Episode 74: The Beatles Cinematic Universe with Monia the Exiled Fan

My guest for this episode was Monia the Exiled Fan! (She was previously on Episode 54 and Episode 47.)

The inspiration for this episode was Monia’s post on the Beatles Cinematic Universe, which you may want to read before you listen. We discuss in depth two of the films from her post—Backbeat (1994) and Two of Us (2000).

As I’ve mentioned on here numerous times, I was a Beatles fanatic when I was a teenager, around the time of the Beatles Anthology (1995) and the “new” Beatles song “Free As A Bird”. I read biographies and memoirs, listened obsessively to my cassettes, watched and re-watched their films, and learned some half-assed covers on acoustic guitar. It was a very different style of fandom than what’s on offer today. The article I mention in the episode on how Gen Z revived Beatlemania gives many good examples:

Now Beatle fans use the same tools as Taylor Swift’s Swifties, Beyoncé’s Beyhive or Harry Styles’s Harries to keep a band that broke up more than 50 years ago. Where their forebears threw jelly babies, the new Beatles fanatics carefully craft fancam edits and trade memes.

In the article, the author talks to Gen Z fans who engage with the Beatles as if they were… One Direction or Taylor Swift.

“That’s what made me fall in love with them,” Redondo says. “The way their distinctive personalities come together, it feels like they’re family, or your group of friends.

I may have daydreamed about being in the 1960s and hanging around outside the Apple Corps building with the Scruffs but the Beatles were never my family or my group of friends. They were historical figures and real, very untouchable people. Sure, I had a schoolgirl crush on a young George Harrison in A Hard Day’s Night but I also knew that he was an old guy living the UK and being a fan felt very different from the fan practices around something like Star Trek, which I was also into around the same time. Those characters really did start to feel more like a group of friends after reading the tie-in novels and fan fiction that built on the “what ifs” (what if Tasha Yar never died????) What seems to have happened in the couple of decades that I’ve been out of the Beatles game is that the Beatles have fully ceased to be real people and are now just another an IP franchise. The fandom practices of Trekkies and Beatlemaniacs have merged.

Don’t get me wrong. There have been Beatles IP properties and Beatles lore-making dating all the way back to when the Beatles were still active. The Greil Marcus piece from 1977 that I reference in the episode (“Beatledata: They Should Have Known Better”) references a “what if” novel titled Paperback Writer: A New History of the Beatles. And well before the current K-Pop trend towards the commodification of idol images in cute cartoon avatars, the Beatles had the “very first weekly series to feature animated versions of real people”. The loveable moptop characters of John, Paul, George, and Ringo—the four best friends anyone ever had—have outlasted not only the the life of the group itself but also of two of its members. “Beatle John” is still alive and snarking on Tiktok four decades after John Lennon was shot. The difference with twenty years ago is that I think we as fans did still have an awareness of the Beatles as real, living breathing people. And that part has faded as the young fans have lost the real connection to the human beings who made all of that great music.

Does it matter that this stuff—the memes, the historical tidbits, the lore—has become the story of the Beatles instead of the artistic story of their music? When we live in a pop music world built by the Beatles and their successors, can the young fans even hear what made them stand out 60 years ago? When Beatles songs are the musical wallpaper used in movies, sitcoms, and commercials, is the appeal of the lore the only thing keeping them relevant?

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The songs played are:

1. “I’ve Got A Feeling” performed by the Fifth Dimension

2. [Paul McCartney on the Chris Farley Show]

3. “All You Need is Love” performed by One Direction

4. “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” performed by Elton John

5. “Act Naturally” performed by Loretta Lynn

6. “Money” performed by the Backbeat band

7. “Long Tall Sally” performed by the Backbeat band

8. [Ian Hart interviewed by Bobby Wygant]

9. “Michelle” performed by the Free Design

10. “Let it Be” performed by Tennessee Ernie Ford

11. “She Said She Said” performed by the Black Keys

12. “Drive My Car” performed by the Donnas

13. [Jonny Buckland of Coldplay song introduction]

14. “I am the Walrus” performed by Oasis

15. “Ticket to Ride” performed by the Vanilla Fudge