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Promoted from the Ricochet Member Feed by Editors Created with Sketch. The Conservative Stewardship of Christopher Tolkien

JackButler
By JackButler
JackButler Podcaster
Jack Butler is host of Ricochet's Young Americans podcast, former sidekick on the Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, a runner, a writer, and a Midwesterner in exile.
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2 COMMENTS
 

“A wizard is never late,” says the wizard Gandalf in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lords of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. “Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he needs to.”

I am not a wizard. Which is why I am only now getting around to memorializing J.R.R.’s son Christopher, who died earlier this month at age 95. Indeed, his passing has already been noted, in a more timely fashion, elsewhere on Ricochet. So I can only hope that readers will excuse my tardiness. For Christopher’s efforts on behalf of his father’s literary legacy are not merely worthy of praise in themselves. They also present an example of what it means to be conservative, in the most literal sense.

Christopher was involved in the saga of The Lord of the Rings almost from its very beginning. Though the germ of Middle-Earth predates any of J.R.R.’s children, telling what became his works as stories to his children helped him refine and develop them. Christopher later recalled, “[a]s strange as it may seem, I grew up in the world he created. For me, the cities of The Silmarillion are more real than Babylon.” And of these children, Christopher was the keenest on these tales. So keen, in fact, that his father put a young Christopher to work as an editor. In a letter to his publisher, the elder Tolkien wrote that “I received a letter from a young reader in Boston (Lincs.) enclosing a list of errata [in The Hobbit]. I then put my youngest son to find any more at two pence a time. He did. I enclose the results—which added to those already submitted should (I hope) make an exhaustive list.”

The younger Tolkien’s editorial efforts did not end there, however. He corresponded extensively with his father during the writing of The Lord of the Rings, despite the fact that Christopher was serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II at the time. But that did not stop Christopher from reading entire sections of the text. In one notable instance, he even kept the name of one of its most important characters from changing. In Christopher’s telling, as his father contemplated changing Samwise Gamgee to Samwise Goodchild, “I replied that I wouldn’t at all like to see Sam Gamgee changed to Sam Goodchild; and Sam Gamgee remained.” He even drew some of the earliest maps for the text. It was for these and other reasons that J.R.R. made his son the youngest—and ultimately the last living—member of The Inklings, the famous literary society centered around Oxford University that also counted C.S. Lewis among its ranks.

And so, when J.R.R. died in 1973, it somewhat naturally fell upon Christopher to become the caretaker of the work his father had produced. This was no easy task. But the spirit with which the younger Tolkien approached the task emerges from the contrast between his own characterization of it and that of others. In his 1977 foreword to The Silmarillion, which I described last year as the “Old Testament” to The Lords of the Rings’ New Testament, Christopher simply wrote: “On my father’s death it fell to me to try to bring the work into publishable form.” And in a 2009 interview with UK’s The Guardian, he modestly submits that he began this work because “I had agreed with my father that I should; and I began work on it soon after his death in 1973.” From such statements, one might think it was just a matter of correcting a few spelling errors, maybe changing the typeface, or other such clerical tasks.

Far from it. A fuller account of the work that confronted Christopher belies his modesty. Here is how Hannah Long described it in her wonderful account of Christopher’s labors in The Weekly Standard (from which, I should readily admit, my own tribute draws heavily):

In 1975, Christopher Tolkien left his fellowship at New College, Oxford, to edit his late father’s massive legendarium. The prospect was daunting. The 50-year-old medievalist found himself confronted with 70 boxes of unpublished work. Thousands of pages of notes and fragments and poems, some dating back more than six decades, were stuffed haphazardly into the boxes. Handwritten texts were hurriedly scrawled in pencil and annotated with a jumble of notes and corrections. One early story was drafted in a high school exercise book.

Despite the challenge, Christopher did ultimately publish The Silmarillion in 1977, fleshing out a world only hinted at in prior published texts.

But Christopher did not stop there. Again in that work’s foreword, he wrote that “[t]here is indeed a wealth of unpublished writing by my father concerning the Three Ages, narrative, linguistic, historical, and philosophical, and I hope that it will prove possible to publish some of this at a later date.” Once more, Christopher was understating. For after many years of similar work, he eventually published the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth, a sort of dual history both of the world of The Lords of the Rings and of how his father created that world. Along with other, similar work, this history almost fully filled out all dimensions of Middle-earth.

The son concluded his efforts with a trilogy, book-length expansions of three tales that appear in The Silmarillion: The Children of Hurin, Beren and Luthien, and, finally, The Fall of Gondolin. The publication of the last of these occasioned Long’s wonderful tribute to Tolkien, and perfectly bookended the world Tolkien created: The last complete work that one can claim to have been written, in any meaningful sense, by J.R.R. (with his son’s diligent posthumous assistance) was in fact the first conceived in what became Middle-Earth. Father began imagining it years before his son was born, as he lay incapacitated in the trenches of the First World War, uncertain that his very life would continue, much less that his work would achieve any kind of legacy.

Thanks to Christopher Tolkien, that legacy is now an ongoing reality of our culture. The popularity of Peter Jackson’s film adaptations is proof of this, as is Amazon’s recent decision to spend more than a billion dollars to adapt other portions of the Tolkien legendarium. Every year, more readers find their way into the fascinating, rich, and uplifting world of Middle-Earth. And every year, other readers return to it and find themselves welcomed as though they had never left. For all of this, we have not only J.R.R. Tolkien to thank, but also Christopher.

In our gratitude, we should also note the fundamental conservatism of Christopher’s efforts on behalf of the world his father created. He not only accepted gratefully the cultural inheritance his father passed on to him. He also preserved it, refined it but never changed its character, only trying to bring it to the standard he knew his father would have wanted it to be at, and then himself passed it onto succeeding generations. I know nothing of Christopher’s politics. But in this, at least, Christopher acted in miniature as we all ought to, serving as stewards for what we receive from those who came before so that we can hand it on to those who come after. That Christopher did it for his father’s world does not make his example any less instructive for the rest of us, who thanks to him will always enjoy the privilege of visiting Middle-earth.

In fitting Lord of the Rings fashion, I am having trouble ending this tribute; I could say much more. I think the best way to remember Christopher is by quoting his father’s own work. And so, though I am not a wizard, I will again quote one, to advise how best to mourn one so important, the last of the Inklings: “I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” And now I shall truly end the only way I think appropriate: by linking to a video of Christopher himself reading the final words of The Lords of the Rings: The Return of the King.

Promoted from the Ricochet Member Feed by Editors Created with Sketch. What If The Beatles Didn’t Break Up? Imagining Their ‘Next’ Album

JackButler
By JackButler
JackButler Podcaster
Jack Butler is host of Ricochet's Young Americans podcast, former sidekick on the Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, a runner, a writer, and a Midwesterner in exile.
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12 COMMENTS
 

One of the most entertaining hypotheticals for Beatles’ fans to discuss is what the Beatles would have sounded like or recorded if they had stayed together after the release of Let It Be.* In a sense, this is an even more fruitless counterfactual than another popular one: What songs would have been on The White Album if it hadn’t been a double album (which I have already covered). Unlike the case of that what-if, the songs the Beatles would have done together were never released as Beatles songs. And to imagine the Beatles staying together after 1970 is to wish away the centrifugal forces that had by that point already largely torn the four musical titans at the band’s center apart.**

But Beatles’ fans such as myself speculate nonetheless, aided by morsels such as collaborations between members after the break-up (most notably in the almost-Beatles song “I’m the Greatest!”), and demos of songs that later became solo work but were conceived or sometimes even recorded while the Beatles were still together (e.g., much of George Harrison’s first post-Beatle solo album, All Things Must Pass).

Recently, news has emerged that whets this speculative appetite even more. In a September 8 story in The Guardian, Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn revealed the contents of a heretofore undiscovered tape from almost exactly 50 years ago, in which the Beatles (sans an unwell Ringo Starr, for whom the recording was made) discussed their future plans. This despite the fact that, as Lewisohn points out, the Beatles had, at that time, already wrapped production on Abbey Road, which would be their last recorded album (though not the last released). And yet, on the tape, the three discuss plans to get a single ready for a Christmas release…to promote their next album! Learning this, I again returned to my own idle speculations, a cold comfort I create for myself in a world in which the Beatles did, in fact, break up. And so, in the Yesterday-esque spirit of Beatles hypotheticals, here is my attempt to imagine what the “next” Beatles album, which I have called Inward and Outward, would have looked like:

SIDE ONE – 22:07

  1. Gimme Some Truth – 3:17 (Lennon)
  2. All Things Must Pass – 3:04 (Harrison)
  3. Let It Down – 3:55 (Harrison)
  4. Back Seat of My Car – 4:30 (McCartney)
  5. It Don’t Come Easy – 3:04 (Starr)
  6. Jealous Guy – 4:17 (Lennon)

SIDE TWO – 22:53

  1. Another Day – 3:42 (McCartney)
  2. What’s the New Mary Jane – 6:12 (Lennon)
  3. Hear Me Lord – 5:46 (Harrison)
  4. Isn’t it a Pity – 7:10 (Harrison)

This album is between 45 and 46 minutes long (depending on which version of some of the songs you use), about the same length as Abbey Road, and roughly standard for a vinyl LP at the time. All of the songs on here either began as intended Beatles projects, were created by one Beatle and shown to others while the band was still together, or were the product of collaboration between ex-Beatles; many of them ended up on later solo Beatles albums. But that is not the only reason I have chosen them, or put them in this order. To give myself an organizing principle, to give the album a “flow,” and as a concession to the growing popularity of both concept albums and introspective folk-rock at the time, I decided to make this another loose concept album, following somewhat in the spirit of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The theme of the album and the title, Inward and Outward (or Gimme Some Truth, if John Lennon’s early-70s narcissism would have demanded the album be named after one of his songs on it), reflect the emotional journey of a single person. It begins with John Lennon—backed by Harrison on lead guitar, and friend of the Beatles Klaus Voorman on bass—asking someone to give him some truth, in a high-energy album opener typical of Beatles’ albums (think “Drive My Car” opening Rubber Soul, and “Taxman” opening Revolver). “Gimme Some Truth,” a song originating in sessions for the ultimately abandoned Get Back album, also comes with some of the political rancor of Lennon’s public life at the time (the first of my album’s accommodations to actual reality that might have kept the band together). Several answers follow, including George Harrison saying that “All Things Must Pass.” This song gave the title to Harrison’s aforementioned first solo album. But its form there was drastically different from the Beatles’ demo version, which was performed stripped-down in a manner deliberately aping The Band. That version is better simply, but also better for this album.

Meanwhile, as the suggested answers continue, Harrison and Paul McCartney suggest love as an answer, with “Let It Down” (again, first demoed in the Beatles era in a far simpler, superior form than what appeared on All Things Must Pass), and “The Back Seat of my Car” (a candidate for inclusion on the ultimately abandoned Get Back album), respectively. The version of “Backseat of My Car” ultimately released on Ram heavily features McCartney’s then-wife Linda; this is another concession influenced by contemporary reality, as I think if the Beatles would have remained together, they would have had to work out some kind of “settlement” concerning spousal involvement on songs (one of many points of tension for the band in its final years). Next, Ringo reminds our emotional protagonist that “It Don’t Come Easy” (a song produced in collaboration with Harrison, who plays lead guitar on it). These answers, while unsatisfactory, bring our protagonist to realize that he’s just a “Jealous Guy” (a song born in the White Album sessions as “Child of Nature”; not surprising, when you hear its “A Day in the Life”-esque piano), in a preliminary though not final realization. This ends Side 1.

Side 2 begins with “Another Day,” as McCartney (again with Linda), in the same spirit as “Eleanor Rigby” and “She’s Leaving Home,” details the monotonous life of a female protagonist. (This song also began in sessions for the Let It Be album.) The next song, “What’s the New Mary Jane,” is an avant-garde composition (on which Yoko Ono, John’s “Linda” at the time, for whom he likely would have demanded greater involvement if he were to stay in the band), in the spirit of “Revolution 9” (born, again, in the same White Album sessions as that song) that begins as almost a parody of “Another Day,” intimating the narrow line between tedium in life and nihilism when one cannot find purpose. After the emotional anguish of this song, as represented by its concluding atonal clashing, the protagonist cries out “Hear Me Lord” (another Let It Be reject), in an exclamation of redemption comparable to “Love, Reign O’er Me,” the song that ends The Who’s Quadrophenia.

But side 2 and the album end with Harrison’s “Isn’t it a Pity.” This song, (wrongly) rejected for inclusion on Let It Be, laments the frequent inability of people to connect with others outside of themselves, and to realize the damage they do to others—in a sense, it reflects both mankind’s failure to do this, and the singer’s own failure, as well as his desire to correct it. In both thematic content and structure, it is similar to “Hey Jude,” with which it shares an extended fade-out (perfect for a classic Beatles album closer, though bizarrely it does not close All Things Must Pass) and a nearly identical runtime (7:10 vs. “Hey Jude’s 7:11; surely not a coincidence). As the album begins with “Gimme Some Truth,” it can be seen as a sort of cycle, connecting the world’s people to each other one at a time.

Harrison’s music dominates this album, and thus, to a considerable extent, his spirit does as well. This is more real history-based speculation affecting the album itself; I think that’s what would have happened. If you look at the solo Beatles in terms of output immediately after the break-up, Harrison wins in both quality and quantity. Plus, in the hypothetical scenario in which the band stays together, surely Lennon and McCartney would have had to accommodate Harrison’s growing talents, especially after they suppressed them for so long, and had finally begun to acknowledge them by the time of Abbey Road. The tape, in fact, alludes to this, as Paul says that “I thought until this album [Abbey Road] that George’s songs weren’t that good.” To which George—rightly, in my view, but I’m a big fan of “It’s All Too Much,” “Within You Without You,” and other Harrisongs—replies that “That’s a matter of taste. All down the line, people have liked my songs.”

Other real-world extrapolation that explains this album’s structure could come from the fact that Lennon was in peak “political” mode at this time, and probably would have demanded both time to do this (thus meaning fewer songs), and that his included songs at least somewhat reflect his newly emphasized public persona, and the accommodations for wives, mentioned above. Also, with some exceptions (“Maybe I’m Amazed,” for example), McCartney’s immediate post-Beatles output wasn’t that great. If anything, I am shafting Ringo here, who really came into his own in the early 70s for a bit.

If you’re interested in this “album,” I’ve created both a YouTube playlist and a Spotify playlist with these songs (with the versions closest to the form I’d want them in for the album) in the sequence I outlined here. Listen for yourself, and let me know if you think it holds together as an album. And if not, I would enjoy hearing what songs you think should be on this hypothetical album, or what some good single pairings would have been. I deliberately left out some seemingly obvious choices for the sake of making it more of an album, and not simply an early 70s greatest hits collection for the ex-Beatles. But some of those hits would have been great as the Christmas promotional single discussed on the tape. Imagine record-buyers in 1969 staring at a “My Sweet Lord”/“Maybe I’m Amazed” Double-A-Side! The possibilities are endless. And though reality sadly went differently, it’s always fun to speculate.

*The answer, of course, is ELO, or, as John Lennon called them, Son of Beatles.

**And yes, that includes my birthday buddy Ringo Starr.

Promoted from the Ricochet Member Feed by Editors Created with Sketch. The Legendarium Podcast Has Come to Ricochet

JackButler
By JackButler
JackButler Podcaster
Jack Butler is host of Ricochet's Young Americans podcast, former sidekick on the Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, a runner, a writer, and a Midwesterner in exile.
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4 COMMENTS
 

At the beginning of this year, I got an offer I couldn’t refuse. Craig Hanks, who listens to the Remnant with Jonah Goldberg (on which I make furtive appearances) heard that I was reading The Silmarillion by J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien. Craig happens to host his own podcast, The Legendarium Podcast, on which he and others discuss the great works of sci-fi and fantasy literature. He invited me onto his show to discuss The Silmarillion. You can listen to the episode here. 

Something strange happened when I distilled my thoughts about The Silmarillion in a post I published on Ricochet: All of Ricochet’s various nerds came out of the woodwork and had a field day discussing this somewhat more obscure “prequel” to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. A similar thing happened when I produced another post, about God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert, after appearing on one episode of the Legendarium (and later another) to discuss it. 

The revelation of an “undocumented nerd” community at Ricochet convinced higher-ups to bring this large, underserved population “out of the shadows” by bringing Craig’s podcast here. And so here it is. Now the Legendarium’s deep-dives not only into Tolkien and Herbert and the worlds they created but also their explorations of other, perhaps more obscure authors and worlds, are available via Ricochet. 

Please welcome Craig and the Legendarium with open arms, as kindly as you have welcomed me, my own podcast, and my explorations of nerdiness here. After all, they’re even bigger nerds than I am, so they deserve that much more welcome from this great community.

Promoted from the Ricochet Member Feed by Editors Created with Sketch. Jeff Lynne’s ELO Recaptures (Most of) ELO’s Peak 70s ‘Strange Magic’

JackButler
By JackButler
JackButler Podcaster
Jack Butler is host of Ricochet's Young Americans podcast, former sidekick on the Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, a runner, a writer, and a Midwesterner in exile.
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9 COMMENTS
 

ELO bros.
On Tuesday, July 9, I was in a panic. A non-D.C. friend of mine texted me asking if I would be going to the ELO concert in two days (well, technically, the Jeff Lynne’s ELO concert; more on that in a bit).

Although I am a Millennial (with a podcast!), and ELO’s critical and commercial peak came when my parents were in high school (though their greatest hits, like “Mr. Blue Sky” and “Evil Woman” have had a long cultural shelf life), I nonetheless have long been a huge fan of this Beatlesque symphonic pop-rock group. I have written about ELO’s output at Ricochet and even got to discuss it for two hours on an episode of National Review’s excellent Political Beats podcast.

So you’d think a superfan of my status would have known about this concert for months, and be planning to attend. Wrong. I either completely forgot or never knew that one of my favorite bands would be performing almost literally in my neighborhood. Hence my panic: I was terrified that tickets would be sold out (they weren’t). Or that I, not a frequent concert-goer for dislike of crowds and of loud noises–my last one was a Moody Blues concert in 2008–wouldn’t be able to find anyone to come with me on such short notice (I did).

So I would go after all. But I still had one last fear: The show wouldn’t be any good. I love ELO’s music. But it’s 40 years old now, and Jeff Lynne, the man who always did the most to create it (hence the new touring moniker, which just confirms this), is in his 70s. And I would bring to this concert a certain knowledge of ELO at its peak. Not only did I know the discography back to front, having listened to it all (yes, all, even Balance of Power) many times. I also own a DVD of an ELO concert from the band’s 1978, original line-up, peak success tour.

ELO is far from alone among classic rock acts touring well into old age. It’s common knowledge that fans both old and young (but mostly old) will pay big money to see these once-godlike figures belt out (or attempt to belt out) their radio classics while making sure they don’t break a hip or fall off the stage. Nostalgia can be a powerful drug and can make one ignore some of the more obvious defects of an aging act. Indeed, for some older concertgoers, there could be a sort of old-age solidarity at play; it may make them feel a bit better about themselves to see that even rock gods age.

But I would not be so forgiving. My test for this concert would be how well ELO recaptured the magic of the band at its peak, with only some leeway given for the different environment of a live show, and for time’s cruel progression. Fortunately, this ELO concert passed this test with flying colors. Between a setlist that touched on (nearly) all of the band’s peak output, some new players who did an adequate job taking the place of no-longer-touring members, and the overall atmosphere of the concert, it almost felt like 1978 all over again (or what I’m guessing 1978 was like, since I wasn’t alive then).

Before the concert actually began, one of the biggest mysteries was what ELO would start with. Many of their songs would have worked as concert-starters; I was thinking maybe the wordless rocker “Fire On High.” But when the gentle, nursery-rhyme-esque tones of “Standin’ In the Rain” trickled through the dark arena, I was delighted and surprised, even though I should only have been delighted: This was the same song that began the concert I had on DVD, recreated almost perfectly (even down to the light show that started with the song proper), with just a few high notes and more complicated parts understandably dropped.

After this, the band went through an excellent set of classic hits: “Evil Woman,” “All Over the World” (which was preceded by Jeff Lynne’s saying “Hello Washington, D.C,” to which I thrilled, though I wish he’d namechecked the city in the song as well), “Showdown,” and “Do Ya.” It didn’t take me too long to get used to the new division of labor that Jeff Lynne had worked out for his tour, by which he handed off some of the more difficult vocal and instrumental parts to other members of his touring band. Though not all of them: He still did the guitar solo from “Showdown” himself, for example. The occasional flub or imprecise delivery, as on “Evil Woman,” was a bit more worrisome, yet always forgivable, and never disrupted the show; only my obsessive knowledge of ELO made me notice such incidents at all.

The next part of the set touched equally on the present and the past. “When I Was A Boy,” the lead single from Alone in the Universe, ELO’s most recent album, came next; Jeff handled this song perhaps best of any that night, as it was written more with his current vocal range in mind than any other on the setlist, but also dealt more with his own upbringing than any other ELO number. “Livin’ Thing,” another highlight of ELO’s greatest hits,” came next, and it was done well, though the concert-forced fade-out replacement could use a little work. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the night followed, as Lynne casually announced that he was going to do “a song by my other group.” At this point, Dhani Harrison, son of Beatle George, whose band had been the opening act, returned to the stage and flawlessly recreated his father’s lead vocals on the Traveling Wilburys’ song “Handle With Care.” During this song, scenes from recording sessions of this legendary supergroup, whose other members included the now-deceased Tom Petty and Roy Orbison and the still-chugging-along Bob Dylan, were projected on stage behind the band. It was a touching tribute to a part of Lynne’s career that I did not expect this concert to reference at all.

From here followed another hit parade. “Rock-Aria!,” one of my favorites, was done well (though they did miss the mini-Beethoven reference the song contains); it is always tricky live, as it involves vocal interplay between a lead male rock vocalist and a co-lead female operatic part. They had both on hand in the touring band; Jeff and a male backing vocalist shared the former, and a female backing vocalist took over the latter, perhaps even improving on original ELO member Kelly Groucutt’s version from the original tour. The show then went disco with “Last Train To London,” accompanied by the night’s most colorful stage visual effects up to that point (a glow-in-the-dark locomotive constantly ran behind the band), and “Xanadu,” which Lynne first did with Olivia Newton-John. The band did not shy away from showing footage from the infamously bad movie (with a famously good soundtrack) that song was the title track of during this part of the show, demonstrating an admirable comfort with all aspects of its past.

“10538 Overture” was the next song on the list. I was a bit surprised to see it there at all; this was the first song on ELO’s first album, created when the band was a far different entity from what it eventually became. Despite that, I thought their rendition of the song was perhaps the most faithful to the studio version of any song played that night, which is no small feat, given the multitracked cello riffs and difficult vocals of the original. They followed it with another surprise, “Wild West Hero,” one of the less popular tracks on Out of the Blue, and “Shine A Little Love.” The latter wasn’t a huge surprise as a choice. But the stunning array of laser lights that accompanied it sure was, and served as a reminder that ELO’s old shows were almost as well known for their light displays and giant spaceships as for their music.

Two far more expected choices followed, in the same order they appear on the compilation album that introduced me to ELO: “Sweet Talking Woman,” and the famous “Telephone Line,” a song that takes the form of a lovelorn telephone call and is one of ELO’s best and most famous. As this song played, ironically (or perhaps fittingly), I saw the dark arena fill up with hundreds of points of light from people getting out their phones to record it.

From here to the end of the show it was hit after hit: “Don’t Bring Me Down,” ELO’s biggest-ever song in America; “Turn To Stone,” a favorite of mine, whose deliberately sped-up middle eight the band nailed–or at least appeared to nail–without the aid of any pre-taped trickery (an unfair criticism of the older shows, and a seemingly quaint one given what concerts have become since); and, of course, “Mr. Blue Sky,” mine and everyone else’s favorite ELO song, which was done practically perfectly. They even did the full minute-plus segment of the song that is technically just the end of the “Concerto for a Rainy Day” suite from Out of the Blue, all the way to the “please turn me over,” an artifact from the age when you had to flip over the vinyl, as the “Concerto” took up side three of that album. It was also a great bookend to “Standin’ in the Rain,” which began the show, as that was the beginning of the “Concerto.” I would have been happy if my first experience of live ELO had ended here. And I thought it had.

But if I had paid closer attention to my concert DVD, I would have known better. Fortunately, the friends I was with urged me to stay, so I got to see what came next. When, out of the darkness, I suddenly heard a musical quote from Beethoven, I knew what was coming: ELO’s prog-rockabilly cover of “Roll Over Beethoven,” a raucous masterpiece from the band’s second album. This was also how the aforementioned concert DVD also encored, so, again, I should have known better. For I would have been truly distraught if I had missed the next eight minutes of foot-tapping, guitar-strumming, violin-burning symphonic rock. And I was glad that I did not.

That was the real end of the ELO concert, about which I have few complaints. But for the sake of fairness, I’ll list them here. Jeff Lynne’s voice is clearly not what it once was. And even though the arrangement he has worked out for his touring band mostly disguises that, there were bits of songs here and there that he either missed or has deliberately dropped from live shows. Some of these changes may just be from the different world of live performance, which also accounts for the forced addition of sometimes-awkward endings to songs that had relied on studio fadeouts. Not all of it was from this, though, and an intermittent imprecision in vocal delivery was also occasionally distracting. I am more sad than disappointed by this, as it merely suggests the passage of time to which we are all subject, even the now 71-year-old Jeff Lynne.

Less forgivable is the absence of any songs from Eldorado, my favorite ELO album. This was the only album from ELO’s 70s peak that did not get at least one representative in this concert. I still loved everything that was played, even if it had a bias toward the late-late-70s, an era that I sometimes forget was the band’s actual commercial peak, as my preference leans slightly more toward mid-70s ELO.

None of this detracts from my overall enjoyment of the concert’s music, or of its atmosphere. Both of these felt quite close to the aura of peak ELO. I understand how much of a cash grab and a sop to Baby Boomers these things are, but after going to one, I see why they are so popular, and I don’t really care. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t see your favorite band in concert while they’re still touring if you have a chance (as you should with ELO); you never know when that last show will be.

I’m just happy a friend reminded me that this concert was happening in the first place.

Promoted from the Ricochet Member Feed by Editors Created with Sketch. ‘God Emperor of Dune’ Embodies the Greatness (and Strangeness) of the ‘Dune’ Universe

JackButler
By JackButler
JackButler Podcaster
Jack Butler is host of Ricochet's Young Americans podcast, former sidekick on the Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, a runner, a writer, and a Midwesterner in exile.
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32 COMMENTS
 

This December, the last Star Wars movie (probably) featuring any of the original series’ cast members will come out. Good riddance. Because in November 2020, the god-emperor of science fiction will reign supreme once more, as a new adaptation of Dune by Frank Herbert will come to theaters.

And I’ll be there, even though I’m a relatively new convert to Dune’s greatness. As a sci-fi- inhaling youngster, I was told that the two sci-fi books I had to read were Dune and Neuromancer by William Gibson. I bought them both at a Half-Price Books more than a decade ago…and did nothing with either of them until July 2016, when I finally made my way through Dune.* I liked what I read, and have been gradually working through the series since.

This is how I learned that Dune is not merely “Star Wars for adults,” as the new film’s director, Dennis Villeneuve (Arrival, Blade Runner 2049) accurately stated. Indeed, Star Wars stole much of its backbone from Dune, in ways that their both starting as sci-fi hero’s journey stories can adequately explain.

Dune (first published in 1965) and its sequels also involve: an ancient order of psychic warriors who manipulate history and can control people with their voices (the Bene Gesserit), monstrous creatures who dwell in the desert and devour anything that comes their way (sandworms), twins born with mystical powers (Leto and Ghanima Atreides), a tyrannical Galactic Empire, and much more. Oh, and did I mention that Dune is set on a desert planet?

But there is far more to Dune than vivid feats of imagination that lesser works cribbed. Over the course of the first book and its Frank Herbert-authored sequels, Dune becomes a fascinating exploration of politics, religion, and morality, never losing sight of these essential themes despite being set thousands of years in the future, in a universe far different from our own.
The most fully realized work in the Dune series after the first that I’ve read so far (I’m 5 books in) is God Emperor of Dune, which I just had a chance to discuss on the Legendarium podcast (where earlier this year I appeared to talk about The Silmarillion). The first three books of the Dune series form a trilogy of sorts, showing the rise and fall of Paul Atreides, their Luke Skywalker figure (though he’s a bit more than just a Luke). But God Emperor of Dune is a dramatic divergence from these in many ways.

For one, it transports us 3,500 years into the already-far future of Dune, in a Galactic Empire still dominated by one of Paul’s children, Leto II. Through an arduous process, Leto, now ruler of the universe, has become functionally immortal, having merged with one of the aforementioned sandworms, and virtually omniscient, inheriting and even building on the psychic abilities of his father.

Unsurprisingly, this book is largely about the God Emperor. And if he were a poorly realized character, you would chafe as in a poorly fitting stillsuit at having to spend most of the book in his company. But this is not the case. With Leto II, Frank Herbert puts a decisively Dune spin on a classic sci-fi archetype: the godlike ex-human struggling to remain connected to humanity. This despite the fact that he knows more about the human race than probably anyone else who has existed in that universe. In addition to his prescience, the God Emperor houses the ancestral memories of billions of people, allowing him an incredible command of history and its personalities. “I am the waylaid pieces of history which sank out of sight in all of our pasts,” he says of himself.

What Herbert puts in the God Emperor’s mouth makes this acute historical awareness seem plausible. Leto II is a veritable font of maxims and axioms about politics and life, many of which ring strikingly true. Take, for example, his observation that “a population that walks is easier to control,” explaining why he has deliberately kept his Empire at a lower level of technological advancement. Political scientist James C. Scott makes a similar argument in his book Seeing Like A State.

God Emperor of Dune also expertly portrays the singular struggles of the God Emperor. Leto II is perhaps the loneliest character in all of science fiction. For not only does the universe lack a single being anything like him. He alone also knows fully the “Golden Path”–the “survival of mankind, nothing more, nothing less”–along which he must steer humanity if it is to survive, even if it objects to his apparent tyranny along the way. And, perhaps most cruelly, he must suffer the lingering attachments of human emotions, as embodied in a love that he cannot reciprocate, one that brings him to the first tears he has shed in centuries (tears that literally burn him due to his unique physiology). In these and other ways, the God Emperor as a character, and the book in which he stars, are a culmination of Dune’s enthralling take on science fiction as filtered through politics and psychology.

There is more to commend God Emperor of Dune. It is one of the most action-packed entries in the series, beginning with a scene that I could already picture as a movie. It is full of stunning explorations of what it would be like to live in the same society as the deity you worship. And it has, in a character resurrected from previous books, a worthy and fascinating foil to the God Emperor: the long-suffering and noble Duncan Idaho(s).

This is not to say that it’s a perfect book. It lacks compelling characters beyond the two I’ve named, who, though taking up a majority of the story between themselves, don’t take up all of it. It also simply cannot be read in isolation from its predecessors, with whom it shares some weaknesses, such as a bizarre obsession with sex and sexual humor whose manifestations are as perplexing as they are unpredictable, and a preponderance of overlong expository dialogue passages.

Yet I am inclined to forgive God Emperor of Dune for its faults, as its virtues far outweigh them. I’ve encountered nothing quite like it in my journey through science fiction, as I discuss at greater length here. As such, it is yet further proof of Dune’s rightful place atop the genre, against which juvenile imitators such as Star Wars pale in comparison. If that’s too strong for you, fine. But I know which upcoming sci-fi epic I’m anticipating more, and it’s not the one that comes out this December.

*Neuromancer remains unread.

Promoted from the Ricochet Member Feed by Editors Created with Sketch. ‘Yesterday’: A Cute Beatles Fairy Tale You Shouldn’t Think Too Much About

JackButler
By JackButler
JackButler Podcaster
Jack Butler is host of Ricochet's Young Americans podcast, former sidekick on the Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, a runner, a writer, and a Midwesterner in exile.
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Yesterday is really two movies, one better than the other.

The better movie in Yesterday, the latest by director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), with a script by Richard Curtis (Love Actually), is a light, cute, modern fairy tale that assumes one’s love of the Beatles* (yes, this movie could not get more British). It presents a simple yet striking what-if: Jack** Malik (Himesh Patel), a struggling, mediocre musician, suddenly enters a world that resembles our own in (almost) every way but one: Only he remembers The Beatles.*** Through a series of convenient but credibly implausible circumstances, he then rides this newfound knowledge to astronomical success, doling out hit after hit seemingly from divine inspiration to all around him, while only he (?) knows the truth.

Yesterday hits all the classic beats of the rise-to-fame morality tale. Success soon forces Jack to abandon his friends and family in England. Most important of all these to him is Ellie Appleton (Lily James), a teacher, his part-time manager while he was still playing at bars and empty tents at music festivals, and–much to his dismay–not quite his love interest. Meanwhile, he struggles to maintain his integrity against the wages of commercialism in the music industry, embodied with enthusiastic cynicism by Kate McKinnon, playing a cutthroat record executive. 

It is familiar, certainly, but well-executed. Patel ably portrays the bewilderment of a musician who suddenly hits it big, nonetheless marred by a literal Imposter Syndrome in which only he (?) knows he’s the imposter. 

The gigantic value-add of the movie is, of course, the Beatles. This is a movie made for Beatles’ fans, nodding at and coddling them at every opportunity (especially with a surprise “cameo” near the end). It does an excellent, almost flattering job of portraying how a world without The Beatles would have gratefully greeted each “new” Beatles’ song, even in the diluted or distorted forms Jack can manage. And it also deftly displays Jack’s struggles to maintain some of The Beatles’ more idiosyncratic gifts to the world against his own faulty memory and against skeptics, giving us a sort of alternate-universe dramatic irony. 

Speaking of alternate universes, the inferior movie in Yesterday is the sci-fi alternate universe puzzler on which the whole thing depends.

To be fair, Yesterday is a romantic comedy, not a Primer-style authentic treatment of quantum mechanics. Even so, there are standard-bearers within sci-fi for the same kind of thing we see in Yesterday. In the novel Replay by Ken Grimwood, for example, the main character, who thinks he is the only person in the world knowingly caught in a time loop, discovers another such individual upon seeing Earthsea, a movie somehow created in 1975 by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, even though the main character, from our universe, knows that it shouldn’t exist. Replay also involves a third individual aware of the time loops, but who turns out to be a malevolent force, something Yesterday toys with while ultimately taking a lighthearted twist away from it.

This was the more acceptable manifestation of the alternate-universe fiction in Yesterday. The less acceptable one was the many, many questions raised by the dialectic of musical history it imagines in the Beatles’ absence. An early joke in the movie has Jack discover that Oasis doesn’t exist just after confirming that the Beatles don’t, which … is quite fair, honestly. Aside from that, though, musical history seems to be exactly the same; Coldplay still releases “Fix You,” Ed Sheeran (playing himself) has the same songs he does in our universe, etc. 

This is a problem for a movie that is a love letter to The Beatles: It is seemingly arguing that the course of musical history would have been almost exactly the same without them. But that can’t possibly be true. Would the Dave Clark Five or the Rolling Stones have led the British Invasion in their absence? Would Beatles-aping bands like The Monkees or Electric Light Orchestra not exist either? How did The Beatles never come together in the first place, and what happened to all the band’s members? Would Brian Wilson have made Pet Sounds without the Beatles to compete against? There are plenty of similar questions one can ask (to say nothing of the other unexplained and unnecessary disappearances of certain staples of our reality), and the movie breaks down somewhat under close consideration.

Which is why it’s probably best not to consider Yesterday too closely. Enjoy it as a love letter to the greatest act in modern music, and as a light, cute, romantic-comedy-cum-fairy-tale, and you’ll be fine. And be sure to stay for the credits, which provide welcome evidence, after a movie without the real deal, that our reality is not Beatle-proof. 

* Such love is not lacking in this reviewer. 

** I felt justifiably obligated to see a work of alternate-universe fiction about the Beatles’ whose main character is named Jack that came out two days before my birthday on my birthday. 

*** Jack’s plight made me wonder what item of pop culture I could “recreate” under similar circumstances if it disappeared entirely. 

Promoted from the Ricochet Member Feed by Editors Created with Sketch. What It’s Like to Run the Boston Marathon

JackButler
By JackButler
JackButler Podcaster
Jack Butler is host of Ricochet's Young Americans podcast, former sidekick on the Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, a runner, a writer, and a Midwesterner in exile.
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It’s hard to do the Boston Marathon.

After 123 years, the race itself now seems inextricably bound up in an aura of athletic excellence, reaching near-mythic status. Just to say “Boston Marathon” (or even just “Boston”) is to invoke a goal or an accomplishment of seemingly impossible caliber. But if you have your sights set on Boston, as I did, then this is exactly what you are trying to do: become part of one of the most famous and grueling athletic pursuits accessible to non-elites and non-Olympians.

But, again, the Boston Athletic Association, which runs the race, doesn’t make it easy. It’s hard to qualify; hard to get to; and, of course, hard to race. (As I’ve said elsewhere: Marathons are hard.) In the lead-up to and on April 15, 2019, the day of my first Boston Marathon, I experienced all three dimensions of the race’s difficulty.

In the end, I ran a 2:35:48 there, placing 226th overall. And if you want to know in granular detail what the whole experience was like, then you can read the 7,000-word (!) account I posted at my personal blog here. (There are also pictures.)

Or, if you don’t feel like reading that many words, listen to the last 25 minutes or so of the second most recent episode of this episode of the Remnant with Jonah Goldberg. Either way, I hope my account successfully conveys what the experience of running the Boston Marathon is like.

Promoted from the Ricochet Member Feed by Editors Created with Sketch. ‘The Silmarillion’ Is a Dense Yet Highly Engaging Origin Story for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth

JackButler
By JackButler
JackButler Podcaster
Jack Butler is host of Ricochet's Young Americans podcast, former sidekick on the Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, a runner, a writer, and a Midwesterner in exile.
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As Game of Thrones draws to a close, and a new Amazon Lord of the Rings TV series awaits, J.R.R. Tolkien is sure to return as the king of fantasy (if he ever even left). Despite being dead now for nearly 46 years, Tolkien created, in Middle-Earth and the stories that take place there, a rich, vivid mythology that has ensured his immortality.

Many people first came to appreciate Tolkien’s work because of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy in the early 2000s. I was one of them. Only eight years old when The Fellowship of the Ring came out, I was not allowed to see either it or its sequel in theaters (though I did catch them later on DVD). But when my parents said they would let me see The Return of the King in theaters, I decided to read all of the books in the trilogy before the movie came out so that I would appreciate it properly. Even at age 10, I recall getting lost–in the best possible way–in the epic and fully realized world of heroism and mysticism that Tolkien had created. Seeing the last movie in theaters remains one of my best-ever theatrical experiences, and it confirmed my status as a Tolkien fan.

Looking for more ways to deepen my fanhood at the time, I came upon The Silmarillion, which I have now had the chance to discuss on an episode of the Legendarium Podcast. Described to me as the ‘Old Testament’ of The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion gave the backstory to which the more famous trilogy is the culmination: the creation of the world, the early struggles between its gods, the plight of the elves, the coming of men and dwarves (and their own trials), etc. Delighted that there was more material to read, I dove right in…only to crash on a rocky shoal of confusing names, excessive detail, and quasi-poetic prose that seemed straight out of some ancient tome. I got only a few dozen pages in before giving up on The Silmarillion.

Only recently, as the excessive cultural cachet of Game of Thrones has turned me into a rabid anti-Game of Thrones reactionary, did I make myself go back and finish The Silmarillion as part of my first full rereading of all of Tolkien’s most popular work, also including The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Rereading The Silmarillion, I could understand why, as a 10-year-old, I found it so daunting. The names were still myriad, and often confusing; the stories abounded, intersecting in ways sometimes unclear to me; and the prose had the same ancient tome quality that I recalled from my youth.

Yet these were far more minor complaints this time around. While 15 years ago, they kept me from getting lost in the work as I did in Lord of the Rings, now they could barely restrain my enjoyment of it. For The Silmarillion is a true epic, the product of a single mind (two if you want to count his son Christopher, who compiled and edited what his father never completely finished). Usually, epic traditions are the products of entire cultures and many authors, assembled over centuries or more. But in preparing a backstory for The Lord of the Rings (which–importantly–was never the focus of Tolkien’s writing, but rather the bulky bottom of the iceberg that allowed him to tell the tiny top of his most famous story), Tolkien just decided to create such a mythology of his own accord within a discrete period–a stunning achievement. Sure, others have followed his lead since. Yet many of them have gotten too lost in their creations, too high on playing god, to produce a work that also contained transcendent themes (or ended!).

For though The Silmarillion is an epic, of gigantic scope and scale, it is also strongly driven by individual actors and choices. Pride, arrogance, fate, hubris, irony, mortality–those all-too-human forces–play out among a cast of often larger-than-life characters nonetheless subject to them.

Indeed, it is hard for me to explain how, exactly, but The Silmarillion seems not merely like the mythic creation of its author, but rather like a window into an entire other tradition, heretofore unknown. Something about the way it was written strongly suggests that what we have is actually a translation from another language, now long forgotten, and that what we are reading pales in comparison to the actual story, now long disappeared. This is not to say The Silmarillion is a bad work; rather, that in depicting its own rich mythology, it successfully conveys a sense that what actually happened was somehow even grander than what we are reading. It is, at times, hard to believe all of this came from the imagination of one man. Tolkien himself felt similarly. He wrote that, in creating his legends, he “…always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there,’ somewhere: not of ‘inventing.’”

The most compelling reason for the more casual Lord of the Rings fan to read The Silmarillion, however, is that it puts everything in Tolkien’s more famous work in context. It deepens one’s understanding of what happens there, and answer some questions about where some things came from. It also instills an appreciation for how, in Tolkien’s understanding, everything in The Lord of the Rings is merely a less impressive imitation or centuries-old echo of the ancient struggles depicted in The Silmarillion, a sort of “there were giants, in those days” aesthetic that often goes underappreciated in Tolkien’s immortal work.

At any rate, if you want to hear more from me (and others more qualified) about Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, check out my appearance on the Legendarium Podcast.

Promoted from the Ricochet Member Feed by Editors Created with Sketch. Director Peter Jackson Strikes Gold Again with WWI Documentary

JackButler
By JackButler
JackButler Podcaster
Jack Butler is host of Ricochet's Young Americans podcast, former sidekick on the Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, a runner, a writer, and a Midwesterner in exile.
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The Oscars for 2018’s movies have come and gone. It’s far too early to tell whether any of these movies, even Green Book, the Best Picture winner, will actually be watched much after this year. But true transcendence is hard to pull off, so the safe bet is: No.

Yet one movie with a good chance of a lasting legacy didn’t even get any nominations: Peter Jackson’s World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. Jackson is best known for directing live-action adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The final chapter, The Return of the King, won Best Picture for its year of release, and earned Jackson Best Director. This is worth considering not merely for reasons of pedigree. For these two works share more than a quality that has ensured a legacy for Tolkien’s work and Jackson’s adaptations, and will, I hope, ensure one for They Shall Not Grow Old.

Tolkien was famously coy about both the ‘message’ of his magnum opus, and about the influence of the real world on it. He claimed to “…dislike allegory in all its manifestations,” preferring “history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers.” And he responded to speculation about influences of the real world on The Lord of the Rings by asserting that “the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are best guesses from evidence that is inadequate or ambiguous.” Tolkien wanted the elaborate mythology he created to stand on its own.

Yet there is at least one aspect of Tolkien’s work whose real-world influence is hard to deny: the connection between his service for England in World War I and the Dead Marshes that appear in The Two Towers. In that work, Frodo, his companion Samwise, and the mischievous creature Smeagol (or Gollum) journey together toward Mordor, the only place where the evil Ring Frodo bears can be destroyed. On the way, they must brave the Dead Marshes, a fetid, swampy region, once the site of a great battle, still strewn with its corpses. As Frodo describes the bodies in the waters of the marshes after falling in: 

They lie in the pools, pale faces, deep under the dark water…grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad. Many faces, proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead…

The trenches in which most of World War I was fought were comparably nasty places, as They Shall Not Grow Old makes clear. Even in the best of wartime, there was hardly any proper sanitation; rats, lice, and disease (such as the lice-born “trench fever” that got Tolkien medical leave from combat) multiplied. And in wet conditions, the trenches became a fearsome muck. Those who merely lost a boot to it were lucky. The muck was thick enough that it would occasionally suck soldiers in to their deaths. Meanwhile, wet or dry, the fields of combat between trenches were littered with the bodies of the slain.

This gruesome reality of war is merely one of the many things They Shall Not Grow Old brings out of the often-impenetrable mists of the past. Working from 600 hours of archived audio from veterans describing the war experience (all of whom are listed in the credits; Tolkien himself does not appear, though I had hoped he would) and 100 hours of archival footage, Jackson and his team stitch together a deliberately generic yet highly revealing portrait of what the war was like for those who endured it.

Jackson and co. achieve this vivid sense of presence by some marvelous technical fixes they worked on archived material, and by some genuinely inspired techniques to apply sound to the otherwise sound-free archived footage they heroically colorized. The combined effect of this technical mastery is astounding; I wondered during the documentary, for example, how material filmed in the 1910s could have had sound native to it, and then marveled that it, in fact, did not, and that all sound was cleverly recreated.

With They Shall Not Grow Old, Jackson has quite literally brought this important era of our recent history out of black-and-white and into the vivid colors of the present. This literal achievement helps enable the documentary’s figurative one of bringing to life an event likely perceived by many of us as merely history, despite its relative nearness to us. Tolkien wrote that “[o]ne has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years.” War of any kind is truly a difficult thing for those blessed with peacetime or exempt from service to understand, much less a war ended now 100 years ago. How many of us, for example, can possibly relate to Tolkien’s own loss from the war, as a result of which, he wrote, “[b]y 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead”?

But with this striking recreation of the experience of World War I, Jackson has not only deepened our historical understanding of this particular war. He has also helped us to bridge the often unfathomable gaps between civilians and soldiers, between peacetime and wartime, and between the present and the past. And, perhaps most important, he has ensured that, though the young soldiers who perished in that war did not grow old, the historical memory of the war in which they fought will live on. Good movies may (or may not) have won at this year’s Oscars. But none can claim these noble accomplishments.

Promoted from the Ricochet Member Feed by Editors Created with Sketch. The Boomers Won Again with Electric Light Orchestra

JackButler
By JackButler
JackButler Podcaster
Jack Butler is host of Ricochet's Young Americans podcast, former sidekick on the Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, a runner, a writer, and a Midwesterner in exile.
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One of the running themes of Young Americans, my Ricochet podcast, is the stubborn half-life of Baby Boomer pop culture. The movies, TV, music, etc., that were popular when the Baby Boom generation was growing up, and the pop culture they created, still seem dominant even as that generation ages into retirement. Star Wars movies still clean up in theaters. Bruce Springsteen tours sell out. Hawaii Five-O gets a TV remake. Et cetera.

Ordinarily, it is my job as a 25-year-old host of a podcast of young people to resent this fact. I bristle beneath the bridle of the Baby Boomers, who refuse to relinquish their stranglehold on pop culture. And I call on younger generations to start creating their own pop culture to liberate us from the Boomer reign.

Yeah, this is what I’m supposed to do. But I’ve got to hand it to you Boomers: You made some good stuff. And so, when I recently appeared on Political Beats, a National Review podcast that performs deep dives on the favorite bands of political personalities (which is what I guess I am now…), I chose Electric Light Orchestra.

ELO is a great, underrated band, as I have written before. Driven mostly by the Beatlesque creative energy of singer-songwriter-guitarist-producer Jeff Lynne, ELO generated a steady stream of hit songs and albums in its original incarnation, particularly in the band’s peak years of 1974-1979. You surely have heard some of them: “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head,” “Evil Woman,” “Telephone Line,” “Mr. Blue Sky,” and “Don’t Bring Me Down” are some of the more famous, but there are many others.

I don’t want to say much more here, because you should just listen to what Scott Bertram and Jeff Blehar, the show’s co-hosts, and I talk about on the episode.

I just want to admit defeat, for the time being. For despite being a Millennial, when I had the chance to discuss my favorite music, I chose the band of a man born in 1947, whose commercial peak came while my father was in high school and college.

You win this round, Boomers.

Promoted from the Ricochet Member Feed by Editors Created with Sketch. RIP Stephen Hillenburg, Creator of ‘SpongeBob Squarepants’

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By JackButler
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Jack Butler is host of Ricochet's Young Americans podcast, former sidekick on the Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, a runner, a writer, and a Midwesterner in exile.
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Public reaction to the death of SpongeBob Squarepants creator Stephen Hillenburg, who died from ALS last Monday, might have confused those unfamiliar with his most famous work. Here was a man being mourned across all ages and demographics, from the trades to Twitter, for creating … a cartoon made and marketed for children?

But this gets SpongeBob, Hillenburg ’s magnum opus, all wrong. At its best, SpongeBob was not simply a kids’ cartoon. From the beginning, Hillenburg brought to the show a unique tone and aesthetic that drew from his background in marine biology. He attended the show’s pitch meeting in a Hawaiian shirt. SpongeBob, the relentlessly upbeat, cleaning utensil-shaped main character, lives in a pineapple under the sea; Squidward, his grouchy next-door cephalopod, inhabits an Easter Island head. And the opening theme song is sung by a portrait of a (human) pirate. Though a veteran of Rocko’s Modern Life, another successful Nickelodeon program, Hillenburg had something all his own in mind from the start.

The result of this tonal intentionality was, at its peak, a delightful, offbeat, and sometimes surreal mix of childish humor for its purported target audience, reinforced by subtle or obscure (though never tasteless) comedy for older viewers. “Help Wanted,” the first episode, which premiered on May 1, 1999 (and which I viewed then as a five-year-old), is a good example of this. On the surface, it is a silly story about a fruit-residing sponge who decides to apply for a job as a fry cook at the Krusty Krab, a fast food restaurant run by a miserly crab in his underwater hometown of Bikini Bottom, a place populated by other anthropomorphic aquatic creatures. Some puerile humor ensues; entering the restaurant, SpongeBob trips on an errant nail and proceeds to spend about a minute tripping, falling, and bouncing around. It’s very silly stuff; slapstick taken just up to the point of absurdity.

Yet there is more depth to these creatures’ oceanic surroundings than first appears. In the opening moments of the first episode, we hear a French-accented narrator begin to describe Bikini Bottom; he is meant to be a sort of Jacques Cousteau, describing the undersea life before him. (In a later episode, this “narrator” gets hit by a car.) And one of the musical motifs of the episode is the 1930 Al Sherman/Al Lewis song “Living in the Sunlight, Loving in the Moonlight” as covered by eccentric musician Tiny Tim in 1968. As a five-year-old, I laughed at the stuff meant for me. But the older I get, the more I appreciate the humor placed there for older viewers, as well as the boldness Hillenburg embraced in trying to mix the high- and low-brow in an ostensibly children-focused cartoon.

This hybridization worked wonders in the first three seasons of the show. As a result, it is almost impossible to understate the extent of SpongeBob’s cultural pervasiveness among people of my generation and younger. All it takes is a simple quote — “Is mayonnaise an instrument?”; “CHOCOLATE!?!?; “HINGA DINGA DURGEN!”; “Wumbo”; “The inner machinations of my mind are an enigma” — to set me and my peers on a nostalgia trip/reference festival. We debate our favorite characters (Squidward is mine), episodes (“SB-129,” one of my earliest exposures to time travel in popular culture, wins for me), and moments (“SpongeBob, you’re never gonna feel better unless you get this thing off your chest” is hard to beat). But SpongeBob did not merely thrive among viewers who were children in its early days. In fact, its subtler humor made it not merely tolerated by our parents and other adults, but actively sought out by them: 40 percent of season two’s viewers were aged 18 to 44.

Perhaps curmudgeons would argue that this fact is not an endorsement of SpongeBob but a condemnation of our infantilized culture, one in which grown adults refuse to leave their parents’ basements while those parents fight desperately to deny their ages. It might be hard to persuade anyone in this demographic of the greatness of SpongeBob. But there is plenty of evidence for the possibility of animation to be high art. Witness the films of Pixar and Hayao Miyazaki, the classics of Chuck Jones, and the artistic and commercial success of The Simpsons at its peak. The best SpongeBob is of a kind with these and, I humbly submit, the heir of classic Looney Tunes and The Simpsons. Indeed, SpongeBob shares more than this with The Simpsons, for it is to my generation what The Simpsons was to Generation X.

Sadly, it also shares with The Simpsons a trajectory of decline. Virtually all of its best moments and material came from the first three seasons and the first movie. We can attribute this to Hillenburg, who had a direct hand in virtually all of it. But Hillenburg left his day-to-day role on the show after the first movie in 2004. He wanted the show to end after the movie, fearing it would jump the shark if continued, but it kept going without his direct control. A noted decline in quality followed, proving him right. Cynics might argue that I am just saying this because I finally grew up and realized the show was childish and immature from the beginning, but I would reject this; I still find the show’s earlier episodes entertaining when I watch them (and yes, I still do). Later episodes have simply lacked the wit, the verve, and the subtlety of what came before.

Alas, now that Stephen Hillenburg has left us, I have little hope that SpongeBob will return to its former greatness. But he has already secured a legacy, and an immortality among all SpongeBob fans, young and old. It was Stephen’s show, Mr. Krabs. He was number one.

Promoted from the Ricochet Member Feed by Editors Created with Sketch. Revisiting (and Revising?) The White Album on Its 50th Anniversary

JackButler
By JackButler
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Jack Butler is host of Ricochet's Young Americans podcast, former sidekick on the Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, a runner, a writer, and a Midwesterner in exile.
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Last Thursday was the 50th anniversary of The Beatles, a.k.a., The White Album, The Beatles’ sprawling 1968 double-LP. I took the occasion to record a podcast on The Beatles’ musical legacy, which you can listen to here.

In the course of that podcast, I made the case for The Beatles’ greatness, even though they are most decidedly a product of the Baby Boomer culture that refuses to relinquish its death grip on us all. But I don’t think they’re entirely beyond criticism, though I wouldn’t dare make it on my own meager authority. Which is why I here invoke George Martin, who made so much of The Beatles’ music possible (as I explained here), and who believed that The White Album should have been just one album and not a double LP.

I happen to agree with this, as do other Beatles’ fans (though not all; some, such as Ricochet’s own Scott Immergut, wouldn’t dare touch this album, believing it an essential artifact of where the band was at the time. I can respect this). Among such revisionist fans, it has become a little parlor game to decide which songs to keep to make it a perfect record. Well, I gave it a try for myself. My method here was to remove songs I didn’t like, without changing the order, until I got to approximate album length for each side of the hypothetical LP.

SIDE ONE

  1. “Back in the U.S.S.R.” McCartney 2:43
  2. “Dear Prudence” Lennon 3:56
  3. “Glass Onion” Lennon 2:18
  4. “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” McCartney 3:08
  5. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” Harrison 4:45
  6. “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” Lennon 2:43
  7. “Blackbird” McCartney 2:18

SIDE TWO

  1. “Rocky Raccoon” McCartney 3:33
  2. “Yer Blues” Lennon 4:01
  3. “Sexy Sadie” Lennon 3:15
  4. “Helter Skelter” McCartney 4:29
  5. “Revolution” Lennon 4:15
  6. “Good Night” Starr 3:13

TOTAL LENGTH: 44:37

SGT. PEPPER’S LENGTH: 39:52

ABBEY ROAD LENGTH: 47: 23

And now, to justify my decisions, first for the songs I kept. I did this in a completely arbitrary, subjective fashion, made even more so by the fact that I have no real musical training. First, here’s why I kept the songs I kept:

SIDE ONE

“Back in the U.S.S.R.”

In true Beatles fashion, this is a fantastic album opener. But it’s also a foray into surf rock, and a parody of the Beach Boys using the imagery and vocabulary of the Soviet Union. I wouldn’t dare to get rid of it.

“Dear Prudence”

“Back in the U.S.S.R.” segues into this song, so I wouldn’t want to get rid of it for that reason alone. But it’s also a beautiful, relaxing number that climaxes beautifully, thanks to some drumming by not-Ringo.

“Glass Onion”

Some might argue that this song is The Beatles at their most self-indulgent, referencing their own songs and teasing those who try to find deeper meaning from them. But The Beatles have always been a bit cheeky, and that cheekiness is an indelible part of their appeal. Plus they’d earned a little meta by this point.

“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”

I am not a huge fan of this song, but I just love that The Beatles decided to do some reggae rock in 1968 because they felt like it. So it stays.

“While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

One of George Harrison’s best career compositions (not simply as a Beatle), and one of The Beatles’ best songs, period, Harrison’s heartfelt lyrics and anguished delivery secure it a spot on the perfect White Album. And Eric Clapton’s guitar work seals the deal.

“Happiness Is a Warm Gun”

In a little more than two-and-half minutes, John takes us through basically three different songs, all musically unique yet somehow not disjoint, with some pretty strong (i.e., blatant) sexual and drug-related symbolism to boot.

“Blackbird”

Closing side 1 with Paul’s simple and comforting acoustic number to come down from the orgasmic euphoria of “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” is a nice consequence of this arrangement, but “Blackbird” could follow any song on any album and I’d keep it regardless.

SIDE TWO

“Rocky Raccoon”

Maintaining continuity with Side 1 by opening Side 2 with “Rocky Raccoon,” another acoustic animal-themed number, is another happy consequence of this arrangement. But again, I would keep this song regardless of the order. Paul does a convincing Bob Dylan parody that also has something of a moral to it. Yes, please.

“Yer Blues”

By the late 60s, blues had become the province of many leading rock bands. The Beatles were well aware of this, and so they decided to make light of it somewhat…while also doing it better than virtually everyone else. John’s screams of “Yes I’m lonely…want to die…” are mocking the relentless blues sadness…but also seem somewhat credible coming from a soul as dark as his. That and mean guitar keep this on the album.

“Sexy Sadie”

John’s thinly disguised attack on Maharashi also stays on the album for being so darn catchy, and for “inspiring” Jet’s “What Have You Done” and Radiohead’s “Karma Police.”

“Helter Skelter”

The birth of heavy metal simply has to stay. The Beatles never got heavier than this, and even later metal bands had to try pretty hard to get here. Yes, Charles Manson later appropriated it into his bizarre fever dream apocalypse, but that wasn’t The Beatles’ fault.

 “Revolution”

In the late 60s, as bands became openly political (if they didn’t start there), one of the only explicitly political messages in The Beatles’ music was anti-revolution: “If you go carryin’ pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow…”; “If you’re talking about destruction/don’t you know that you can count me out…” But there was always that extra “in…”

“Good Night”

I don’t just keep this here because Ringo needs a track on the album (though he does). I genuinely enjoy this over-orchestrated, Disney-esque track, with Ringo’s calmly sung lullaby vocals (ending with spoken word). Even a halved White Album takes us to some pretty wild places, so something this comforting is a good way to end.

And now to justify what I removed. This was hard for me to do, as I do love The Beatles. And I make all of these criticisms from the supremely-elevated platform of Beatles’ greatness; i.e., I measure the band against itself, as no one else comes close. (And again, I do this in a completely arbitrary, subjective fashion, made even more so by the fact that I have no real musical training):

“Wild Honey Pie”

I don’t need to justify this. This song never should have made it out of studio diddling.

“The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”

I hate the refrain of this song, I hate the structure of the verses, I don’t care about the story it tells, I hate that it’s the answer to the Beatles’ trivia question “What Beatles’ song has a vocal from a non-member?” and I hate that that non-member is Yoko Ono.

“Martha, My Dear”

I like much of what John mockingly called Paul’s “granny music,” so it was a difficult choice for me to excise this. But it’s not even the best granny song on the album..and it’s about a dog. Dogs are great, but this is The White Album. We’ve got more important things to talk about.

“I’m So Tired”

John did the “I like to sleep” thing better on Revolver’s “I’m Only Sleeping,” which has backwards guitar and other interesting things to commend it. This just seems like another anonymous White Album track to me.

“Piggies”

I have a soft spot in my heart for this song, which is so delightfully weird that I do like listening to it. But it’s not novel enough in its weirdness to merit inclusion. Plus, I gave “Helter Skelter” a Manson pass, but I’m not sure this gets one, as its lyrics were written in blood on the wall of a Manson murder house.

“Don’t Pass Me By”

As far as Ringo county ditties go, I guess it’s better than “Act Naturally” and “What Goes On,” but that’s about all I can say about it.

“Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?”

A fun title and rousing delivery, but beyond that, forgettable and unnecessary for a pared down White Album.

“I Will”

This is one of several songs on The White Album so similar to each other that I always forget about them or can’t distinguish them from one another in my memory: slow, acoustic, simple lyrics…whatever. Get rid of it.

“Julia”

See above.

“Birthday”

This song should only be listened to on your birthday.

“Mother Nature’s Son”

This was a bit of a harder choice, as I like its structure, but it gets cut because I don’t think it’s really about anything.

“Long, Long, Long”

See answer for “Julia,” “I Will.”

“Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except For Me and My Monkey”

See answer for “Why Don’t We Do It In the Road.”

“Honey Pie”

Perhaps the hardest thing to cut. By far Paul’s best “granny music,” and a full-on Beatles music hall impression. If I could put one more song on the Half Album, this would be it.

“Savoy Truffle”

Another song I have a soft spot for, but a little ditty about Eric Clapton’s candy addiction does not make the cut. Sorry George.

“Revolution 9”

I don’t need to justify this. How this song made it on at all when The Beatles were rejecting far-superior Harrison compositions left and right is a mystery to me. This song should only be listened to on Halloween.  

So there you have it: My ideal White Album, with explanations for why I kept and cut what I did. To be sure, I still love The White Album as-is, and it was hard for me to criticize anything The Beatles did. I just think George Martin was right that a little bit of discipline might have helped. But The Beatles may have been beyond discipline by that point anyway, as the four stars had already begun to spiral away from each other’s orbits, alas.

Anyway, here’s a Spotify playlist of The White Album with only my chosen songs: I called it “Te Wie Abm” because I removed every other letter from each word. If you like my version, then you can pretend it’s the real one. Or you can make your own. Probably every Beatles’ fan has a different preference. And that’s one of many reasons why they’re so great. Even if they are proof that Baby Boomer culture just won’t go away.

A version of this post first appeared here.

Promoted from the Ricochet Member Feed by Editors Created with Sketch. Here Come the Young Americans

JackButler
By JackButler
JackButler Podcaster
Jack Butler is host of Ricochet's Young Americans podcast, former sidekick on the Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, a runner, a writer, and a Midwesterner in exile.
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In a world where Baby Boomers stubbornly cling to cultural power, where Gen X-ers won’t admit that they’re old now, and where most Millennials are too busy Netflix-and-chilling and too poor from excessive avocado toast to leave their parents’ basements and get married (to say nothing of whatever the heck the next generation is called), who will deliver the hot takes the Internet already has too many of, but in verbal form?

Leave it to the Young Americans. Led by host Jack Butler (me), an otherwise ever-shifting cast of right-leaning young people will discuss the news and culture of the day while trying to prove that some youths actually do know what they’re talking about. We’ll also attempt to offer some valuable insights about things people our age are actually experiencing.

In the course of our discussions, the Young Americans will attempt to answer for all time such weighty questions as: Are Millennials really buying too much avocado toast? Are all young people degenerates, or just most of them? Should we trust anyone over 30, and, if so, what should the actual cutoff be? 35?

Whether we answer these questions, or whether we just prove how foolish we ultimately are in our youth, you’ll have to listen to find out. So listen to Young Americans Ep.1: The Debut. 

JackButler

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