Rushing To Judgment

When I was last in the excellent Kinokuniya bookshop in KLCC in Kuala Lumpur a couple of weeks ago, I found myself sorely tempted to buy what looked like a tasty little tome by Ian MacDonald entitled Revolution In The Head. This was on the music shelf, being a sort of run-down of all the tracks recorded by The Beatles (241 of them, it seems) with other bits of essay-like pieces thrown in. It looked enticing for its chubbiness alone, but the various words of praise from sensible sort of chaps like Noel Gallagher dotted over the cover and on the first of the inside pages made it even more attractive. However, somehow I held back (having already purchased two other books when I had promised myself to abstain until I was in England) and this proved to be an unexpectedly wise decision. Last Friday I came across the same edition in the NTUC just across the road at the Esso petrol station on their cheapo cheapo book rack, just one copy, going for a mere 9 bucks! It was duly snaffled.

And duly perused over a less-than-routine weekend, basically because with the usual pattern of things disrupted, a book that could be easily, painlessly dipped into at random was about the only thing I could really settle to read.

And for once the blurb was spot on. It's a great book, a real labour of love. MacDonald is illuminating in every respect but particularly on the musical content of the songs. He brings a genuine sense of expertise to what one might loosely term popular criticism.

But there's one aspect of the book that puzzles and fascinates me in roughly equal measures, with a dash of something like irritation thrown in. He is extremely clear in his judgments of almost every song and not afraid to rubbish what he regards as rubbish. But the problem is that quite a bit of what he rubbishes seems to me to be well worth equivocating over. Whilst his expertise, and obvious love of the group, might seem to earn him the right to judge decisively, it's a bit hard to take scathing dismissals of songs like Helter Skelter. In this particular case it had never occurred to me that anyone might dismiss a track I just assumed was universally accepted as brilliant. Oddly enough I can relate to his particular criticism here, cannily related as it to the development of heavy metal and the song's relationship to that dubious genre, but it seems to me that to belittle a track that has meant so much to so many - presumably to the likes of U2, for example, electing to steal it back from Charles Manson - somehow is missing something about the music somewhere.

As I have noted before, the deep-seated need we seem to have, in matters of artistic judgment, to divide the sheep from the goats is one that we might all usefully question, and possibly restrain.