Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introducing the Beatles
- Part I Background
- Part II Works
- Part III History and influence
- 11 The Beatles as zeitgeist
- 12 Beatles news: product line extensions and the rock canon
- 13 “An abstraction, like Christmas”: the Beatles for sale and for keeps
- Notes
- Beatles discography, 1962–1970
- Select bibliography
- Index
13 - “An abstraction, like Christmas”: the Beatles for sale and for keeps
from Part III - History and influence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Introducing the Beatles
- Part I Background
- Part II Works
- Part III History and influence
- 11 The Beatles as zeitgeist
- 12 Beatles news: product line extensions and the rock canon
- 13 “An abstraction, like Christmas”: the Beatles for sale and for keeps
- Notes
- Beatles discography, 1962–1970
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
When, in a generation or so, a radio-active, cigar-smoking child, picnicking on Saturn, asks you what the Beatle affair was all about – Did you actually know them? – don’t try to explain all about the long hair and the screams! Just play the child a few tracks from this album and he’ll probably understand what it was all about. The kids of ad 2000 will draw from the music much the same sense of well being and warmth as we do today.
derek taylorBeatles press officer Derek Taylor got some things wrong in his 1964 liner notes for Beatles for Sale. Certainly he was off with the Saturn bit, and the claim with which he closed – Beatles for Sale “is the best album yet” – missed the mark by 180 degrees, at least if you accept the critical consensus that sees the band's fourth LP as a cover-filled rush job, the exhausted gasp that pretty much had to follow the ecstatic peak of A Hard Day's Night.
But Taylor was on to something about AD 2000. On November 13 of that year, Apple Corps released 1, a CD collecting twenty-seven chart-topping Beatles singles which, in its first week, sold 3.6 million copies, a sales pace that held up for weeks, such that 1 became the year's biggest-selling album and the top seller “in 30 countries.” In the same month, ABC television broadcast a two-hour documentary, Beatles Revolution, which featured luminaries such as Salman Rushdie, J. K. Rowling, Al Green, and President Bill Clinton attesting not just to the Beatles' tunefulness but to their transformative impact on world culture. The month before had seen the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum unveil a huge exhibit entitled Lennon: His Life and Work, an installation designed to showcase its late subject as both multimedia artist and world-historical individual. Late fall was also rollout time for the print edition of the Beatles Anthology, the last phase of a documentary project which first went public (in televisual and audio form) in November 1995.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles , pp. 230 - 254Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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