1 June 2009: "Have yall heard of the popular video game band ‘The Beatles’?"

This post is about the death of Paul McCartney. One of the signs of the fading 1960s dream was the wide circulation given to conspiracy theories about Paul McCartney's death in the wake of the artistic left turn the Beatles made with the confused concept album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The heedless optimism of the "summer of love" generated its own undertow of paranoid reaction, which found expression in perversely gleeful accounts of the death of one of the most conspicuous proponents of that youthful spirit.

We are still haunted by the ghosts of 1968. The revolutionary ideals remain with us, even if that generation of rebels sold them out. That is why the wound still feels fresh when, as Carles points out, the Beatles license their music to the production of stupefying entertainments such as the video game Rock Band. Carles description is aptly sardonic: "I saw a group of bros with the door open ‘having a great time’ playing original music. But then I realized they weren’t actually creating the music themselves, it was actually a ’sweet ass game’ where u pressed buttons along with a kewl guitar rock song." In this "sweet ass game," participants simulate the creative freedom of music making but experience it as unfreedom, in which a machine keeps score of how well the humans can emulate the machine's marching orders.

Perhaps consenting to have heir music included in such a clear manifestation of the exhaustion of postmodern society is the Beatles revenge on their audience for the pressures they experienced as the culture industry's primary exponent, when the demands that they produce pabluum subverted their own clearly revolutionary instincts. Accordingly, Carles defends his parents' appreciation of the Beatles, regarding it as emblematic of the upbringing he received, the moral and philosophical education which still resounds in his writings. But he recognizes that their generation failed to follow through on the conditions that made an overthrow of consumer capitalism ripe:

Maybe this is why our parents loved the Beatles so much. Maybe they knew that their songs would last 4ever, eventually ending up in some ’sweet ass’ video game that ‘doesn’t promote musicianship’, ‘the spirit of music’, but primarily highlights the fact that bands are ‘brands’ which ‘create art’ that can be protected and licensed out whenever u need some more money.

The failure to seize the opportunity presented by 1968 led directly to the hegemony of brands, the triumph of a surfeit of consumer goods sweetly stifling dissent. Why don't we do it in the road?

Carles contends that John Lennon, were he not assassinated, would have prevented this project. But there is a sense that Lennon's murder makes the continued confusion over Paul McCartney's living death more salient. Have the Beatles now purposely restaged the "Paul is Dead" controversy, by allowing any random person to simulate him in an ersatz Beatles? Is the licensing deal actually an intricate way of disassociating their radical legacy from the degenerate and reactionary uses to which their music is put in these disaffected times, passing the blame onto some other band made up of what are in effect simulations of the band's original members -- precisely in the fashion that people who play the video game Rock Band supplant them? Is this the Beatles way of disaowing responsibility both for the spirit of the 1960s and its disillusioning dissolution? Carles asks the key question: "Do yall think that Sir Paul McCartney is ‘rolling around in his grave’?"

The implications are crystal clear: When we believe Paul was dead, we become both his killer and his replacement. His actual ontological status, it goes without saying, is irrelevant.