#tbt: The Beatles as punk rockers

I wrote this review of Devin McKinney’s Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History for PopMatters in March 2005.

Magic Circles
The Beatles in Dream and History by Devin McKinney

The attempt is perhaps a vain one, an ambition impossibly grand, one that cannot be reached. The crafting of an intellectual history, a dream history as the title says, an exploration of mass cultural change triggered by the unexpected appearance on the world stage more than 40 years ago of four lads from Liverpool, England. This is what Devin McKinney sets out to do in Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History, to re-place the greatest band in rock and roll history—perhaps (again that word) in the history of recorded music—within the context of the volatile time in which the band exploded into the public consciousness, changing the band, its four members and everyone forever.

This is a hopelessly lofty goal, so McKinney can be forgiven if he fails to reach its apex. But in aiming so high, in reaching for peaks that ultimately are impossible to reach, he still manages to conjure something important, to get inside the phenomenon of The Beatles in a way the explains their connection to their fans and their growth as artists and the time in which they worked.

Magic Circles is not a biography of the band; it is, rather, a meditation on its music, the epoch and the role these four lads from Liverpool played in the changing times, in the turbulence that the band helped create and that was swirling about it. For McKinney, the band is both he trigger of change and a mirror that reflects the changes, exploding from a still-broken Europe playing American rock ‘n’ roll at breakneck speed and ear-splitting volume. From its earliest moments in Liverpool and then in Hamburg, and then later as fame chased them around the world, across Asia and through the heartland of America, The Beatles were both the artist and the canvas on which the world created its own new mythologies. Later, as he writes, the band helped foster the delusion of peace and love, the simplistic cliché of apathetic hippiedom, drawing the wrath of leftist critics (in this formulation, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the great fake) before catching a whiff of—and casting it in song—the failure that would bring the decade to its painful, unfulfilled end.

Continue reading here.

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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet