Playing With the White Album (original) (raw)

Notes on the Beatles' "White Album" in the Year 2022

2023

Notes on The Beatles' 'White Album' in the Year 2022, considers the historical context and literary content of certain tunes from the Beatles' 1968 album that speak to the continuing problem of violence in America over half a century later. A surprising admixture of religion and gunplay, it is argued, appears in these compositions. This essay arose in relation to the insurrection in Washington in January 2021, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the series of mass shootings that were occurring across America during the spring and summer of 2022. "Notes on the Beatles' 'White Album' in the Year 2022," in Enduring Violence in America: Two Essays by Theodore Louis Trost," Occasional Papers of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh, Scotland (March 2023): 17-25; 29-32. Also online: https://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/news/enduring-violence-america

The Beatles as Performers of Cultural Memory

2016

Critical commentary on neo-Victorian art focuses predominantly on prose fiction produced by a single author. This focus generates definitions that can prove limiting when applied to other media. Neglected are works that are clearly neo-Victorian in character, but which are collaborative in origin, or are fanciful or ludic, which are expressed in mixed media, or which predate the development of neo-Victorian critical theory-all of which are true of the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and their film Yellow Submarine (1968). Concepts drawn from theorists of cultural memory can expand the canon of neo-Victoriana to include these and other works of art and craft which would otherwise remain marginalised, unrecognised, or insignificant.

John, Paul, George and Richard: The Beatles' Uses of Literacy (book chapter: RICHARD HOGGART: CULTURE AND CRITIQUE, eds. Michael Bailey & Mary Eagleton, 2011)

With close reference to Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957), this chapter emphasises the influence of working-class culture on the songwriting of John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. The chapter also discusses Hoggart's rarely-cited (and often cautious) comments on The Beatles' work. (This chapter was published in the edited collection Richard Hoggart: Culture and Critique, edited by Michael Bailey and Mary Eagleton (Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, Nottingham UK, 2011).