The Beatles Are Still Charting the Future of Pop. It Looks Bleak.

Discovered: Dec 3, 2023. 21:54 The Beatles Are Still Charting the Future of Pop. It Looks Bleak. - The New York Times <— eerily inert is what i see when is see “AI” generated images. “Eerily Inert LLM content” is my next indie band :-) –> QUOTE:I’ve seen numerous people describe how genuinely moved they were by listening to “Now and Then.” I believe them. And the experience of communing with lost friends and collaborators was obviously an especially meaningful one for McCartney. For me, though, the song is eerily inert. Lennon’s original shoddy demo, long available online, is, by contrast, movingly alive, not despite but because of its incompleteness. The recording generates an aura of possibility that fits with the song’s themes: all that might have been, the power of what endures over time, even as so much else erodes. It reminds me of the Beatles without sounding like the Beatles — and why should it, when Lennon didn’t write it for them? The new “Now and Then,” for which some of Lennon’s original lyrics were cut and others rearranged, doesn’t entirely sound like the Beatles either, no matter how much it wants to. The image that formed in my mind as I listened and relistened was that of a spotless, echoey mausoleum, built from shiny gray marble and haunted by garbled digital cries that sound like people I once knew, trying to connect across impossible distances.