From: dmaclaug@agsm.ucla.edu (saki)
Subject: Re: Youth vs. profundity
Organization: UCLA, Anderson Graduate School Of Management
Date: 29 Jul 92 18:33:26 PDT

In article <1992Jul28.095506.9682@waikato.ac.nz> deryl@waikato.ac.nz writes:
>Here's a thought that often occurs to me, now that I'm old... do you
>ever feel strange about how seriously we take the music and pronouncements
>of the Beatles when they were mere slips of lads in their early 20s ? It
>often seems to me that people I actually know of that age seem quite young
>(to an ancient 27 yr old like me...), and yet the lads seemed so
>profound!

Does logic proclaim that the young can't be profound? :-)

There's no logic to Beatlemania...never has been. Maybe that's partly
what's made it so long-lasting, so transcendent. But when has it ever
been that art speaks to the logical mind before it hits the soul? You 
stand before a painting and you know almost instantly whether you like 
it, whether it awakens something inside you...and you know this, more
miraculously, before you can cogitate over its Deeper Meaning. Before
you can figure out if you *ought* to like a work because it was created
by a Great Artist, you already know on an intuitive level whether or not
it moves you.  That's what matters at the most basic level. Whether or
not there's an art critic standing by your side, you know by that visceral
punch that you're in the presence of something truly profound.

The worst type of profundity is manufactured; and often this results in
high tragedy. A work that was once exciting is taught to schoolchildren
by rote, stripped of its passion and beauty. High school students don't
know how to look at Shakespeare and see the power of the language; they'll
never learn in the classroom how to read Dickens or Dostoyevsky for the
wisdom once found there. Instead students are too often fed false profundity,
predigested by beleaguered teachers who wouldn't be able to cope if their
charges erupted with the inner light of inspiration. What is profound is
dead; and the only way you'll know that it's profound is by the way you're
taught to underline the important bits; by the heavyhanded footnotes; by
the logy critiques of literary experts. 

The Fabs escaped all that. They wrote popular music for the hit parade,
and in and around that music they said and did a lot of funny things. They
made a few movies (which itself is a popular art, first and foremost),
posed for a few pictures, wrote a line or two of copy. Compare these
princes of pop to any of the old masters of music and you'll find
yourself questioning just what happened. Were they really all they
seemed? Are they worth the attention? They were just kids, after all!
How can profundity come forth from mouths so young?

Age, of course, is relative. In some cultures manhood is reached at
thirteen, not just figuratively. In some eras a twenty-year-old
was bordering upon middle age...especially if you consider that in
remote times one was lucky to live to the age of thirty-five. In the
1990's, twenty seems awfully young. Youth keeps extending its parameters.
And the wisdom of youth, as we know, is an oxymoron. :-)

Even when the Beatles were first writing their hits, they were awfully
young by today's standards. They weren't such old coots by their own,
either. A twenty-three year old man in 1940, especially in England,
had family responsibilities, likely as not---responsibilities towards 
his parents or his own children---and was facing the threat of the worst
of world wars. This changed only somewhat by 1963. One half of the
writing team of Lennon and McCartney was just such a family man, whose
future was by no means secure in the fickle world of pop music; the other
half, though charming and equiped with the ability, if not the will, to
pass his school exams, had left his future in the hands of the music
charts. Maybe this was evidence that, for them, youth was still predominant.
For them, dreams still mattered; belief in oneself was all. And it takes a
certain reliance on the child-part of one's soul, rather than the adult's,
to make such dreams happen.

The Beatles *were* young. Looking at the occasional photo from the
peak of their early success, it's sometimes possible to see a glimmer
of juvenescence, a green ingenuousness, in the shadows of their
collective visage. I have to admit that I rarely perceive it. Their public
countenance was so well schooled in the pop-idol's smile that they
rarely, even individually, let down their public facade. And there's
the added complication that, to a ten year old, a man of twenty-three
looks quite ancient indeed. :-)

And as I consider even now---in a harsher light than the idealistic
glow of the 'sixties---it's not so much that the Boys themselves were
profound. Their wit was captivating, often; their tentative political
consciousness awkward, frequently. But when we latter-day Beatlemaniacs
discuss the details of their lives, the chronology of their days, I
think we're dancing around the *actual* profundity. It's inevitable.
Not one word quoted from their own youthful mouths comes close to
the sapient symmetry of their music. The music's the heart of it.

The real profundity is in the songs they wrote and sang. Words
reflect it only analogically. The bests critics and historians
of the Beatles' work come close to describing that melodic magic,
but the visceral thrill is packed tightly and enduringly in the
figurative grooves of the vinyl---or within your musical medium
of choice. :-)

Youth doesn't prevent this. Youth, in fact, enhances it. The young
often forget that, in polite society, it's considered somewhat
indecent to love something (or someone) wholeheartedly. What you
hear in the Fabs' music is their expression of this inner passion.
It's a passion that age, in its "wisdom", is inclined to suppress.

The truly successful artist---whether on canvas, vinyl, or film---
never loses the touch of this newfledged source of profundity. It's
the youth's soul that makes it possible to put such passion on the
surface...where, if we're lucky, we'll feel its quake and accept
the resonance within our own inner depths, every time we hear one
of those agelessly youthful tunes.

--
"Modern music is, however, the groups' delight, and as if to prove the
point, John and Paul have written over 50 tunes, ballads & faster
numbers, during the last three years!"_________________________________
                                        saki (dmaclaug@agsm.ucla.edu)