Reviews for Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History

The average rating for Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-02-23 00:00:00 Peter Grossman If you're going to make the case that the Beatles were the greatest artists of the rock era, you cannot just make a musical argument; that's too subjective. Compare their work to too many other, worthy songs out there, and subject it to too many conflicting tastes'an exercise no artist could survive'and you might conclude the Beatles were "just a band that made it very, very big, that's all," as John Lennon, in an iconoclastic mood, once put it. (Although every act in his life refuted this opinion'was there ever anyone who believed in the Beatles myth more than John Lennon?) Some critics, usually with a classical background, do haul out the musical notation and try to demonstrate how the Beatles' music is more sophisticated than typical pop music; go down that path, though, and you're going to end up elevating the Carpenters over the Clash. We all know that great rock'n'roll is too instinctive and mysterious to be explained by such criteria and we rightfully tune such critics out. You have to look, instead, towards the band's incomparable position in the culture: the Beatles were not just better, or the first, they were something other. They went farther than anyone else and, from that unique place, made art that no one else was even in the position to make. The Beatles' work grappled with, and answered, questions not even put to other artists. This was not thrust on them; they made it happen. Had they never come along, no one else would have played that role; it simply wouldn't have existed. You can agree or disagree, but these are fundamentals of Beatles exceptionalism. [Brief interlude on other examples of exceptionalism: American exceptionalism, Shakespearean exceptionalism (also known as Bardolatry), human exceptionalism, Roman exceptionalism, African-American exceptionalism, all religions. On a personal note, consider me a Michael Jordan exceptionalist, which means I find the Jordan vs. Lebron debate as ludicrous as Beatles vs. Stones.] Darren McKinney, a Beatles exceptionalist if there ever was one, goes all in on the chosen-ones perspective. Neither strict music analysis nor biography, although adept in both, his book explores the Beatles' necessarily brief story as popular culture's greatest and richest myth. An intensely metaphorical writer, McKinney relays this myth through a series of symbolic connections and carefully cultivated, recurring images. The squalid early years inspire an extended toilet metaphor (read: gutter) that not only obliterates the band's clean-cut image but underlines the underground aspect that would be indispensable to their greatness. This is more than paying your dues; this is the wilderness. The infamous, rejected "butcher cover," with its sides of beef and broken dolls, is the basis for a meat metaphor that runs all through the chapter on that pivotal year 1966, with meat simultaneously representing both substance (e.g., challenging, conflicted music) and the Beatles as grotesque objects of public hunger. Everyone wanted a piece of the Beatles, from the fans who camped outside their hotels to the Bible Belters who burned their records. The book's central metaphor of circles has various meanings'from an artist's being in the zone to the danger of closed systems'but finds its fullest expression in the way the Beatles formed a community among themselves and then, rather than floating off into the aether, invited the world in'their "social greatness," according to McKinney. If it sounds like this is edging into religion, that's because it is. The book is, in part, the anatomy of a social phenomenon, and one symptom of this is the cults and counter-myths breaking off on their own like gospels, from the Paul-is-dead urban legend to the twisted White Album rationale for the Manson Family murders, wherein magic circles become holes. But it's also a love story: when McKinney notes the crossroads the Beatles encountered in the mid-60s, for example'that they would have to either "docilely serve the audience or draw it into a deeper engagement"'you can't help noticing it sounds like a romantic infatuation shifting, against all odds, to something even heavier. Above all, it is a shared dream, at turns as magical and as grotesque as real dreams. All dreams have to end; the Beatles'unlike, say, the Stones, who inhabited no such dream'could not survive the '60s. "Only history could kill the Beatles,"McKinney writes, and it certainly did in the end. The last chapter, which takes an autobiographical turn and centers on the author's discovery of the Beatles and a yearning for the '60s he was born too late to experience, I can't comment on. I am the same exact age as McKinney, and the uncanny parallels between his life and mine'from the precocious and obsessive reading of Beatles texts to the adolescence made melancholy by divorcing parents (talk about a dream ending)'was too painful for me to read.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-06-09 00:00:00 Berry Curry I read this for school about eight years ago and, even as a lifelong Beatles fan, found myself continually surprised by McKinney's theses, observations, and interpretations. It was his long discussion of the White Album that finally helped me appreciate that monster, and it was this bold claim that made me sit up and pay attention: "The Beatles is their most fractured album, and their ugliest; their most unsettling and their most moving. It's their best album, and nothing else in rock and roll has ever come close to it." Okay then! What I most enjoyed about my second reading -- other than the opportunity to appreciate all the White Album stuff again, this time having listened to the album much more -- was the last section, "Fantasy into Flesh," which is much more personal and touches on themes that interest me a great deal, such as the nature of listening to music made before your own time, appreciating and longing for an era into which you weren't born, etc. I was also struck by the similarity of McKinney's approach, in some ways, to Greil Marcus's in Mystery Train. The writing is just as dense and mysterious, and just as concerned with mythology. The "dream and history" part of the subtitle is very accurate. For the record, I think there are four essential Beatles books: Revolution in the Head, Paperback Writer, Lewisohn's book about the recording sessions, and this one.