{"id":76,"date":"2014-02-25T16:31:44","date_gmt":"2014-02-25T21:31:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/?page_id=76"},"modified":"2019-03-07T13:58:33","modified_gmt":"2019-03-07T18:58:33","slug":"learning-globalization-from-the-beatles","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/previous-issues\/impact-vol-4-no-1-winter-2014\/learning-globalization-from-the-beatles\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning Globalization from the Beatles"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

BRIAN CULVER<\/h2>\n

New York University<\/p>\n

My title, \u201cLearning Globalization from the Beatles,\u201d references\u00a0one of the first essays about the Beatles by a professional academic, Richard Poirier\u2019s \u201cLearning from the Beatles\u201d (1967). I reference it because Poirier argues that the Beatles teach us both how culture needs to be redefined and how disciplines that take culture as their object of study can be reformed. Moreover, Poirier\u2019s analysis of the Beatles\u2019 song \u201cAll You Need Is Love\u201d contains prescient hints of this song\u2019s role in the history of contemporary globalization. 1<\/sup> Consequently, in my essay I would like to expand upon Poirier\u2019s by arguing that the Beatles\u2019 \u201cAll You Need Is Love\u201d not only was shaped by geopolitical forces of globalization, but also globalization\u00a0comments on them. \u201cAll You Need Is Love\u201d can teach us how to teach globalization.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll You Need Is Love\u201d was first performed on June 25th<\/sup> 1967 to an estimated audience of a half billion people as part of the first global live satellite television broadcast, \u201cOur World.\u201d The importance of the \u201cOur World\u201d broadcast in the history of globalization was exhaustively documented a decade ago by the media scholar Lisa Parks in her essay \u201cOur World<\/i>, Satellite Televisuality, and the Fantasy of Global Presence.\u201d Although \u201cOur World\u201d was not the first satellite broadcast, it was the first conceived with a deliberate global reach (Parks 74). Unsurprisingly given Marshall McLuhan\u2019s prominent role in the program\u2019s introductory segment, \u201cOur World\u201d presented itself as heralding the utopianist promise of the \u201cglobal village,\u201d one that renders \u201cour world\u201d one world, \u201cinterpellating the viewer not only as \u2018globally present\u2019 but as \u2018culturally worldly\u2019 and \u2018geographically mobile\u2019\u201d (Parks 75). But, as Parks shows, this utopianist promise scarcely hides the program\u2019s neocolonialist ideology. \u201cOur World\u201d \u2019s self-proclaimed \u201cliveness\u201d is a discourse of Western modernization, one that widens the economic and political disparities between the Global North and Global South.<\/p>\n

The conclusion of the broadcast\u2019s penultimate segment features the Beatles recording \u201cAll You Need Is Love\u201d in the Abbey Road studios. Situating this song in the context of the \u201cOur World\u201d broadcast, and this broadcast in the history of contemporary globalization, implicates \u201cAll You Need Is Love\u201d in what Doreen Massey has called the inevitable \u201cpower geometry\u201d (194) of neoliberal capitalist globalization. Moreover, this song\u2019s place in the popular imagination as the hippie anthem for the \u201cSummer of Love\u201d seems to make it an affirmation of the utopianist promise of the \u201cglobal village.\u201d But does \u201cAll You Need Is Love\u201d actually make any such affirmation?\u00a0 Let\u2019s begin with the verbal ambiguity of the song\u2019s title and refrain. Does it assert, as is commonly assumed, that love is the only thing ever needed, or that love is the one thing still needed?\u00a0 The refrain\u2019s inversion in the song\u2019s coda, \u201clove is all you need,\u201d puts the emphasis not on love but its need. Perhaps then love is the one thing still needed because it is a need that can never be met. This is precisely Richard Poirier\u2019s reading; he adds that the song\u2019s verses confirm this interpretation of its title. The three verses proceed through a series of the word \u201cnothing\u201d seven times, the first verse beginning \u201cThere\u2019s nothing you can do that can\u2019t be done,\/Nothing you can sing that can\u2019t be sung.\u201d The lyrics in fact lament the loss of any new possible makings. The musicologist Wilfred Mellers contends that the song is not celebratory but \u201cinfinitely sad\u201d (103).<\/p>\n

The song\u2019s musical features underscore these ambiguities. The song is in the key of G major, traditionally the most cheerful of keys, but the voice leading produces an E minor chord on the last word of the first two lines of each verse \u2013 for example, on the words \u201cdone\u201d and \u201csung\u201d in the first verse (Everett 124). Each verse ends with the phrase \u201cIt\u2019s easy,\u201d but the word \u201ceasy\u201d is set to an appoggiatura<\/i> (a dissonant note quickly added and then resolved, like a musical sigh), implying that it\u2019s not so easy after all. The song is most formally ambitious in its coda, comprising a string of musical quotations that includes a two-part invention by J.S. Bach, the opening riff of Glenn Miller\u2019s 1939 hit \u201cIn the Mood,\u201d the Renaissance ballad \u201cGreensleeves,\u201d and two self-quotations, the Beatles\u2019 own songs \u201cYesterday\u201d and \u201cShe Loves You.\u201d The recurrent need for love is situated in the history of music about its need. That love is a need that can never be met \u2013 that we have never had love and so perhaps never shall – is proclaimed by the recurrence of songs about it. When we attend to its verbal and musical subtleties\u00a0, we see \u201cAll You Need Is Love\u201d is revealed as highly skeptical of any kind of utopia promised by any kind of new world order.<\/p>\n

But \u201cAll You Need Is Love\u201d is neither cynical nor wholly satirical. In \u201cLearning from the Beatles\u201d Richard Poirier also contends that when the Beatles are allusive they expand a \u201csituation to the simultaneous condition of pathos, because the situation is recurrent and therefore possibly insoluble, and comic, because the recurrence has finally passed into clich\u00e9\u201d (120). If the Beatles are skeptical of the promise held out by the new \u201cglobal village,\u201d they are equally skeptical of rhetoric that simply dismisses it. When I shared\u00a0some of my ideas in this paper with a joint group of students and faculty, one of my colleagues remarked that in the song\u2019s musically allusive coda she could hear nothing but chaos. I replied that her ear might be recoiling from the song\u2019s polytonality when \u201cGreensleeves\u201d is quoted. Both the Bach and Glenn Miller quotations are transposed from their original keys to the song\u2019s cheerful key of G. Not so with \u201cGreensleeves,\u201d which is left in its original Dorian mode and so, strictly speaking, is in no key at all. Musicologist Alan Pollock compares the polytonality used here to that often used by the composer Charles Ives, for whom polytonality is not chaos but energy and excitement. \u201cAll You Need Is Love\u201d is no na\u00efve hippie love-anthem, but neither is it, contrary to Meller\u2019s suggestion, \u201cinfinitely sad.\u201d<\/p>\n

We still need to consider how \u201cAll You Need Is Love\u201d comments on what Lisa Parks calls \u201cOur World\u201d \u2019s fantasy of \u201cglobal presence\u201d which imposes neocolonialism. For Parks, this fantasy is maintained by the program\u2019s insistence on its \u201cliveness.\u201d But this insistence is contradicted by what we witness the Beatles doing \u201clive,\u201d which is making a recording. Indeed, during much of the Beatles\u2019 televised segment the mediating presence of the recording studio is highlighted. We often view the Beatles through the window of the recording studio\u2019s control room. The BBC announcer often explains that what we are hearing is not, in fact, \u201clive.\u201d \u201cThere\u2019s several days work on that tape,\u201d he declares at one point.<\/p>\n

Of course, these \u201ccanned\u201d moments equally point up that what the Beatles are making is not just a recording but a commodity, that their efforts are situated within the global marketplace of neoliberal capitalism, one that is decidedly dominated by the modern system of Western nation-states controlling the very broadcast we are viewing. Each of those nation-states participating in the \u201cOur World\u201d broadcast chose a \u201crepresentative\u201d to showcase its contribution to \u201cworld culture.\u201d The Beatles were chosen by the BBC (not without controversy) as Great Britain\u2019s \u201crepresentative.\u201d But here too ironies proliferate. \u201cAll You Need Is Love\u201d is introduced by the opening of the French national anthem, \u201cLa Marseilles.\u201d Moreover, the bass part quotes the opening three notes of \u201cLa Marseilles\u201d at the end of every line of the verse. Is this recurrent presence of the French national anthem intended as a joke directed at the choice of the Beatles as Great Britain\u2019s representative, or a more general mockery of nationalist pride, or a still more general mockery of musical anthems of any kind?\u00a0 (Or all three?) Although the song begins with a nod to the French, it does conclude with the quintessential Englishness of\u00a0 \u201cGreensleeves.\u201d But then what are we to make of the jarring polytonality it creates?\u00a0 The song\u2019s most transnational characteristic inheres in its most often remarked upon musical for \u2013 it\u2019s shifting meter. The melodic structure of most pop songs is eight measures of four beats each. Each verse of \u201cAll You Need Is Love\u201d is likewise eight measures, but it shifts between four and three beats for six of its eight bars. Such a metrical scheme closely resembles that of a tala <\/i>in Indian raga<\/i>. That the Beatles were influenced by Indian music (years before their trip to India) is well known. Musical scholarship is only recently, however, beginning to show how much of the Beatles\u2019 metrical innovations were also driven by such influence. So even before it was part of a global television broadcast, \u201cAll You Need Is Love\u201d was already the product of globalization.<\/p>\n

So what can we learn about globalization from the Beatles? Let me preface my answer with a few assertions about globalization, to most of which I suspect we can all readily assent. First, globalization is a multi-dimensional process or set of processes. That is, globalization takes place in all of the social domains \u2013 the economic, the political, and the cultural. Second, while the social domains have always been interdependent, they are made even more so by globalization. Third, although increasingly interdependent with one another, no social domain has causal priority. 2<\/sup> To these three I would like to add a fourth assertion to which we might not so readily assent:\u00a0 while interdependent with one another, the social domains are also incommensurate. By \u201cincommensurate\u201d I do not mean \u201cautonomous.\u201d In its sense of self-governing, \u201cautonomy\u201d obtains in only one social domain, the political. Consequently, \u201cautonomy\u201d is precisely the kind of term that the incommensurateness of the social domains disavows. If no social domain has causal priority, then we cannot describe globalization in any one social domain using standards of measurement appropriated from the others. Furthermore, insistence upon the incommensurateness of the social domains has major implications for both the teaching and research of globalization, especially as it addresses three of the thorniest issues of global studies:\u00a0 power, agency, and disciplinarity. Time\u00a0permits\u00a0me to address only the third of these.<\/p>\n

With the\u00a0theme of interdisciplinarity in mind, let\u2019s return to Richard Poirier on the Beatles:<\/p>\n

The Beatles are primarily musicians and musical composers…and don\u2019t choose to get stuck even within their most intricate verbal contrivances…[U]ses of words that allude both to the subject of the moment and to their constant subject, musical creation, occur in \u201cAll You Need Is Love\u201d (\u201cNothing you can sing that can\u2019t be sung\u201d)…\u201cAll You Need Is Love\u201d is decisive evidence that when the Beatles think together (or apart) about anything they think musically and that musical thinking dictates their response to other things . . . (126-28).<\/p>\n

I hope that the foregoing analysis of \u201cAll You Need Is Love\u201d shows that the song\u00a0does, in fact, engage with the issues of globalization entailed by its global context. But it is not this context that discloses its meaning. It is, rather, the context of music-making that situates the song\u2019s engagement with globalization. Per my claim of the incommensurateness of the social domains, globalization manifests itself in this song as a relation between it and other music \u2013 including other music by the Beatles themselves. The simultaneous interdependency and incommensurateness of the social domains requires not more interdisciplinarity but more disciplinarity. 3<\/sup> Lest I be thought to contradict the very premise of\u00a0the conference for which this paper was originally conceived, let me add that by \u201cmore\u201d disciplinarity I mean two\u00a0things. While I do mean more work on globalization done within the confines of the individual disciplines, I also mean more disciplines working on globalization. What\u2019s needed is not a referendum on the relevance of disciplinarity to a full account of globalization, but an increasingly greater number of disciplines producing increasingly more diverse accounts of globalization. What is needed, in short, is more occasions like the one that has just finished…now.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Notes<\/b><\/p>\n

1<\/sup> \u201cLearning from the Beatles\u201d was first published in The Partisan Review <\/i>in December of 1967 (and so scarcely six months after the release of \u201cAll You Need Is Love\u201d), then reprinted (with minor revisions) in Poirier\u2019s essay-collection The Performing Self<\/i> in 1971. The essay\u2019s re-situation in this collection especially foregrounds its argument about disciplinary reform.<\/p>\n

2<\/sup> That these three assertions are uncontroversial I deduce from their recurrent presence in introductions to global studies, such as (to cite only a couple of the most recent ones) Manfred B. Steger\u2019s introductory essay to Globalization, The Greatest Hits <\/i>(2010) and Frank J. Lechner\u2019s and John Boli\u2019s to The Globalization Reader <\/i>(2011).<\/p>\n

3<\/sup> In their essay \u201cDiscipline and Freedom,\u201d Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente argue that \u201ccurrent celebrations of interdisciplinarity often harbor within them a deep \u2013 yet insufficiently examined distrust\u201d of what both does and does not constitute an academic discipline. They further demonstrate how historicizing modern disciplinary formation reveals that interdisciplinarity was always \u201cat the heart of disciplinarity itself\u201d (2).<\/p>\n

References<\/b><\/p>\n

Anderson, Amanda and Joseph Valente. \u201cDiscipline and Freedom.\u201d Disciplinarity at the Fin de Si\u00e8cle<\/i>. Princeton University Press, 2002:\u00a0 pp. 1-15.<\/p>\n

Everett, Walter. The Beatles as Musicians: <\/i>Revolver through the <\/i>Anthology. Oxford University Press, 1999.<\/p>\n

Lechner, Frank J. and John Boli, eds. The Globalization Reader<\/i>, fourth edition. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.<\/p>\n

Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender<\/i>. Polity Press, 1994.<\/p>\n

Mellers, Wilfred. The Twilight of the Gods: the Music of the Beatles<\/i>. Schirmer Books, 1973.<\/p>\n

Parks, Lisa. \u201cOur World<\/i>, Satellite Televisuality, and the Fantasy of Global Presence.\u201d Global TV: A Global Television Reader<\/i>, ed. Lisa Parks and Shanti Kumar. New York University Press, 2003, pp. 74-93.<\/p>\n

Poirier, Richard. \u201cLearning from the Beatles.\u201d The Performing Self<\/i>. Rutgers University Press, 1971:\u00a0 pp. 112-40.<\/p>\n

Pollock, Alan W. Notes on \u201cAll You Need Is Love,\u201d #118. http:\/\/www.icce.rug.nl\/~soundscapes\/DATABASES\/AWP\/aynil.shtml. 1996.<\/p>\n

Steger, Manfred B., ed. Globalization, The Greatest Hits:\u00a0 A Global Studies Reader<\/i>. Paradigm Publishers, 2010.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BRIAN CULVER New York University My title, \u201cLearning Globalization from the Beatles,\u201d references\u00a0one of the first essays about the Beatles by a professional academic, Richard Poirier\u2019s \u201cLearning from the Beatles\u201d (1967). I reference it because Poirier argues that the Beatles teach us both how culture needs to be redefined and how disciplines that take culture […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7752,"featured_media":0,"parent":1098,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/76"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7752"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/76\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1847,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/76\/revisions\/1847"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}