Bad Beatles Renaissance

I'm in the midst of a Bad Beatles Renaissance. Last month the Beatles re-released their full canon on CD, remastered with unified packaging and Enhanced-CD Quicktime making-of docs (known in the mid 90's as CD-ROM extras... way to innovate there, fellows).

An excuse to purchase more crap from one of my favorite bands, arguably the most important musical act of all time? Well, sign me up. I fully intend to collect all 14 parts of the remastered canon, but in a fit of sensibility, I'm purchasing first the albums that I don't already own in some format. And there's a reason I don't own them.

They're not very good.

There are varying reasons for there to be crap in the Beatles' catalog: they were an incredibly experimental band and the nature of experimentation is that it often goes horribly, horribly awry. As a result, we get the unmitigated awfulness of the Magical Mystery Tour movie, but experiments can be serendipitous as well (the soundtrack of that film was an unexpected little bit of ass-kick). Other things are incredibly lame by today's standards, but are quite remarkable when looked at in their original context. Others are a matter of personal taste. And good or no, they're important.

My intention, therefore, is to go through the Beatles' releases in no particular order and talk about the things that sucked and why they sucked and why they may or may not be important anyway. I'm sure plenty of people are already talking about what was so groundbreaking about these, and I'm sure I'll have fanboy moments of that as well, but I intend to really listen and mine the suck and ignore the brilliant.

Also, I'm not going to do them in a block, just as the spirit moves me--part of this is for budgeting of time/money, part of this is me simply not wanted to get "blogged down" (haha!) for two weeks in one project while the rest of the world keeps turning. And I may have to combine albums--Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band are near-perfect, so it may take both of them for me to fill a post. Since The Beatles (aka The White Album) and Past Masters are double-albums, I might split those into two. Or I might not. We'll see how it lays. Also, I'm going to ignore the American releases (which have been previously remastered and re-released, but I don't care--the music is all covered elsewhere, and it's not like the Beatles like their Americanized albums all that much).

And I'm thinking I'm going to have to start at the beginning, with their first ever album in the UK: Please Please Me.

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