What Is It To Be Human? The Beatles

This week I was asked to write an article for a very local and very unread magazine. The article was suppose to act as a collaborative written portrait of The Beatles. Each writer was asked to write 300 words in response to "What is your favourite Beatles song?" I couldn't do it. How do you label one Beatles song a favourite? How after listening to every one of their Studio Albums do you sit down and select one song, a window of perhaps 4 minutes and say "this is exactly why I like the Beatles". I just couldn't do it. It felt exactly like my hopes to be Pope; impossible. Only this time it was impossible for reasons beyond my gender.

 

A friend once said "I just don't understand how The Beatles are relevant anymore". It is safe it say that we are no longer friends. The Beatles were (and still are) the most unprecedented musicians known to humanity. No one before, and no one after has impacted music like they did. I recently watched a bit of a rockumentary on The Beatles. It covered their first US Tour; the ultimate uprise of the Beatle-mania epidemic. It is so easy to forget how many people the music of The Beatles has effected. Because each time I listen, they seem to be talking directly to me. It is almost as if no one can touch our conversation.  

 

But perhaps instead of "What is your favourite Beatles song" the editors of the very local and very unread magazine should have posed the question "What is it to be human?" I don't know music. But I do know, a little about emotion. Music is such a precise carving of emotional expression; it is instant and extraordinary beauty. Perhaps, what I like most about the Beatles is that through the evolution of their sound... so many emotions are tapped into. The Beatles drag you to the core of humanity; there is a song that exists for everything.

 

 The Beatles endure me. And that is what I like about them. I like that my favourite Beatles song in January 2004 is different to my favourite Beatles song March 2013. My current favourite Beatles song is In My Life.  But that will probably change by next Friday because I have a whole palette of emotion to dip my brush in between now and then.