costello on the beatles

I stumbled across a fine essay Elvis Costello wrote on the Beatles in Rolling Stone. Costello is a good writer, personal and analytical. The last two paragraphs are classic -- go read it!

Costello also makes an observation I haven't seen before:

[The Beatles] were pretty much the first group to mess with the aural perspective of their recordings and have it be more than just a gimmick. Brilliant engineers at Abbey Road Studios like Geoff Emerick invented techniques that we now take for granted in response to the group's imagination. Before the Beatles, you had guys in lab coats doing recording experiments in the Fifties, but you didn't have rockers deliberately putting things out of balance, like a quiet vocal in front of a loud track on "Strawberry Fields Forever." You can't exaggerate the license that this gave to everyone from Motown to Jimi Hendrix.

This, I think says something about the relation between hypertext/hypermedia/cybertext theory and digital media. The lab coats have generated a mass of great experiments, but I think we are still waiting for the digital John, Paul, George, and Ringo to write fine art with mass appeal and lasting influence.

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