On frozen perceptions.

Have you played Beatles RockBand? (What? You can't write a dissertation sixteen hours a day.) If you have, you know that certain "accomplishments" -- primarily earning three or five stars on individual songs -- win you certain rewards -- mostly photographs of the Beatles. These reward photographs are meant to be apt to the accomplishment you earn them for, and they come with a few lines of text to explain how. One of the photographs earned for "Getting Better" gets you an anecdote with a moral: the story that while Paul was the main songwriter, John decided on his own to reply to Paul's "Got to admit it's getting better" with a harmony part of "Can't get much worse." Supposedly, Paul loved the way John's "cynical side" and "dark humor" served as a counterpart to his own sunnier personality, and often cited the anecdote as an exemplary instance of their song-writing partnership.

However, it's total nonsense.

Not that that didn't happen; I expect it did; harmonizers, like people playing any part in a rock band, often have a great deal of leeway with their parts. (The notable exception being, of course, anyone working with Brian Wilson, who wanted to be an auteur composing "pocket symphonies," and who also was an exceptionally talented songwriter working with less ambitious popsters. His vision led him to choreograph every sound he was responsible for, to the point that the Beach Boys apparently spent six months in the studio recording "Good Vibrations." Understandably, most harmonizers prefer getting to sing whatever they want to sing.) So probably John heard Paul singing "Got to admit it's getting better" and responded more or less spontaneously with "Can't get much worse."

But look, "Getting Better" is not a happy song. The lyrics "I used to be cruel to my woman/ I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved/ Man, I was mean, but I'm changing my scene/ And I'm doing the best that I can" are not sunny lyrics. What I'm saying is, of course Paul loved John's addition. It brought out exactly what Paul intended for the song.

Why does this matter? Well, really, it doesn't. But I never cease to be amazed at the way people read the then-future back into the past. After the Beatles broke up, John became a "serious" person: a political activist, a performance artist, someone whose devotion to his wife sort of scared people -- and a murder victim. His hits had lyrics hoping for "nothing to kill or die for" and "giv[ing] peace a chance." Paul retained the pop star persona and failed to scare anyone with his devotion to his non-threatening wife or their activism in behalf of animal rights. His hits had lyrics about liking silly love songs and included a James Bond theme tune.

So people remember them that way as the Beatles, too. "Helter Skelter" is taken to be somehow less "typical" of Paul than, I don't know, "Here, There, and Everywhere." Because "Here, There, and Everywhere" sounds more like "Maybe I'm Amazed" and "Yesterday." So they miss that Paul rocked the hardest of the Beatles and sang the shoutiest.* They forget that he wrote funny ("Back in the USSR," "Martha My Dear," "Honey Pie," "Get Back," "Maxwell's Silver Hammer") and also terribly emotional songs ("I've Just Seen a Face," "For No One," "I Will," "Golden Slumbers," the exquisite and never-commercially-released-by-the-Beatles "Goodbye"). And they forget that John wrote tripe like "Mr. Moonlight," the Beatles' worst song by a very large margin. (Granted, "The Long and Winding Road" is pretty unlistenable too, album version at any rate, and that's Paul.) And trivialities like "Ask Me Why." Also maybe they forget that "Imagine" is in fact a terrible song, and so are most of his other post-Beatles songs. (That one track on which George and Ringo join him and the lyrics are all about how spiteful he feels towards Paul sometimes, I remember enjoying.)

Anyway, my point isn't that John Lennon was not a great songwriter. He wrote some of the Beatles' absolute greatest songs, that is, some of the greatest Anglo-American popular music of the twentieth century: "She Loves You," "In My Life," "I'm So Tired." My point isn't that he wasn't a witty guy with a sardonic streak. Anyone who's seen "A Hard Day's Night" knows that Paul projected the least strong personality of the boys. (They say he was supposed to have an independent scene, too, but it got cut for lack of excitement. Contrast George's brilliant turn discombobulating a television executive who fancies himself an expert on hip, John's sparkling nonsense conversation with a woman who thinks she recognizes him, and of course Ringo's soulful solo adventure. Paul comes across as the leader of the group, in a Leonardo-from-"Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtles" way: he's the one who worries for them.) And of course it's not wrong to note Paul's interest in music hall songs and that influence on e.g. "Your Mother Should Know." And sometimes when Paul tried to write emotional, serious stuff, it went wrong, either salvageably or not so. It's just strange to me that people insist on reading so much back into the music. Perhaps because I discovered the Beatles through my parents' old LPs rather than the radio or "The Ed Sullivan Show," and was born after Lennon's murder, I am missing the way it really looked at the time. But I don't think so. I think the people who were there then were also there later, and later always has a way of seeping back into then.

I see the same sorts of things in ancient and early modern philosophy all the time, but that's an impassioned rant for another day, and a different hang-up.


* No, "Twist and Shout" is not as shouty as "Helter Skelter" or "Birthday." I don't even think it's as shouty as "Got To Get You into My Life." It might be shoutier than "Wild Honey Pie" (otherwise distinguished mainly as the only Beatles song one can imagine the Pixies covering) and "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?," though.