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Scrolling the Beatles tag every day like it's the morning paper

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I know George's spiritual misadventures are lowkey kinda funny, but also, if we're being real, rich people with an utterly shredded sense of normalcy and self worth are basically target number one for cults. It's not really that weird that someone who had been subjugated by a toxic/abusive system for a decade or more would have a weak understanding of normal, healthy attachments, and might even trend towards relationships where he is subservient

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I love seeing the most insane bad faith drama for fandoms I'm not involved in it's so funny like paragraphs upon paragraphs taken so seriously by both parties and it reads like. fuck you if you think the itsy bitsy spider WANTED to crawl up the spout and not that she was pressured into it by th-

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It took me a minute to recognize Beware of Darkness in the opening sequence of Weapons (that's how hard the movie grabs you right from the start) but it did make me realize George has a real autumn night kind of voice

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Happy birthday @bobdylans116thdream !!! ❤️❤️❤️

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"The song isn't 'we are on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve and it's hurting our post-war recovery.''"

lol true. There's the fascinating Datebook interview from him though which both shows his naivety and an awareness that something was wrong he couldn't fully articulate.

“He thinks that his, George’s personal taxes are going directly to pay for F111’s. He sees Mr. Wilson, the Prime Minister of England, as the Sheriff of Nottingham, ‘There he goes,’ George said bitterly,  ‘Taking all the money and then moaning about deficits here, deficits  there – always moaning about deficits.’ In fact, he approves of nobody in authority, religious or secular. These people are called Big Cheeses or King Henrys. They should practice what they preach, and, according to George, they do not. ‘Take  teachers,’ he said. ‘In every class when I was at school there was always a little kid who was scruffy and smelly; and the punishment was always to sit next to the smelly kid. Fancy a teacher doing that.’”

“I think about [the war in Vietnam] every day, and it’s wrong. Anything to do with war is wrong. They’re all wrapped up in their Nelsons and their Churchills and their Montys – always talking about war heroes. Look at All Our Yesterdays. How we killed a few more Huns here or there. Makes me sick. They’re the sort who are leaning on the walking sticks and telling us a few years in the Army would do us good.”

George's continuous suspicion of authority is super interesting to me. I've always felt the common take of him being driven by money was simplistic considering how much he freely gave away. Not to say it was irrelevant, but it seems to me more like he never believed the government intended to use the money for noble reasons.

Ooh this is so interesting, I've never seen it before!! Even setting aside that it's George, it's just fascinating to see what people with their ear to the ground thought about their leadership at the time. I've always thought that inherent suspicion of authority was partly a Catholic thing -- but it's also a reasonable reaction to the authority he was presented with. I can't say I don't relate. Thank you for sharing!!

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I think this applies to their relationship with money too. People listen to Taxman within a modern context of typical greedy rich person, but it was more complicated than that.

It came from a place of working class anxiety that what they had was fleeting and George could easily find himself back to where he was as a kid. He was young and not contemplating late stage capitalism. As far as he knew, he'd been working his ass off for a better life and the gov was taking what they earned to protect the British empire. Families who came from wealth and owned a ton of land weren't affected by the tax in the same way.

The Beatles didn't know how long they'd be famous or remembered. They didn't know how long they could live on what they had. They saw their 50s heroes lose their spot in the zeitgeist very quickly.

All these artists were also hugely taken advantage of by record companies and hangers-on. Several like Dick Dale were forced to tour until they died because their money was taken from them in bad deals. The Beatles ended up fine, but it was their solo careers which made the difference, and for Paul, buying music rights. George and Ringo were particularly vulnerable.

This isn't to be like oh poor Beatles weren't even richer. But to acknowledge the circumstances for artists weren't the same then and their anger with the system makes sense under proper context. It's kinda like the debate around the actor strikes in Hollywood.

YES I have had this exact same thought. Britain's post-war economic policy is..... controversial, to say the least. I don't consider myself an econ person but I have yet to see anyone ever claim that their policy had a meaningful impact on wealth inequality, which is the context I see people erroneously applying to Taxman. I understand why, because that's the context the internet sees taxes through now, but it's a bit unrealistic to assume it's how George or anyone else would have seen it at the time. Well-crafted economic policy is a rare and beautiful thing, well-crafted and well-implemented even rarer, and I think it's fair to say that post-war Britain did not have that.

That being said, I doubt George had a terribly sophisticated understanding of the situation, either. The song isn't "we are on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve and it's hurting our post-war recovery", it's "damn you're taking a LOT of my money and that's making me feel anxious because I grew up in the public housing system." Like you said, they weren't assured of their financial security to the degree that we in 2025 would assume.

People also tend to forget that if you experience financial insecurity as a child you will always feel the shadow of it throughout your adult life -- you will never have enough to feel secure, and you will never stop reaching for the next level of safety. The best example in the Beatles is actually probably Paul. He experienced enormous financial anxiety as a very young child, and it's evident in pretty much every business and financial decision he's made for his entire life. No one becomes a billionaire by accident, but you don't develop that mindset by accident, either.

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“A lot of critics didn’t understand why there was sudden laughter after Within You Without You on Sergeant Pepper. Some said it must have been put in by the others, to mock George’s Indian music. It was completely George’s idea. ’Well, after all that long Indian stuff you want some light relief. It’s a release after five minutes of sad music. You haven’t got to take it all that seriously, you know. You were supposed to hear the audience anyway, as they listen to Sergeant Pepper’s show. That was the style of the album.’”

— The Beatles: The Authorized Biography (1968) (x)

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but the fool on the hill sees the sun going down and the eyes in his head see the world spinning 'round 'round and 'round and 'round and 'round and 'round

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Beatles Tumblr blogs will be like 'one time Paul McCartney lactated and Yoko stole his breastmilk to create a stew" and you'll be like "that must be from a fanfic" then you'll look it up and the source is Ringo

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BANG BANG! MAXWELLS SILVER HAMMER CAME DOWN UPON HIS HEAD! 🔨

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serving face with mama

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I know this is five years old but it's kind of a fascinating example of how the "not like other girls" discourse fell to pieces, because the artist in question is actually nonbinary they/them. The whole "pick me" thing started as a really interesting conversation about women who will throw other women under the bus for male attention, and then through the telephone game of the internet it evolved into a derogatory term for any AFAB person who doesn't present in a traditionally feminine way. Including people who aren't actually girls in the first place.

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Something I've been thinking about wrt acknowledging The Beatles were only human is that they were as much at mercy to the norms of the era as anyone else and that gets easily forgotten because they seemed larger than life.

It gets more obvious the older you get that they simply didn't know what they were doing and were following in the footsteps of their parents' generation.

So you get John marrying Cyn after finding out she's pregnant even though he's not at all ready for it. It's what he was expected to do. That marriage was never going to end well, especially once The Beatles became successful.

Paul almost married Dot for the same reason. Imagine how that would've gone down. Eventually it happened with Linda and luckily worked out.

George marries Pattie because that was the next milestone to achieve as an adult after getting money and a house. It's what his parents did. Now he could be a normal man. Except of course he couldn't. He barely knew who he was as an individual before committing to a lifelong partnership. When they couldn't have children it was like they lost all sense of purpose.

Ringo initially was a natural family man but obviously that didn't last.

Then as the 60s go on The Beatles gradually realize they've achieved everything they possibly could while still in their 20s and they're surrounded by temptation. Those relationships were only going to ever end in hurt.

The point here isn't to absolve them of criticism or say they weren't in control of their actions. It's more that, famous people in the 60s were in the strange position of trying to balance two types of lives because they didn't know what else was possible. Not until it was too late.

Put The Beatles in the modern era and they probably make some different choices. We should talk more about that I think...The Beatles were a classic case study of the damaging effects of societal pressure to conform to the nuclear family.

This is so fascinating, thank you for sharing! I'm afraid I don't have much to say atm, but I'm excited to see what others think. It's a really interesting idea and one I haven't really thought about before.

It's a little off topic, but I had a professor in undergrad who used to say that the 60s actually happened in the 70s. By which he meant that the way most people picture the 60s actually came later, and the 60s still had far more social pressure to conform and a more powerful current of traditionalism than we imagine. It was a time of upheaval, but also essentially a liminal space between traditionalism and change.

I've noticed a lot of people have this dividing line in their brain between "history", or things that happened so long ago they no longer occurred in a familiar world, and "the past", or things that are old but aren't alien. And for a lot of people the dividing line seems to be the 60s -- things that happened in the 70s, 80s, 90s, etc are past but not untouchable, things that happened in the 50s, 40s, 30s, etc are from another world. I think it might have to do with whether you know anyone who was alive back then, idk.

But the point is, everything that took place in the past took place in a world that is alien, and nothing that took place in history is truly untouchable. It all flows into today. There's no point where you step through a portal into a different world, just every day flowing into the next and everything that came before telling us where we are now.

The Beatles existed in that liminal space between history and the past, where we tend to judge them as if they were operating in a world that is just like our own, while also failing to see how much their choices reflect on where we are today.

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I've been exercising enormous self control in not posting about LBJ on main and not posting about Beatles on the LBJ blog but the delightful similarities between Paul and Lyndon are getting to be too much for me to handle at this point

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hi everyone here's more musician art I made since the last art post got way more love than I was expecting !!! paul and paul and paul and george and robert plant ⭐ ok thank u xoxo follow my art insta @artsyflea_

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My new favorite excuse for not jumping on new trends or bandwagons is 'I'm 30.' No more explanation needed because anyone under 30 just thinks I'm old and everyone over 30 understands implicitly