor to the new hero like Dumbledore was to Harry in the original series. Unlike the other entries on this list, the requirements are straightforward: inspiration from J.K. Rowling, enough time to make it work, and no expectation that it will compete with, or outdo, the Harry Potter books.

4 The Beatles: The Final Word of History

What It’s About and What’s Needed: Ugh, another Beatles book? Why? Good question. Here’s the thing: though there’s been an ocean of ink spilled about the band, including some on this website, I’ll be bold enough to say that there’s never been a truly good narrative non-fiction book about the Beatles. In theory, the books serving this purpose are the still on-going The Beatles: All These Years by Mark Lewisohn, the closest person to an official Beatles historian that exists. However, Lewisohn’s approach is taking way too long. Only Volume 1 of 3 is out and Volume 1 is already 1000 pages. I’ve yet to read it, so I won’t pass judgement on that book, but most people who aren’t Beatles fans won’t be able to swallow a 3000 page work of history on a subject they don’t care about. What I’m thinking of is a single-volume work of history that’s less like Robert Caro’s enormous (and endless) biographies and more like Doris Kearns Goodwin’s ensemble biographies. The proposed book would condense Lewisohn’s research, have the direct involvement of either the surviving Beatles or Apple Corps, and synthesise previous disparate accounts to make a true work of history. Lewisohn’s book might be the book of record, but it might severely test the casual reader. At a minimum, Lewisohn’s books, when they eventually come out, need to be abridged into a single volume.

5 Development Hell, Why Movies Take Forever To Get Made

What It’s About and What’s Needed: Have you ever wondered why it takes so long for movies to get made? For example, as of 2023, there are five (and hopefully no more) Indiana Jones movies. The first movie was released in 1981, the second in 1984, the third in 1989, the fourth in 2008, and the fifth and final in 2023. Audiences waited three years, then five, then nineteen, and then another fifteen for a “complete” story. Admittedly there wasn’t a plan to release five over an unthinkable 42 year period, but the long-development times leave you wondering: why do movies take so long? It’s so common in Hollywood that it has an official name, Development Hell. The proposed book would be about how Development Hell has come to be, why it can’t go away, how it stymies so many projects, and what might be done about it. The author for such a work would need to be embedded in the movie industry, know exactly how development hell works, have contacts at dozens of major studios, and know all the relevant actors, directors, and production people to make the story interesting. The trouble with Development Hell as a subject is that it has no character arc, no obvious history, and no beginning, middle, and end. Before starting, the author would most likely need to find a representative sample of movies frozen in Development Hell to serve as the concrete case studies to ground the reader’s focus.

6 Harvard: A History

What It’s About and What’s Needed: If the recent college admissions cheating scandal reveals anything, it’s that people are willing to go above and beyond what’s morally right to get their kids into elite colleges. The stakes are too high and the rewards are too great. Universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge have a disproportionately high impact on the progress of civilization. Famous names all tend to pass through these institutions and professors at these schools are the ones writing the books I keep reviewing. Therefore I believe it is fair to ask: how and why is this the case? Why does everyone want to send their kid to Harvard and why does going to Harvard work? What is the advantage at being taught at Harvard and not the local college? The book doesn’t have to be about Harvard exactly, though the institution is storied enough to warrant a major work of history about it. To produce a book like what I’m thinking, the author will not only need to be intimately familiar with the institution in question, they also need to know about how winner-take-all dynamics emerge. Again, the interesting thing about Harvard or similar universities isn’t the history but why they produce the people that they do. So at the very least a passing knowledge of network theory, winner-take-all dynamics and urban planning will be needed to explain this phenomenon in depth. The institution makes the rock star just as much as a rock star comes though an institution.

Conclusion

If these books exist, I haven’t come across them or the author who wrote them did so in a manner that made them mediocre. Nevertheless, I believe they should exist if for no other reason than future generations need to know about this stuff.

Our era of excess information makes it all too easy for important things to slip through the net.

Queen's Perfect Performance

Freddie Mercury’s 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, climaxes with Queen’s famed performance at the Live Aid charity concert. Mercury’s finest hour is fully recreated with meticulous, loving care. Lead actor Rami Malek turned in a performance so startling that the one-to-one copy of Queen’s indispensable frontman earned him a well-deserved Oscar.

Queen’s Live Aid performance not only earned first prize amongst the concert’s many luminous performances, but has since been rightfully described as the best concert performance in pop music history. Their set was perfect, but that naturally begs the question: WHY?

Why was it so perfect? What did Freddie and co do right? How did they exceed expectations?

Some proposed answers are banal and do not fully capture the magic of Freddie Mercury gracing a stage. For instance, this article claims the band’s extensive rehearsal period was a contributing factor to their success. Yes, but surely the other artists rehearsed too? Even a performance of one or two songs requires a rehearsal. Other sources claim Mercury’s towering, charismatic presence was the defining factor. This is more plausible because Queen is the best live act in history (I brook no dissent here). Freddie’s stage presence was, and remains, unmatched.

Clearly something worked for Queen on the Live Aid stage, but what.

To me, the cause is obvious.

Let’s Give That A Second Look

To give the uninitiated some context, we need to understand what Queen and the other artists were doing that day at Wembley Stadium—how it contributed to Queen’s unrivalled contribution to the history of live entertainment.

On the 13th of July, 1985, dozens of bands and musical artists were booked (some against their will but that’s a story for another day) by Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof for a very, very special charity concert: Live Aid. The purpose was to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia. Eight months earlier, in November 1984, Geldof gathered many of those same artists together in a Notting Hill recording studio to sing a new charity song he composed with his friend, Ultravox singer Midge Ure. Geldof and Ure’s song was Do They Know It’s Christmas, and it was released under the delightfully punny moniker Band Aid. Do The Know It’s Christmas was, in retrospect, a dopey song with a few questionable lyrics, but its purpose was little more than to give the public a way to donate to a good cause.

Geldof’s gamble worked, and he took the next stage (no pun intended) of his charity relief efforts by announcing two simultaneous benefit concerts on two continents, one in London, the other in Philadelphia, via satellite link-up. The group of artists Geldof shanghaied into performing remains unsurpassed and no subsequent music festival has offered a better billing. On the London set, The Boomtown Rats (duh) would be joined by, among others, The Who, Phil Collins, Queen, a then up-and-coming U2, Elvis Costello, Elton John, David Bowie, and Paul McCartney before everyone gathered on stage for the final sing along of Band Aid’s smash hit. The Philly concert featured Madonna, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Mick Jagger, Bryan Adams and even a reunited Led Zeppelin with Phil Collins (arriving via Concorde) filling in for the late John Bonham on drums. Artists had a 20 minute slot for their performance. The concerts would run 10 hours…each. Queen were slotted to perform in London at 6:41.

Immediately, we can see the first obstacle Queen, and indeed every artist, had to overcome that day: stiff, stiff competition. For charity gigs of this kind, participating performers usually have room for two or three songs to make an impression. Indeed, most artists took this approach, but that strategy came with risks.

Case-in-point, an hour before Queen majestically pranced onto the stage, the young and serious U2 performed what they thought would be a three-song set. They started with their then biggest hit, the whomping Sunday Bloody Sunday. They then moved into the fan-favourite Bad, which went gloriously off the rails.

Mid-performance, frontman Bono leapt down from the stage to rescue a woman being crushed to death in the audience. He then pompously danced with her in the stage pit. The other members of U2 couldn’t see where their frontman buggered off to and were on the verge of panicking as they continued to play Bad’s hypnotic rhythm. Bono returned to the stage and improvised the last two minutes of their set. U2’s performance boosted their career, despite the fact they lost the opportunity to play the third song, the insta-classic Pride (In The Name Of Love).

For their set, Queen decided against the usual route of playing a few of their greatest and instead did something so perfect that in retrospect I can’t believe nobody else thought of it: a medley (key word) based off their already immaculate concert roster.

18:41

Queen’s success at Live Aid derived from their thematically structured set-list, aimed at the highest level of audience participation. They had some experience in this area; in 1981, Queen conducted a South American tour held entirely in large football stadiums similar to Wembley. This proved a key difference between Queen’s performance resting in the history books while consigning the other performances to mere immortality. To see how they pulled it off, let’s review Queen’s performance.

At 18:41, Queen took the stage, frontman Freddie Mercury charging out with the enthusiasm of a man who was delighted to be there and whose doctor gave him the go-ahead to perform (neither of which were true). After waving to the crowd, Mercury plonked himself at the grand piano and banged out the iconic opening chords of Bohemian Rhapsody.

On first glance, Queen’s decision to lead off with The Rhapsody is baffling. After all, the song usually came 2/3rds of the way through their full-scale concert setlists, and even then they never bothered performing complex middle operatic section. Instead, the studio-recording would be played through the stadium while the band took a break before their final encore. So what was it doing in the lead-off position at Live Aid?

The answer was 72,000 persons strong. Unlike their own concerts, Queen were not playing to their specific audience at Live Aid. Sure, many in the audience liked Queen, but there were at least fifteen other artists competing for the audience’s attention. But the monster hit Bohemian Rhapsody, a song rubbing shoulders with Hotel California and Back In Black as rock best ever song, was Queen’s most recognizable song by a million miles. There was no better overture to the band’s setlist. For Queen to put their biggest hit anywhere else would have been breathtakingly stupid. The correctness of the decision can be heard on the audio playback, where the audience is singing along with such fervour that sometimes they can be heard over the band.

Mercury led the crowd through Bohemian Rhapsody’s opening ballad section before letting guitarist Brian May run wild with a scorching rendition of the song’s famous guitar solo. In a typical Queen show, May’s solo would end on a somewhat subdued note so the sound crew could properly queue up the pre-recorded operatic section. But at Live Aid, May concluded the solo with a thunderous power chord against drummer Roger Taylor’s cymbal-crashing bonanza. Mercury then rose from the piano bench while Taylor and bassist John Deacon worked through the complex musical transition from May’s power chord to the opening notes of song number two, Radio Gaga.

Radio Gaga (yes that’s where Lady Gaga got her name) was, in 1985, Queen’s most recent hit single. In the years leading up to Live Aid, Queen suffered a popularity dip after 1982’s Hot Space, their ignominious attempt to make a synth-heavy disco record. The album was, predictably, a disaster, and the band retreated to safer territory with their 1984 album, The Works. The lead single from The Works was the melodic masterpiece Radio Gaga. For a 1985 audience, this would have been a pleasantly familiar tune.

But the band took their performance of this now-most iconic of Queen songs to a new level. Liberated from the confines of the piano bench, Mercury was handed his signature bottomless microphone stand and he began prowling the stage. It should be noted that Queen performed all of the songs in their setlist at a slightly faster tempo to meet the tight timetable.

As Mercury sang through the opening verses, he got the audience to mimic Radio Gaga’s most famous component, taken straight from the extremely popular music video. In the video, Queen are standing on an elevated platform against a white background. As the band raise their hands and clap in time with the song’s drum fills [“(all we hear is/Radio Gaga (cha-cha, cha-cha)/ Radio Googoo (cha-cha, cha-cha)”], a large group of factory workers standing in front of the band raise their hands and clap in unison.

At Live Aid (and indeed all live performances of Radio Gaga), Mercury slapped his microphone in time with Taylor’s drum fills and the audience, with awe-inspiring precision, raised their hands over their heads and clapped in unison with the band just like the music video. During each chorus, Freddie Mercury guided the audience through the claps with exact timing—a feat even more impressive because he was guiding the general public, not a Queen audience.

Not only was this spectacle of 72,000 people clapping along stupefying to the eye, Mercury’s theatrical gestures ensured the audience was a participant in the performance, something Live Aid’s other acts never nailed. Queen always gave their audience something to do.

To drive that point home, Mercury took a one minute break after Radio Gaga concluded include the best part of every Queen live show, the vocalzied call-and-response game. Mercury would begin these improvised segments by calling out a vocal note (AAAAAAAYYYYAYAYAYAYYA-OOHHHHHHH!). The audience would respond with the same note (AAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYAYAYA-OOOOHHHHH!). Mercury would then guide them up-and down his titanic vocal register in the most epic version of the game Simon Says.

After giving his bandmates a moment to prepare, Mercury bellowed out “HAMMER TO FALL!” Brian May then charged in with the blistering opening riff of, as expected, Hammer To Fall. Queen’s third song was then their newest single. An acknowledged Queen classic today, the hard-rocking Hammer To Fall was a ballsy inclusion in 1985 because it was the single they were then actively promoting. But Queen being Queen, they wouldn’t miss the opportunity.

Shameless plug for their new song or not, Hammer To Fall’s roaring guitar tones kept the tempo way up for the middle of the set. As the audience in the stadium had already participated in Queen’s concert, Mercury next took served the audience at home. He did so by conducting a ballet of sorts with the BBC cameraman filming him on the stage for the television audience. As roughly a billion people were tuned in to the concert that day, Mercury’s up-close and personal dance with the cameraman was as close as anyone would get to joining the band live on stage. It was an act of cheeky charisma nobody but Freddie Mercury could have pulled off. Brian May then turned in Hammer To Fall’s shredding solo and the band squeezed in a short live jam before rushing headlong into the climatic conclusion.

With three songs down, Queen might have left the stage, but the unrelenting tempos meant they were only halfway through the set. For their fourth song, Mercury was handed a cream-white electric guitar, a dangerous move considering he knew exactly three chords and played the instrument with little precision. After receiving his guitar, Mercury announced, “This next song is only dedicated to beautiful people here tonight!” Lest the audience start to panic about their attractiveness, he added, “It means all of you. Thank you for coming along and making this a great occasion!”

He then moved into the first chords of Crazy Little Thing Called Love, another popular mainstay of any respectable rock radio station. By this point, the band was just showing off. For this Elvis-esque rockabilly tune, Brian May played no fewer than three guitars during the song, one for the first verse, a second for the solo and a third for outro. The song’s inclusion was a smart choice for this slot as it filled out the set with a famous cut while keeping the pace up. The studio recording isn’t even three minutes long, so the song’s inclusion gave the band an opportunity to play a third track in full. But more importantly, including this fourth song meant the band’s set morphed into a true structured concert rather than a batch of unrelated tunes.

But including a fourth song also meant Queen was pressed for time, and so they needed to bring this great occasion to close.

Along gravity and entropy, it is an immutable law of the universe that a Queen concert, no matter how short, ends with We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions. One must not be played without the other. Queen duly fulfilled this obligation by ending their set with those songs. As they were racing against the clock, the band elected only to use the first verse of We Will Rock You and the final guitar solo. This was sufficient as the audience received their opportunity to stamp their feet, clap their hands and sing the chorus, which Mercury let them do without him intervening.

After May’s abridged solo, Mercury dashed over to the piano for We Are The Champions. The performance was soaring and the audience, to quote Roger Taylor, went “bonkers in unison”. Mercury sang the song’s triumphant chorus with sublime power and staggering dynamic range. When he got to the lyric “I thank you all”, he spoke it directly to the audience, sending the charged atmosphere into overdrive.

As Mercury and the band guided the audience through the final two verses by constantly repeating the refrain “We are the champions/ WEEEE ARREEE THE CHAMMMPPIONS!” it dawned on all those present that the band were announcing their victory in the competition of “best performance of all time”. The performance ended when Mercury sang out the final line, “of the woooooorrrrrrlllldddd!”, while Taylor smashed his two splash cymbals with cheerful abandon.

One power chord later, Queen’s Live Aid slot had finished.

Perfection Is A Structure.

As I hope my literary re-enactment demonstrated, Queen’s performance was pure bliss, not only due to their extensive rehearsals but also from a combination of song selection, setlist running order, and maximised audience participation. Limited to six songs (four full and two half songs if you really think about it) and an audience that may or may not have been enthusiastic about seeing them, Queen hit a home-run every step of the way. They ensured that every person present was involved and excited.

Queen would tour with Freddie Mercury only once more after Live Aid before his untimely death in 1991. But Live Aid gave the band a morale boost so large that resulted in four more Mercury-led albums being released before mortality finally caught up him. Queen at Live Aid remains a fitting tribute to rock concert perfection and sets a standard no artist will ever match.

AAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY! OOOOOHHHH!

The Perfect Song About Anything

For Millennials and Gen Zs, the band U2 is the embodiment of uncool. They've been around for more than forty years (lame), have a frontman, Bono, who is known for being preachy during concerts (eww), and once infamously shoved their newest album down our collective throats free of charge (oh the humanity).

But though it's popular to hate on U2, fact of the matter is that they're one of the most successful bands in the world and for good reason. Their staying power is impressive, especially as they came out of an era where one-hit wonders were the norm. Weirder still, U2 have never suffered a line-up change (substitutions for illness not withstanding). Their career has had the typical peaks and troughs, but with their newest residency in Las Vegas, the concert-buying public shows no sign of losing interest in U2.

And so, I want to talk about a curious near-death experience U2 suffered thirty years ago which gave them the staying power they now enjoy. This is the story of their 1991 hit single, One.

How They Got Here

In March, 1987, U2 released The Joshua Tree, an album so successful that it received two anniversary reissues and three concert tours in as many decades. This monumental work was the steady build up of a lifetime's intense musical practice. From their 1980 debut Boy right through to The Joshua Tree, the Dublin-born U2 built up a sound and a reputation that already made them an enduring act. Serious political lyrics backed by simple, almost austere, arrangements made them a socially conscious band minus the fancy bric-a-brac normally attached to such acts (looking at you, Pink Floyd).

But The Joshua Tree's success, as is often the case with an artist's greatest work, came with serious repercussions that threatened to destroy them. The follow-up was 1988's Rattle and Hum, a bizarre album-movie combo that almost made U2 a parody of itself. Self-righteous and earnest to a fault, Rattle and Hum was by no means a failure (as U2 manager's Paul McGuinness put it, "It sold 14 million copies, it's a failure I can live with"), but it left the band artistically adrift. Their embrace of rootsy-Americana—so beautiful on The Joshua Tree but painfully cringe on the sequel album—left them all dressed up in cowboy gear with nowhere else to go. At the end of their Lovetown Tour of 1989, Bono announced they would "go away and dream it all up again."

Needing a fresh start, U2 dashed off to the one place where fresh things were happening, the newly reunited Berlin. Now devoid of its infamous wall and home to the legendary Hansa Studios, U2 believed recording in the city would be glorious. A new era in world history had begun and the band needed a new era for themselves.

But then it all went to hell.

For one thing, Germany was struggling with the logistics of reunification and optimism was never the Germans' forte. Instead of a city excited by a new future, the band faced a place where stark divisions separated a common people. Hindering them further, the so-called legendary studios were actually shite and civilized recording equipment had to be imported. The freezing cold weather also contributed to their endless misery.

And on top of all of that, the band was still artistically lost. They had no direction and couldn't think of anything exciting. Jam sessions meandered along, leaving little of inspiration in their wake. Producers Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno sensed it was going nowhere. For one dark hour, it looked like U2 was finished. Over Christmas break 1990, they returned to Dublin and held a meeting to decide if they would breakup, but they agreed to continue.

Contributing to their decision to recommit was an unfinished song from the Hansa sessions.

ONE

The unfinished song was One, just one of two tracks the band kept from their time in Berlin. For most U2 fans, hearing it for the first time was a shock.

Starting with a quiet drumstick tap, the song subtly launches into a subdued rhythm completely lacking all of U2's 1980s hallmarks. Gone are the whomping martial drums, meaty basslines, chiming guitar arpeggios, and soaring vocals of The Joshua Tree. Instead, One gently gallops along, no one instrument standing out over the others. The drums keep time, the bass locks down the rhythm, and the guitars have a weeping tone that, were the arrangement not so beautiful, could be construed as the band lacking confidence. A supporting synth-string part played by producers Eno and Lanois kept the song's mix extremely balanced.

One's unassuming melody served as the backdrop for some of the most open-ended philosophical lyrics ever found on a pop song. Immediately on the song's release, a million interpretations appeared, all somehow equally valid. People heard and saw everything from a tale of a breakup to a recriminating conversation between a son dying of AIDS and his disapproving father to Bono commenting on the relationship problems within the band. There's certainly something to that last one. Guitarist The Edge went through a divorce at that time and the turbulent sessions strained relations between everyone in the U2 organization. Berlin's dreary recording atmosphere might have also contributed to the lyrics. After all, the two Germanies, now reunited after two generations of Cold War, were very different places. They were one, but not the same.

Adding to the song's multifaceted interpretations were its three very, very different music videos.

The first video was directed by the band's long-time Dutch friend Anton Corbjin. Corbjin's video is an arthouse screwball, featuring scenes of the band back in Berlin dressed in drag and driving Trabants painted with sexually suggestive characters, all filmed on a horrible dark sepia tone. It passed muster, but just as they were about to release it, a startling thought occurred to all parties: the proceeds for the single would be going to AIDS charities. By 1991, AIDS had only just shed the misperception that it was caused by perverted licentiousness. Suddenly, a new video featuring U2 dressed in drag threatened to reopen that can of bigoted worms and the video was quickly pulled. Flailing, the band hired director Mark Pellington to put together a replacement.

Somehow, Pellington turned in an even weirder video. For one thing, the band is completely absent. Instead, images of flowers and the song's title in multiple languages languish on the screen for an agonizing 10-15 seconds at a time. Slow-motion black-and-white footage of buffaloes running across the plains is interspersed throughout these painful still shot segments. The art-deco PowerPoint presentation culminates in a photograph by the artist David Wojnarowicz depicting buffaloes falling off a cliff. Pellington's postmodern snoozer might have worked as concert background footage (a purpose it served on the band’s Zoo TV tour), but it wouldn't help promote the song where it mattered, MTV.

And so U2 tried for a third time, hiring Rattle-and-Hum director Phil Joanou to make a more straightforward video. Jaonou's cobbled-together creation featured Bono sitting in a bar with some girl looking miserable intercut with the band performing the song. Did it work? Not really, but it was better than nothing and it got the band much needed MTV airplay.

Listeners first heard One in November 1991 with the release of the completed album, Achtung Baby, which sounded even less like their 1980s style than One did. The radically different record featured hip-hop drum beats, growling guitars drenched in pedal effects and lyrics about relationships rather U2's typical blend of politics and social activism.

Not only did U2 sound different, they looked different too. For the past four years, they sported a midwestern, Americana look with lots of browns and beiges. For the new decade, Edge had glittering trousers, Bono wielded cartoonishly large sunglasses, bassist Adam Clayton looked like a renegade hip-hop star and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. looked like a Levis model demoing the new European bad-boy collection. Irony and excessiveness were the order of the day.

But even amidst all this glitz and glam, there was still the very sober One. It sounded out of place on Achtung Baby and probably sounds out of place on any U2 album.

And yet, it's arguably the most emotional song they ever wrote.

Their New Lease On Life

Following Achtung Baby, U2 went overboard with the supporting Zoo TV tour, a multimedia blitzkrieg that perfectly prefigured what the Internet would do to us fifteen years later. They completely lost the plot when they hastily recorded the follow-up album, 1993's positively weird Zooropa, whilst on the tour. Like their earlier 1980s iteration, 1990s U2 reached its absurd apex with Zooropa's follow-up, 1997's Pop. But unlike Rattle and Hum ten years earlier, Pop was a disaster.

The songs had no hook, no clear melody and no obvious way of sounding good live. The supporting Popmart tour was an equally garish monstrosity. Bewildered fans endured Popmart's enormous LED screen, a giant stage arch that looked like a cross between the McDonald's logo and a vagina, and the tour's signature 40-foot high mirrorball lemon, which split in half to reveal the band hiding inside before they pranced into their lousy encore. After Pop, U2 did another about-face and spent the 2000s perusing a safer combo of their 1980s and 1990s sounds…until that ran its course with 2009's No Line on the Horizon, a thoroughly bland record eclipsed by its superior concert tour.

U2's fourth decade, the 2010s, saw them settle into the role of live music's consistent steady-hand as the record business that supported their early career was strangled by streaming services. Few U2 records were released in the 2010s, but their concert game was as good as ever, seeing as how they held their own against younger artist like Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift in terms of sales numbers.

The past 30 years have been interesting to U2, but of one thing this writer is sure: without One, none of it would have happened.

Journey to Insanity: An Intellectual Parable

August, 1976. In the United States, the country’s bicentennial celebrations are marred by self-doubt and cultural navel-gazing. America reeled from stagflation. Worse still, the shadows of the biggest political disasters of the age, Vietnam and Watergate, destroyed a generation’s confidence in the idea of America.

Amidst all this misery, an unknown band named Klaatu released their debut album, 3:47 EST.

Enter Steve Smith, Intellectual Knave to The Court of Reason

3:47 EST was typical among debut albums of the age. It featured bold artwork of a bright yellow sun with a dopey face rising in a garden. It is colourful, psychedelic and a joy to look at, but that alone wouldn’t persuade anyone to buy it. Because Klaatu was a new group, their record label, Capitol Records, sent copies of the album to newspapers across America, hoping they’d score positive reviews and a boost in sales.

One of the newspapers to receive such a free copy was Rhode Island’s Providence Journal. Klaatu’s promising debut ended up in the paper’s “record grab”, a bin containing dozens of (now-forgotten) records free to any employee. Perhaps it would have languished there forevermore. Then, one day, it caught the eye of a journalist named Steve Smith.

Smith picked up the album and noticed upon closer inspection that the record was curiously devoid of album credits. No producer, engineer, tape operator or any musical personnel were listed. It was all credited to Klaatu. Curiosity aroused, Smith took the album home for a listen.

His ears pricked up immediately. This music was…familiar. He had no doubt that he’d heard these musicians before if not these songs. The harmonies were immaculate, the melodies intricate, and the lyrics sublime. No debut group could possibly be this talented and have that particular sound. A most ludicrous idea entered his mind, but he dismissed it quickly.

Yet as Smith sank his attention deeper into 3:47 EST , the mad, absurd, and wondrous idea that popped into his head upon hearing the first song only grew. Every second of the album reminded him of them. One song was a coincidence, but every song? Surely not.

By the time he reached the final song, all doubts had been banished from his mind. The only possible conclusion, and the scoop of his career, was plain as day: Klaatu wasn’t a band of nobodies putting out their earnest debut album. Instead, they were The Beatles, fully reunited and keeping their reunion under wraps to see if the world still loved them.

Um, What?

Smith’s conclusion seems positively mad in retrospect, but a semblance of logic existed in his reasoning. Six years earlier, in April 1970, The Beatles acrimoniously broke up. Losing The Fab Four dealt Western Civilization a blow more punishing than the fall of the Western Roman Empire. A Beatles-shaped hole, then as now, existed in our collective lives. Hopes and expectations for a reunion were stratospheric and The Beatles would be smart to keep a low profile if they recorded new music.

Now, with Klaatu’s heavenly, Beatleesque album, Steve Smith could step into the shoes of Mary Magdalene and announce the resurrection of the Liverpudlian Lords.

Crazier still, the Doubting Thomas in Smith initially found few places to probe through the miracle of a secret Beatles reunion. After all, no credits or personnel were listed besides “Klaatu” and the lyrics had themes of “rebirth.” Furthermore, the album artwork prominently featured a rising sun, and which band had that sublime song entitled Here Comes The Sun? Hell, the rest of the psychedelic garden artwork bore a passing resemblance to the background of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band.

Still, a mere evocation of The Beatles wouldn’t silence the doubters. Smith needed real proof and so he duly phoned up Capitol Records. It should be noted that Capitol was the very same label responsible for releasing The Beatles’ North American albums. Capitol swiftly shot down his request for an interview or further information. Klaatu were a “mystery group” (quotes in the original) who wanted to be known for their music and not their personalities.

Smith, unsurprisingly, was taken aback. What new band would refuse the opportunity to do free press? And then there was the use of that particular word, “mystery.” After all, The Beatles used the exact same word on an album sonically similar to 3:47 EST, Magical Mystery Tour. All he got from Capitol was that the name Klaatu was a reference to the 1951 movie, The Day The Earth Stood Still, a film recently referenced by none other than Ringo Starr on a solo album.

But like any good journalist, Smith kept probing, eventually reaching a man named Frank Davies, who called himself “Klaatu’s sort of manager”, whatever the hell that meant. Davies did not give Smith the names of any band members nor did he emphatically confirm or deny that it was The Beatles.

With nowhere else to turn, Smith finally published an article in February, 1977, entitled Could Klaatu be Beatles? Mystery is a Magical Mystery Tour, the full text of which can be read here.

Reading this article is like reading the demented ravings of an unhinged lunatic. Here is a certifiable excerpt where Smith outlined his “evidence” that The Beatles were cryptically announcing their reunion.

Looking up many words from the lyrics, I discovered they concerned secrecy, underground, renewal and revival. A song on the album, Bodsworth Rugglesby III is misspelled on the back of the album cover so that it says Rubblesby. Defining bods, worth, rubbles, and by, Bodsworth Rubblesby could mean: persons of importance born of quarrying…The Beatles were first known as the Quarrymen. In Sub Rosa Subway there is mention of, first, New York City and then, Washington. The Beatles first arrived in the United States in New York City and played the Ed Sullivan Show and Carnegie Hall, then they played the Washington Coliseum. The whole album is about magic, mystery and touring, and true Beatles freaks know that Magical Mystery Tour was the only album the Beatles considered a failure. Could Klaatu be their answer to that?

I won’t answer the slanderous charge that Magical Mystery Tour, an album with the unrivalled tunes Strawberry Fields Forever, Penny Lane, and All You Need Is Love, is a Beatles failure nor entertain his torturous reasoning about The Quarrymen nor will I go into the idea that The Beatles were so far up their own arses that they came out the other end with a song unironically about themselves.

But the rest of world swallowed Smith’s gilded shit and the rumours of a Beatles reunion spread like wildfire. For a few months in the spring of 1977, songs from the album received extensive airplay as Beatles fans studiously decoded the clues that Scouse Jesus had returned. Klaatu themselves, ever publicity-shy, ignored the rumours and continued recording their follow-up album…in London.

But just as Klaatu basked in the glory of free publicity, cracks in Steve Smith’s hopeful theory appeared. In fairness to Smith, he indicated in his mad article that he might’ve been wrong about the whole ‘Klaatu is Beatles’ hypothesis. Other publications cast further doubt, with one memorable British headline reading “Deaf Idiot Journalist Starts Beatle Rumour.”

At long last, the terrible truth came out, courtesy of a man named Dwight Douglas. As program director for a Washington D.C. radio station, Douglas took it upon himself to see who really made this album. Unlike Capitol Records, who were more than happy to be shit-stirrers by stonewalling nosy inquisitors, the U.S. Copyright Office required musicians to disclose their names if they wanted copyright protection.

Upon visiting the Copyright Office, Douglas discovered the copyright holders of 3:47 EST to be John Woloschuk, Terry Draper, and Dee Long of Toronto, Canada.

All hopes of a Beatles reunion were dashed.

So What?

When I first heard this story, courtesy of this YouTube video, it struck me as a parable for our times.

For one thing, it’s a story about people’s ability to believe whatever they want based on absolutely nothing or even less. Steve Smith cobbled together his conclusion based on a few curious passing references while studiously ignoring all the datapoints contradicting his conclusion (such as the fact he talked to Capitol Records Canada and that The Beatles never recorded in Canada). In the world of bad logical reasoning, Smith’s error is known as The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, named after the guy from Texas who fired his gun at the side of a barn and then drew targets around the random bullet holes to show what a good shot he was. People swallowed Smith’s theory because they desperately wanted to believe that The Beatles were back and so found hope wherever they could. Those who want something badly enough will believe absurdities to boot it into reality.

For another thing, it’s a story about epic brand mismanagement. By allowing themselves to be compared to rock’s messiahs, Klaatu’s trio of frostbitten hose-heads destroyed their promising career. By not doing press, by not publicly touring, and by not creating a brand for themselves, Klaatu allowed other people to write their story. Their reasoning, that they genuinely were curious about what the world thought of their music, was ludicrous and deserves our opprobrium. Without market demand or playing their music in front of the right people, nobody would even think to find them. When the truth came out, the backlash against Klaatu was severe and rightly so. Proof that Klaatu were justly punished for their poor marketing came when their record label dropped them three years later due to low sales.

As for The Beatles, reunion plans were obliterated with the murder of John Lennon in December, 1980. Three posthumous Beatles songs emerged in the years after his death, all poignant reminders of society’s irreparable loss. Whether or not they would have actually reunited had Lennon lived is still fiercely debated. But had it happened, I think we can all agree they wouldn’t have made the album under an alias while eating donuts and moose-meat in Canada.

An Extremely Advanced Book Buying Tip

Much of my advice about book-buying consists of simple rules to guide you along the store shelves. For example, "ignore current affairs books" as they're easily out of date and subject to presentism; "give books of historical interest more weight as their longevity is a quality-assurance filter"; and "read your favourites", pretty self-explanatory.

However some rules can only come about from extensive reading and encountering a few weird animals along the way. One such animal is a particular kind of book, usually non-fiction, that involve a dirty trick on the part of the publisher.

Since these books do not have a name, I'll give them a name: "the bait-and-switch title books".

What the hell are you talking about?

Fair question, so I will illustrate this example with a story. The week the Queen died, I was graduating from a London university. My father came over to the UK watch my graduation ceremony. As a big military history fan, one must-visit for my father was the Imperial War Museum. A visit was duly planned and we encountered several off-duty soldiers killing time before they prepared to haul the Queen's coffin around the capital.

We also encountered a wide-range of British military history literature in the gift shop. One of the books on display was entitled 1914-1918: The History of The First World War. This book was, obviously, a book about World War I. I knew little about the war then and was keen to expand my knowledge. I believed this to be a solid first choice because not only was it single volume, it was also a Penguin Orange Spine book.

For my non-British readers, the UK-arm of Penguin does an amazing job branding its "serious" non-fiction titles by giving them a sleek orange spine. Perennial bestsellers like Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and all of Malcolm Gladwell’s books are Orange Spine books. Orange Spine books are renowned for their quality and I thought 1914-1918 would fall into that category.

However when I started reading book, I was severely disappointed. It was vague, failed several comprehensibility tests, jumped from topic to topic without warning and was incoherent for a good deal of the first half. I failed to finish it.

So what went wrong with 1914-1918?

The answer was located in an unexpected place. On the copyright page, found at the beginning of every book, I noticed something peculiar about the book's publication history. It stated the book was first published in the US as "Cataclysm: the First World War as Political Tragedy". It was completely different from the UK edition.

I was shocked and then extremely irritated because I believed the publisher crossed a line.

The Rubicon

For those unfamiliar, books are never, ever released as the same product country-to-country. Publishers make their own covers and sometimes change titles to suit the local market. This often makes sense. Sometimes books will come with titles that mean one thing in one culture and absolutely nothing in an another culture. Ditto for covers: French people don't like books with garish American cowboys even if they might like the book.

But I think the publisher pulled a fast one on me with this book. The US title was much more descriptive of what the book was about and the kinds of people who the book was for. Books published in academic presses are often vague mysteries to non-academic readers because academic presses assume readers are abreast with the latest developments in that field. I doubt I would have ever picked up a book called "World War One As Political Tragedy" not because I doubted the author's credentials but because I knew I wasn't close to the intended audience.

But with the UK branding, suddenly this book looked like a general introduction to the conflict for someone unfamiliar.

It purported to be something else and to me. As far as I’m concerned, that's a line publishers shouldn't cross.
Tips To Prevent This From Happening To You

This has only happened to me twice and both books, coincidentally, involved World War I. I say this to stress that you going through my experience is extremely unlikely. But if you are concerned that the publisher might be up to no good, your job is simple: read the copyright page and look at the book's publication history before buying it.

If there's a title change and a pretty dramatic one at that, think twice before buying it. If the book was originally published by a different style of press (like academic or educational) then think twice before buying it. You're looking for clues that the book is anything other than what it is branded as.

Once again for the folks in the back, this is unlikely, but it’s still worth keeping in mind.

Why A Book Is The Best Gift Shop Purchase

The promise of the online travel/credit card community is “travel the world for (almost) free”. The advice and strategies on offer are simple. First you sign up for a loyalty programme and then link it to your credit card company’s travel portal. When the time is right, transfer your points to that programme and reap big rewards. It’s a bold promise indeed, and it often works. If you can get enough points, you can redeem them for first class flights/five star hotels, saving you thousands of dollars in the process.

However, there’s a few hidden costs with this arithmetic: first, you need to actually get the points. You do this by opening various credit cards and using said cards to, you know, pay for things including flights. At their heart, loyalty programmes are like a punch-card from your local coffee shop: earn enough credits for one free trip. But earning enough credits can mean spending more to get there, not less. If you’re not careful, you’ll wind up sinking more money to earn the free flight than it would cost to save up for the cash price.

But even if you’ve solved both the hotel and the airplane fee issue, that travel will still cost money in the following ways: transit, dining, and experiences. You still need to eat and it's unlikely your food is included in those point systems. And once you get to your hotel, it’s not like you’ll be experiencing everything your travel destination has to offer. The whole point of travelling to Windsor Castle is to visit Windsor Castle, which isn’t free.

However, a smart traveller will have budgeted for these items as well. But there’s one item always manages to snag tourists and sink their money every single time: the gift shop.

Where Your Money Really Goes To Waste

Take it from the guy who grew up a stone’s throw away from Orlando’s theme parks: gift shops provide some of the worst ROI on your spend you can possibly imagine. There are several reasons for this.

First, the “gifts” on offer are usually novelty items. We’re talking things like key chains, commemorative pins, hats, t-shirts and postcards. Even if they’re cheap, a lot of them are just tacky. Sometimes the items on offer are hideously expensive.

Second, and more importantly, their purpose is zilch. Ostensibly, one buys something from a gift shop to either give to friends (and who wouldn’t want a pewter bust of Queen Elizabeth’s head) or, more commonly, to remember their experiences. In the short-term, this might work. If you buy a tea-set branded with the Royal Family’s seal from the Windsor Castle gift shop, you’ll remember where you got that tea set every time you use it.

But that’s the kicker…you have to use it. In the tea set example, how often do you serve tea to your American friends who don’t understand your love of British culture (asking for a friend)? Answer: not as often as you imagine.

Most items on offer at gift shops are even worse. Hats and t-shirts become useless the moment you grow out of the size you purchased or the article of clothing gets worn out from overuse.

So clearly you should save your money whilst travelling and never buy anything at a gift shop, even if the museum or historical site relies on those funds to stay open.

That’s Cruel; Is There A Better Way?

Yes, there’s a better way to spend money at a gift shop. Of all the items you can purchase, there are two that count for anything. The first is a framed photo of you at that location taken by a professional. Put your iPhone away and let the pros do it. For instance, at the Platform 9 3/4 photo spot at London King’s Cross, you pay for your photo to be taken with a Harry Potter scarf before going to the gift shop next store to get it printed in a special frame.

This is a good purchase as photos decorate a home for a lifetime.

But if photos aren’t an option, there’s usually an item on offer that’s even better: books.

If you were surprised by that answer, then welcome to my blog, and I hope you enjoy your first blog post. It’s no secret that I’m a book fanatic, which is required if you aspire to write anything with any kind of quality. But even if you’re not a writer, a book purchased from a gift shop will give you the most value.

How so?

You Take The Tour Guide Home With You

As a proud member of an esteemed art gallery and frequent visitor of museums and other historical sites, one of the problems that comes with visiting such cool locations is giving the visitor context. Not every visitor arrives at Windsor Castle knowing what it is, its history or why the Royal Family loves it so much. This is perfectly understandable. To rectify this issue, you are provided with an audio guide attached to a modified iPhone. It makes your experience nicer, but then, once you go home, you forget what the guide said.

The only way to prevent that issue whilst on site is to pay for a tour guide who you can only hope is memorable and exciting. But that’s not a given either. So what are you left with?

Answer: a book about the site or a related topic on offer in the gift shop plus a postcard to serve as that book’s bespoke bookmark.

If you really want to remember your experience after you get home, take the information home with you. In other words, don’t buy a book about Winston Churchill from your local bookstore, buy it from the National Trust’s gift shop at Chartwell, Churchill’s home for much of his life. Don’t buy a book about Walt Disney from your local book store, buy it from the Magic Kingdom’s Disney Store. Don’t buy a book about Thomas Jefferson at your local book store, buy a copy at Monticello. Insert your own interests and you’ll see how it works.

Naturally this approach will skew you towards history books, travel guides, and certain books about the natural sciences rather than any kind of fiction. Then again, most famous tourist attractions are famous because of their storied history. Why else would you go to the Berlin Wall’s museum if you weren’t at least curious about what happened there in the past?

The key thing when buying a book in the gift shop is to purchase something inextricably linked with that place rather than something only vaguely related. During my visit to Chartwell, I noticed they had not only biographies of Churchill but also books about his influence over politics today. Those books are a step too far removed from the point of visiting Chartwell for me to care. Nevertheless, you can be reasonably confident that the books on offer at a gift shop only concern the experience you had just paid for.

What distinguishes a gift shop book from the other items on offer is its long-term value. You can read a book several times and learn more than you could when you were on your trip in the process. Furthermore, the book will enrich your experience when you return home. Questions you couldn’t ask your tour guide will be answered. And best of all: books are cheap. Because the books are ordered from the publisher, the price is often the same as it would be if you bought it in a retail chain. This usually to the tune of 20 dollars, 35 if it’s a hardback.

The ROI is much, much better than a t-shirt that might not even fit you.

But What If I Hate Reading?

To that unholy person, I say this: your like or dislike of reading is entirely attached to your interests in a subject. Take it from a reading enthusiast: some books are slow because they’re boring. It’s okay to find stuff you don’t like boring and hard to read; I do too. You’ll procrastinate because your mind subconsciously knows it’s not worth your time and you should put that book down immediately.

However, if you hate reading, but paid for a plane ticket, a hotel room (with or without points), and a ticket to an attraction before reaching that gift shop, I’m wagering you’re already interested in books purely about that thing.

Talking about people’s drive and motivation to do anything when their interests are activated borders on magic. People who hate reading but will binge-watch a twelve Netflix documentary about The Battle of Britain can be persuaded to pick up a book about The Battle of Britain. Books that are aligned with your interest, even if you’re a reluctant reader, will be riveting anyway.

Conclusion

Next time you’re in a gift shop, buy a book to commemorate your amazing experience. You’ll learn more about your experience when you get home and it will inspire you to go back with a new perspective. Is there a better use for your money and/or credit card points?

Ivory Towers Cannot Fly: In Defence Of The Trashy Airport Novel.

If you’re an author of fiction, having your novel labelled an “airport novel” is a fate worse than death. Airport novels have a reputation of mediocrity, blandness, and moral depravity. Okay, maybe not that last thing, but the general consensus remains: airport novels suck.

The reasons why are numerous, and the airport novel faces an uphill reputational challenge from the get-go. For one thing, they’re often small, being required to fit in your hand luggage; every item purchased from an airport shop is one more item you must carry on your person. For another thing, the most common genres, crime and romance, are repetitive and generic.

Surely, surely there are better ways of passing your time on an airplane?

That’s the thing: No.

The Travel Problem Nobody Tells You About

Travelling, the act of getting from one place to another (completely different from what you do once you’re there), is a mixture of stress and boredom. Travelling effectively, the point of this entire section of the website, is a learned skill. It takes practice in the same way becoming a chess master takes practice. And the more you travel, the more you realise how much cognitive energy is required of you at all times.

To fly by airplane, you must get to the airport, find the right terminal, check-in, drop off your luggage, pass through airport security, find your gate, go through the boarding procedures, get your bags stowed, take-off, land, and repeat most or all of the above steps in reverse order…and that’s assuming everything goes right. Upheavals in the delicate chain of events might leave you stranded in Montreal against your will. Your margin of error is low.

Even if all goes well, you might still be sleepy from having to get up early, which will decrease your alertness. All-in-all by the time the plane actually gets in the air, you will have used up a considerable amount of cognitive energy just to get there.

The research, as outlined in Cal Newport’s Deep Work is clear: people cannot exercise unlimited concentration, and that’s not counting the distracting menace of smartphones.

And being an experienced traveller doesn’t give you extra immunity. You might still be caught off guard by a gate change or extensive delay, requiring considerable attention to rectify. The only difference is that you might face these problems in an airport lounge and you’ve got insurance courtesy of your co-branded credit card.

In this pitiful environment, the trashy airport novel steps in to save your soul (if not your literary tastes).

Where and When To Read The Trashy Novel

Your journey through the airport, however stressful, leads you to one place, your airplane seat. The moment you click your seatbelt, you’ll be facing a serious predicament: boredom. No matter what’s facing you when you land, for the next two hours minimum, you’re stuck.

If you’re lucky, your seat comes with an in-flight entertainment system. Games, movies, and fun flight maps can passively amuse you during this lull period between take-off and landing. But what if you answer no to the question “ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!?” Or worse, what if there is no in-flight entertainment system? Don’t think your phone or tablet can help you either; in airplane mode, they have no access to the Internet.

But then you remember that airport novel you bought, promising salvation from this boredom. For one thing, the novel is under your ownership, which means it can’t be shut off by an announcement from the pilot (in-flight entertainment systems are required to do so). For another thing, you don’t need to rely on the airplane’s crappy, expensive WiFi to work the book; if you’re literate, you’re good to go. Third, you don’t have to choose how you’ll use the system. Will you watch a new movie or an old favourite? The problem with a new movie is the concentration problem inherent to flying and the problem with an old movie is that the novelty’s worn off. Unless it’s your all-time favourite film, your mind will wander. The novel solves both these problems as you’ve never read it before (because you possess some self-respect) and the subject matter does not require you to concentrate that hard.

Over on the book review blog, I review and recommend high-end non-fiction books as well as serious literary books that ought to be included in a standard education. However I also recognise that reading them requires a good deal of concentration. But the issue with airplanes is that concentration is much, much harder. Not only are you cognitively blitzed from going through the airport, you’re also suffering from the pressurised air. In that environment, your ability to concentrate is slightly impaired. As such, going through Kant’s Critique Of Pure Reason is off the table.

But the bog-standard romance of the mediocre airport novel solves that problem: there are no abstruse concepts to grasp, no deeper themes the creator is trying to get across, only steamy love scenes in the back of a pickup truck. Forgetting how or why the romantic leads put a new spin on the wheelbarrow position doesn’t matter. You’re just passing the time and you don’t have to read another word once you get off the plane. The word count of these novels means you’ll have them finished on a flight lasting more than two hours, including meal service and bathroom breaks.

Once you’re safely on the ground, you can confidently return to Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals.

Conclusion

It’s easy to sneer at airport novels and their infamous reputation. Yet this much-maligned genre of books doesn’t always deserve this derogatory label. Comparing them to the smartest works of science, history and literature is an apples to oranges comparison because these books serve completely different purposes.

As a book review blogger, I strongly believe that any book someone reads is better than that person not reading at all. But in their specific environment, airport novels are superior to Darwin’s Origin of Species because they take into account, however unwittingly, the likely cognitive state of the reader. Reading is hard not because the act is tedious but because we live in a world beset by distraction, noise and interruption. In such a world, even finishing a 275 page novel about a ranch-hand and his cowgirl performing some special field plowing is a daunting task. In the airport and on an airplane, such an environment is the norm. Ivory towers cannot fly, so don’t bother pretending that they can.

Embrace the smut and enjoy your flight.