I am forced to conclude that another 400-page treatise on Paul McCartney meeting Bob Dylan is the only thing standing between us and total cultural barbarism. But we must demand more from our pop-music hagiographies.
It is a truth universally acknowledged by a certain generation of men in corduroy jackets that the entire trajectory of human consciousness was fundamentally altered in a mid-sized hotel room in August of 1964; a premise so deeply woven into the fabric of our cultural inheritance that to question it is to invite ruin. Jim Windolf’s newest offering, Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other—And the World, bravely retreads this utterly exhausted territory, insisting with the fervor of a medieval scholastic that rock and roll’s transition from disposable teenage commerce into high, unassailable art is a subject requiring yet another sprawling historical treatise. One cannot help but be reminded of the time my own mother, functioning as a sort of domestic Cassandra, warned me that playing Neil Young at an ear-splitting volume would permanently damage my hearing, a prophecy that proved just as painfully accurate as Windolf’s assertion that we must, collectively, continue to litigate the artistic merit of four men from Liverpool until the sun ultimately expands and swallows the earth.
The problem with Windolf’s chatty, populist methodology is not that he is wrong about the seismic cross-pollination between Dylan’s impenetrable, amphetamine-soaked poetry and McCartney’s relentless, agonizing cheerfulness; rather, it is that he fails to recognize the broader phenomenological crisis at play. To truly understand the synthesis of the acoustic folk tradition with British invasion pop, one must naturally look first to the hermeneutic despair of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, before cross-referencing it with the structural rigidity of the 1903 Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog, and finally—though I suspect I must explain this connection to a readership largely unfamiliar with true suffering—the tragic, inescapable cyclicality of the animated television program Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!. Windolf simply lacks the intellectual courage to admit that when John Lennon first heard Blowin' in the Wind, he was experiencing the exact same epistemological rupture as Dante standing before the gates of Dis, albeit with a significantly worse haircut.
Instead, we are treated to a pedestrian recounting of the time Dylan introduced the Beatles to marijuana, an event Windolf treats with the same breathless, world-historical gravity one usually reserves for the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia. We are asked to marvel at the sheer, miraculous contingency of these singular geniuses sharing oxygen, as if the concept of artists influencing one another was freshly birthed in a New York City suite, wholly untethered from the long, agonizing march of Western civilization. The electric guitar, that crude, blunt instrument of mid-century commerce, is elevated in these pages to the status of a holy relic, completely ignoring the reality that a teenager clumsily approximating a pentatonic scale is not, in fact, engaged in a dialectic with the absolute, but is merely trying to avoid doing their mathematics homework.
It is frankly exhausting to watch these authors continue to treat a minor shift in the Billboard Top 40 as though it were the storming of the Bastille, but we must publish them anyway lest the baby boomers realize they were just listening to pop music.
Ultimately, Windolf’s project succeeds precisely because it fails, serving as a magnificent monument to our desperate need to imbue the disposable artifacts of late-stage capitalism with the weight of eternal truth. If we cannot convince ourselves that McCartney realizing songs could last longer than two minutes was a paradigm-shifting leap in human evolution on par with the discovery of penicillin, we might be forced to reckon with the terrifying void at the center of our own existence. I, for one, applaud the effort; it is infinitely preferable to read another four hundred pages about Bob Dylan’s lyrical phrasing than to spend even five minutes sitting quietly in a room, confronting the horrifying realization that rock and roll was never anything more than a moderately effective way to drown out one’s mother.