Push The Button

The Beatles won't go away. Try as we might, we can't forget them. Their music continues to find its way into the ever-increasing flood of pop music, mixing and twisting and turning and then finding its way to the top. Consider the event that was made of the Fab Four's catalog being made available to streaming services over Christmas this year. It wasn't an also mentioned article in Rolling Stone, but a featured piece in the Wall Street Journal. You can now listen to "She Loves You" on your iPhone. Not that you couldn't before, but you had to buy the song from iTunes and then store it on your mobile device to be able to hear all those songs from fifty years ago.
I have the same whiny gripe with the Beatles that I do with Star Wars. I bought the original trilogy on VHS when they first became available. Then there was the re-managed vision that had Han shooting second and other digital enhancements. I bought those too. When my wife and I were given a Laserdisc player for a wedding present, I purchased another round of Skywalker. Then came the prequels, and my son's fascination with all things Clone. We have a six pack of DVDs that tell the story of Anakin and his troubles growing up on the dark side. Over the holidays, as we waited in line to see the awakening of the Force, there was renewed discussion about getting the whole batch on Blu-Ray. This is when I noticed the sign in our local Best Buy suggesting that we reserve our digital copy of Star Wars 7 today. Why bother having another disc? Just pay for the right to push a button and have all that galactic fun come pouring into our living room or laptop or phone. Here it comes: the future.
The future where I find myself wondering why I would care that the Beatles' catalog is now available for that same cloud-based experience? My brother gave me my first Beatles record when he was buying a replacement for the one he had all but worn out: the one he was giving me. That didn't matter. All those crackles and pops became as recognizable as the harmonies and the guitar licks. Eventually I amassed my own library of the lads' albums. I lugged them from home to dorm to apartment after apartment, eventually landing in California along with the rest of the vinyl I had brought along. By that time, I had begun to replace those LPs with CDs. Compact though these discs were, they still took up a great deal of space on shelves and later drawers of our fancy filing system. It was real estate. The twelve studio albums don't exactly compare to artists whose careers extended on and on into the seventies, eighties, and beyond. I have some of those, too.
Only now, I don't need to. I could just push that button and have streaming Beatles. No more lugging around crates of vinyls or drawers full of CDs. I don't even have to give up hard drive space on my computer to store the collective works of John, Paul, George and Ringo. They're out there. Somewhere. In a fluorescent rainbow cloud. Everywhere. Which brings me back to that Wall Street Journal article. This wasn't music news. It was business. One of the hallmarks of Beatlemania has always been the way they have managed their music and careers. From Brian Epstein to Apple Corps to Michael Jackson to Sony, the way this sacred music has moved from their minds to your speakers has always been an art unto itself. Mick Jagger only wishes he had that kind of impact with a dozen of their studio releases. The Who, or "Who's Left," are going on tour this spring to celebrate their fiftieth year as a band to remind us of how great they always have been. The Beatles? You just have to push the button.