I Don’t Like the World That’s Hearing the New Beatles Song.
By Jimmy Magahern | November 3, 2023
In 1964 I was 7 years old, testing out the new Mattel V-RROOM! Hot Rodder Engine my dad had helped me attach to my bicycle to make my Schwinn sound like a Harley — or at least a tinny chainsaw.
“New spokescards?” called out my puzzled cousin as I passed by her house.
“Nah, got something new!” I hollered over the racket.
“You got Something New by the Beatles?” my cousin joked, aware that we were all waiting anxiously for the first kid on the block to get the U.S. follow-up album to A Hard Day’s Night, released just one month prior that summer.
Back then, every new Beatles album or single was an event, from each orange-and-yellow swirled Capital 45 we waited to see hit the shelves at Woolworth’s to the worldwide satellite broadcast of “All You Need Is Love.”
This week, on the day “Now and Then,” the long-awaited single billed on social media as “The Last Beatles Song,” dropped on all the streaming services, I called out to that cousin again. This time on Facebook, tagging her, her brothers and my sister in an early photo of us all playing in a makeshift marching band in our driveway.
“Here’s something I haven’t been able to ask my old gang in a while,” I wrote. “Hey guys, have you heard the new Beatles song yet?”
There were replies to the photo, but none on the song. Finally my sister chimed in from Florida, gently reminding me that every sixtysomething I’d tagged in that photo — except me — has pretty much moved on from Beatlemania. “As far as the Beatles new song, I knew nothing about it till your post,” she wrote. “I listened to half of it and wasn’t really impressed. But then again, I haven’t listened to any Beatles song in a long, long time.”
Today handfuls of my fellow diehard Beatlemaniacs — some in the media, some just posting personal “reaction videos” on YouTube — have been weighing in on what they think of the song, first recorded as a demo in the late 1970s by John Lennon and finally completed this year by surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, using guitar tracks of George Harrison from the initial attempt to finish the song in the 90s. Gratifyingly, it’s doing well, debuting at № 37 on Billboard’s Rock & Alternative Airplay chart the day after its release.
But this isn’t a review of the song. For the record, I like it. A lot.
But I don’t like the world that’s hearing it.
“Now and Then” arrives before a fragmented music audience, where a banner for the single shares space on Apple Music a scroll away from one for Megan Thee Stallion and the debut solo single from BTS member Jung Kook. It’s impossible today to stage another “All You Need Is Love” moment. Maybe Taylor Swift fans got a taste of it when “The Eras Tour” movie hit AMC Theaters a couple weeks back. I don’t know. I was tweeting with other Rolling Stones fans I’d never met about the new “Hackney Diamonds” LP (also doing well on Billboard — thank the devil).
After listening to the song, alone, on the best smartspeaker in the house, I inevitably felt sad. That one last unexpected rush of finally hearing a new Beatles record was over, in a quick 4 minutes and 8 seconds. Instead of heading to the playground to talk about it with my friends, I took to Twitter, where the most engaging conversation I had took place over a few 140-character posts with a McCartney fan in Brazil.
In the end, it felt like a crushingly solitary experience. I didn’t even talk about the record later with my mate, whom I felt had already endured enough of my Beatles fanaticism when I broke the coffee table sitting as close to the TV as possible to take in all 8 hours of 2021’s Get Back docuseries. I donned my 40-year-old John Lennon t-shirt to run a few errands, and smiled when I got one nod of recognition from a woman around my age in Walgreens.
This morning, at 6 am PST, the video for the song, by Lord of the Rings and Get Back filmmaker Peter Jackson, debuted on The Beatles’ official YouTube channel. It didn’t go overlooked, quickly notching up over 3 million views by noon. But the amazingly archived video, pairing up footage of Lennon and Harrison from the 60s with McCartney and Ringo in their 80s — often in the same frame — felt oddly too fitting with the times, like one more online demonstration of the latest AI trickery, or a Facebook ad touting software that can magically animate old family photos.
The video closed, emotionally, with vintage photos of the band blending into old images of Beatlemaniacs drowning out our heroes at Shea Stadium and other earth-shattering appearances, while the digitally reunited voices of John, Paul, George and Ringo sang, “And if I make it through, it’s all because of you.”
Because of us, this song has made it through the din of all the other fleeting pop culture blips this week, from the latest Taylor and Travis sighting to Olivia Rodrigo’s newest iPhone ad. But there’s fewer and fewer of us left.
Jimmy Magahern, https://jimmymagahern.pressfolios.com/
