On 8 December 1980, John Lennon was killed in New York. The ex-Beatle was more than a pop icon; he stood as a symbol of a cultural movement. ‘Woman is the nig**r of the world’ (feminism), ‘Give peace… Bas Wallet13 min read·6 days ago

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Before I discuss the Beatles and social justice, I need to establish a global understanding of the economy and technological progress of the ’60s. The jet engine, invented in the ’50s, made commercial long-distance flights accessible to the general public. Car ownership became the norm, and motorway networks rapidly grew. By the early ‘60s, most Western Households owned a TV.

This progress exposed people to much broader opinions and stories than those of their pub mates and village peers. Wealthy people could travel abroad and meet foreigners, the middle class could go on road trips, and nearly everyone could watch TV. People’s worlds became bigger than someone’s home town; society started to see the world through multiple lenses.

Advertisements also penetrated people’s lives. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1947), lower transportation costs, and new digital communication caused an explosion in consumer capitalism. During the ’60s, novel products were offered at affordable prices, new forms of entertainment emerged, and exposure to new cultures changed people’s views. All this served as creative fuel.

Commercial airlines gave individuals the opportunity to visit different continents. John Lennon’s bandmate, George Harrison, travelled to India and later introduced Indian folk music to the Beatles (Love You To). The Beatles also incorporated elements from other cultures: Spanish guitar (And I Love Her), flamenco (The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill), Broadway (Good Night), and Rock and Roll. The 5th Beatle, classically trained producer George Martin, added orchestral arrangements.

The Beatles blurred the lines between genres, national cultures, and between high culture (classical music) and pop culture. The band is a great example of society’s shift in the ‘60s:

In the ’60s, the world moved from isolated and scattered cultures to a connected world of multiplicity.

American philosopher Frederic Jameson argues that the Beatles are an example of high modernism, but this claim is rather absurd. Allow me to explain.

The Nowhere Man, what is truth and morality?

Exposure to different cultures taught people that there are numerous opinions, different moral views, and, ‘god forbid,’ multiple truths. Both French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard challenge the idea of meta-narratives.

Are there universal and eternal truths? It might not be worth debating whether water boils at 100 degrees or not. Yet, what behaviours are wrong or right, what is justice, and what is objective science are heavily open to interpretation.

The diversity brought by globalism made objectivity and categories relative. Defining clear boxes and labels is much more challenging with multiple viewpoints. What trendy fashion is often depends on geographical and cultural characteristics. Dutch people need to think about their rainy bicycle commute, whilst people living in deserts think about sun and sand. Good, practical, and trendy is relative. Categories become flexible.

The Beatles’ work can’t be easily put into a specific genre. All four band members wrote songs and contributed to their diverse, genreless, and inconsistent sound — a typical postmodern sign.

However, Jameson mentions that postmodernism is not an exclusively stylistic term. It’s not only about how something looks or sounds. It’s a form of mass culture driven by capitalism.

The Beatles produced 12 records in 8 years. An absurd amount. They were, in essence, a capitalistic production machine.

One may wonder if, in some instances, quantity was prioritised over quality. The Beatles have quite a number of throw-away tracks. Some of these songs lack profundity and emotion, but records needed to be released at a considerable pace. The Beatles commodified their music and themselves. The band created their own record label (Apple Music), turning themselves into a corporate brand.

Jameson claims that:

Postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism.

The Beatles are a capitalist logic.

Sidenote:I am well aware that there are“intellectuals” and “influencers” who distort the concept of postmodernism, I suppose for political reasons. I don’t know their definition of postmodernism, and neither do they.

I will stick to Lyotard’s ‘Postmodern condition’, which coined the term, and Jameson’s ‘Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’ that laid the further foundation of the philosophical concept.

In the mid-1900s, increased wealth gave more people access to guitars, pianos, and even music production tools, causing a sudden influx of music.

Music used to belong to professional artists and the occasional niche culture (blues), but it has now become a product of the masses, leading to a simplification of music.

The 1964 Kinks debut album (You Really Got Me) best illustrates this. The band made simple power chords mainstream — a technique that was not-done amongst educated musicians.

The power chord allowed everyone with two hands and 6 strings to play rock music. Rock and roll music and the Beatles simplified music tremendously. This is also present before the Kinks’ first hits, for instance, on the Beatles’ 1963 debut album (Do You Want to Know a Secret).

The Beatles also used a concept called pastiche: borrowing elements from the past. This shouldn’t be confused with Parody. Parody is a form of copying that relies on satire and humour. It makes the consumer aware of the absurdity of the past. Yet, pastiche simply imitates without purpose. This is another form of a reduction of depth in art.

Clear examples of pastiche can be found on the Beatles’ eclectic white album: Ringo Star’s Don’t Pass Me By, an attempt at country-folk music, McCartney’s Honey Pie, a British music hall imitation, and George Harrison’s Piggies, an insult to Baroque music.

I’ve got a feeling, oh yeah

The Beatles’ pastiche songs imitate a historical feeling, an emotion that is far gone. But what about the present sentiment? Welsh cultural philosopher Raymond Williams developed the concept of a structure of feeling. What Williams means by this notion is that people have shared experiences at specific moments in time; they align behaviours and emotions.

The structure of feeling is a sentiment shared by most within a particular group.

Williams reasons that it’s deeply embedded in people’s lives but hard to grasp. Art is the best tool for analysing this sensibility.

The Beatles demonstrate the evolution of the ’60s and the structure of feeling remarkably well. When the band released their first album in 1963, they were an instant sensation; they resonated with their younger audience because they were seen as rebellious.

However, how did they present themselves? The lads appeared perfect sons-in-law, dressed in suits, neat haircuts, and freshly shaved faces. This gives a glimpse of how little variation in human demeanour there was in the early 1960s. The fab 4 combined their decent suits with fairly basic rock and roll music and simple lyrics about love.

The image of the Beatles changed dramatically quickly. Only 3 years later, the band appeared with a marching band aesthetic (pastiche). They had bizarre and colourful costumes, long beards, and songs about drugs (Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds).

The decent chaps became radical hipsters. They paved the way for the Woodstock festival and the flower power movement. The structure of feeling in the early ‘60s drastically differed from that in the late ‘60s.

Since the ’60s, the world has had access to more reliable and instant information, which allows for quick decision-making. The global financial system has been redeveloped. The gold standard was abolished so that (mainly US and dollar-dominated) financial institutions could carry out an awful lot of acrobatics to control the global economy. Cargo transportation systems were also optimised.

These developments caused a shift from the localised assembly line factory (Fordism) to a system where different product parts could be manufactured across the globe and assembled at their final destination. McKinsey consultants started to throw terms like outsourcing, flexible supply chains, process optimisation, and labour cost reduction into the boardroom.

Businesses could create their products in cheaper regions; therefore, blue-collar workers in the West were no longer needed. Instead, the West needed clever coordinators in suits: the service sector and PowerPoint economy were born.

The corporate elites consequently gained more power to fight labour unions. The C-suite could now select a low-income country for a company’s manufacturing and thus negotiate tax policies, regulations, and labour laws.

The consumer was the big ‘winner’ in this new production ecosystem. For instance, fashion could be put in the shops much faster and for lower prices, so the very early predecessor of fast fashion was established. The newest Beatles record was also much quicker in the record shop.

The shift from Fordism to a flexible, decentralised, and multi-national production is what British-American academic David Harvey calls flexible accumulation.

Harvey also developed the concept of space-time compression. The infrastructure created in the 20th century enables businesses to access information and communicate much quicker. People can also reach other parts of the world much faster, either physically or virtually, de facto, making the world smaller.

Let’s assume a certain paperback writer in 1966. This person would go to work, but to conduct research for his thousand-page book (give or take a few), he needs to go to the library. He has to move there physically, go through the aisles to find the right books and browse the pages to get the information he wants. In today’s age, a simple online search will give him the same information. He needs less time and needs to cover less space. Time-space is compressed.

People’s ease of life has significantly increased, and information flow is so smooth that brains are exposed to so much data that individuals can hardly live without benzos, CBD, or SSRIs. Help! Information is instant and can be acquired from anywhere in the world.

I have already discussed how inspiration from other cultures in art has become much more widespread, but a reversed ‘harmonisation’ of styles has also become the norm.

As someone who lives in France, I find it painful to see how the unique regional architectural city centres are now surrounded by bog-standard mass-production houses. Each region’s distinctive character is slowly disappearing.

Gentrification is quite apparent in the gastronomy sector. In each developed part of the world, one can eat the same pizza Hawaii, Tex-Mex burger, or California maki (fusion kitchen) and drink that oh-so-familiar flat white soymilk latte.

A more absurd phenomenon is replicas of original buildings appearing across the globe — the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas or Tokyo, or an imitation of Amsterdam as a hotel in Turkey.

So, where are we in time? Where are we in history? And where are we headed… in space? American political scholar Francis Fukuyama claims in his 1989 essay that the end of history has been reached. What he meant by this is that we are witnessing

“the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

He celebrates that

“the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness”

and that

“it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society.”

In other words, humankind had enough time, conflicts, and liberal victories to develop enough to be satisfied with what we’ve politically become.

Mind you, Fukuyama wrote this in the year the Lambada was one of the most popular songs worldwide. According to Fukuyama, the ideological jigsaw fell into place and showed a picture of liberal democracy. The world could be satisfied with the end of the cold war. The west has “won” and it will be mostly uphill from here.

Fukuyama’s claims did not convince Frederic Jameson. Jameson does agree we have reached a particular end in history, but this end is not about time but about space. Society has reached its spatial limits with

“the entrance of capitalism into a new third stage and its consequent penetration of as yet uncommodified parts of the world, which make it difficult to imagine any further enlargement of the system.”

The capitalistic world has thoroughly (neo-)colonised the planet, its resources, and its labour force, so it’s hard to imagine how history (and its space) would expand further.

It’s now a few decades after Fukuyama and Jameson wrote their texts, and we all know neither was correct. The world is still trying to find out which governmental and capitalistic/economic systems work, and the global powers are still constantly fighting over terrain/resources/influence on Earth and in the extraterrestrial realm.

Sure, the ’60s caused a massive shift that moved the world from isolated cultural silos into one of connectivity. The world can produce more, people can travel effortlessly, companies use resources and workforces regardless of their geographical location, and intellectuals and artists draw from a wide variety of cultures.

The world has become one big connected system. Yet, it hasn’t settled into a final state.

Art hasn’t reached its final form either. Jameson nevertheless makes this absurd claim:

“Writers and artists of the present day will no longer be able to invent new styles and worlds — they’ve already been invented; only a limited number of combinations are possible; the unique ones have been thought of already. … In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles.”

This is an insult to any form of creativity.

Of course, there are only 11 notes on a musical scale. But, technology brings new opportunities, sounds, frequencies, and beats. Heck, artists like Jacob Collier even create microtonal music, using notes deviating from the 11-note scale. Collier’s scale contains a gazillion notes.

Stronger and lighter materials give architects options that were physically impossible in the past. Artistic possibilities for architects are endless. The same is true for visual art, which can now be created as moving holograms.

Art is not dead, neoliberal democracy is not the final form of governance, and global and extraterrestrial borders are not ossified.

The world undoubtedly often lacks imagination and gets stuck in the past. Greed, vanity, and xenophobia also ensure that space is still at play. Yes, the future has an infinite number of possibilities for change. Or destruction.

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