Can anyone cover The Beatles?

With all of this talk about Across The Universe, a subject comes up again and again: Can the Beatles be covered successfully? A lot of people say no, I say yes. So I am curious:

Can you think of any Beatles covers that top or compete with the original?

I can give you two:
Fiona Apple's 'Across the Universe'
Stevie Wonder's 'We Can Work It Out'

Actually, I can give you a third!
Nancy Sinatra's 'Day Tripper'

Now you. Can you think of any?

Goings-on

Hamilton was great fun. Congrats to B.A. Johnston on his DVD release! Sean Ward & DJ Human Kebab got a great review on the Hamilton Tiger-Cats message board.

Video shoot last week ruled. Shut the financial district down. Some poor girl nearly crashed her car trying to make a video and drive at the same time.

Manifesto Festival was the bomb. To have all of those acts on one stage... if you grew up with Canadian Rap City when Michael Williams and then Oliver were hosting it, that closing night thing at City Hall had to be like a middle-aged person seeing Led Zeppelin, the Who, the Guess Who, and Rush all on the same bill.

Covering Nuit Blanche for Ed the Sock this weekend. Me, Brandy, and Max Brand. Might we see a certain DJ making a special appearance?

My review of Across The Universe

I'm pretty well-known as a Beatle-maniac, so a question has been popping up with great frequency: "What did you think of Across The Universe?"

As you must know by now, Across The Universe is a movie about a guy named Jude who goes from Liverpool to New York and ends up, with his American pals (Max, Lucy, Sadie, Jo-Jo, and other names all taken from Beatles song lyrics), taking part in the cultural milestones that would define the popular conception of what the 1960s were.

There's a lot to like about this movie, but for the most part it seems kind of clunky and awkward. I don't think that the music of The Beatles lends itself to this treatment, and the movie is just trying way too hard to force it. I agree that there is a drama implicit across the oeuvre, but this is a poor fit. The primary problem is that The Beatles music was not representative of the political goings-on of the times. They were always more about being timeless than being of their time, so I don't think that setting their music to this story is in keeping with the spirit of the music. Their stance was made clear in Revolution where the message, in the middle of the Vietnam War and massive cultural upheaval, is "whatever it is, don't worry about it. This too shall pass." The Beatles are timeless. They're not synonymous with that era the way Hendrix, The Doors, or scores of other artists are. And doing this same movie using any of their music might have made for a better production.

Because they're trying so hard to make the music fit the concept, certain songs need to be recontextualized to fit the plot. For an example, see I Want You (She's So Heavy). It's Uncle Sam singing "I Want You" to a Vietnam draftee, and "She's So Heavy" is sung by a bunch of soldiers carrying the Statue of Liberty through a miniature jungle. And for goodness' sake, All You Need Is Love is not about romance!

The psychedelic and abstract scenes are the most successful of the film, I just wish they would have gone a lot further with it. The Strawberry Fields Forever sequence, or the Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite sequence, either of those exist completely beyond the scope of the 60s overview the movie's trying to be. I wish they would have taken it there.

The Beatles are not a rock band. They are artists such that they could successfully 'do' any style of music they attempted. When Paul decided he wanted to do a song like the ones he grew up listening to, they didn't make a song that sounded like The Beatles doing a vaudeville number. They did a song that sounded absolutely authentic. And they did this in every style they could get near. Victorian-era English culture, surrealist art, avant-garde philosophy, all of these were much bigger influences on the group than the shifting cultural tides of the times, so maybe a psychedelic love story set in the 1890s would have been more successful. And it could be one of those movies like Marie Antoinette or A Knight's Tale, where the movie takes place way back when but is set to the sounds of now (well, forty years ago). I'm being a little silly here, getting upset over what the movie's not instead of assessing it on the merits of what it is, but still... I think that would have been more in keeping with the spirit of the source material.

But I will say this: the movie is grand, epic, and it reaches for the stars. It even manages to just barely scrape the edges of the stars with its fingertips here and there. It's definitely worth a look, but it's not the classic it really ought to have been.

Stop Worrying! Help is on the way!

So there was no Beatles on iTunes announcement last week. What a drag. But almost as exciting is finding out that HELP! is going to be on DVD! Finally!! October 29!

Tonight I'm seeing a big theatre that might be where the record release happens. I hope it's everything I'm dreaming of!

Apple/Beatles announcement tomorrow?

So tomorrow Apple is making a big announcement. I am looking forward to tomorrow because, as you know, I am a big Mac nerd. The rumor is that they are going to announce the Beatles catalog, remastered, available on iTunes. This is excellent news for me because, as you know, I am a huge Beatles maniac. That collection of music has not been updated (in terms of the quality of the sound) since 1987. Those albums were issued on CD in 1987 when CDs were brand new, and they haven't been touched since. Yeah, the hits sound great on 1, but I am looking forward to hearing all of my favorite album tracks with the bass booming and the treble sweetly swirling around the room. And apparently there's going to be new iPods, but that's not the exciting part for me.

Catching up like we used to

Last night was a fantastic night, one of the more fun ones in recent memory. Way to kill it, Herman. It was all great until I lost my glasses. That is a fuckin' drag.

I am dumb because I am all about the vidcast, but then I get in these adventures where I forgot to take my camera along and end up going "oh, this would have been awesome for the vidcast!!" Dumb.

Last night I went to sleep at about six thirty in the morning. Today I got up at two thirty in the afternoon. It's now almost four thirty, and all I feel like doing today is going to rent the second season of Weeds. I just saw the first season earlier this week and watched the whole thing, all ten episodes, in one go.

The next three months are going to be some of the busiest of my whole life but when the thing that's happening in three months (less now, actually) it is going to be bloody spectacular.