13 ms·
The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back
- grujicd 5y agoIf you ever played in a band, even if it's a middle-aged-friends-with-minimal-talent one, you'll enjoy Get Back immensely. It looks so real. Even if you weren't in a band, but in some other kind of a team of peers, you'll enjoy how group dynamics plays out. I still didn't manage to watch part 3, but first two are pure gold.
- tomcam 5y agoThere's just nothing like getting into a groove when you're in a band.
- munificent 5y agoPlaying music with other people is one of life's greatest joys.
- cm2012 5y agoPart 3 is the payoff!! You've got to watch the rooftop concert.
- tomcam 5y agoBeatles fan since 1963 here. Easily the best thing I've ever read about them. All the mind-reading, which I generally hate in profiles like this, is pretty well justified by context. For anyone creative, Peter Jackson's "Get Back" can be both heartening and devastating: the former because it reminds you that a lot of creativity is sweat equity, and the latter because holy shit, they just had it like no one else.
- gumby 5y agoI'm actually not a huge fan of the Beatles* but wow, I really enjoyed this essay. * I think it's because they are simply so good (an the sense explained in this essay) that I just heard them too much over the last 50+ years and they have become as much a universal cultural cliche as, say, Shakespeare. I have certainly listened to them a lot, with pleasure, but not so much in the past couple of decades.
- lapetitejort 5y ago> they have become as much a universal cultural cliche Same thing happened to me when I first listened to U2's Joshua Tree and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. The first halves just sound like Greatest Hits records. But nope, they're just so ubiquitous that I've already heard half the album through cultural osmosis.
- js2 5y agoBono doesn’t think he’s a very good singer. https://www.vulture.com/2022/01/bono-embarrassed-by-u2.html https://www.vulture.com/2022/01/bono-embarrassed-by-u2.html
- sockpuppet69 5y ago
- AutumnCurtain 5y agoIronic nickname, then ("Bono Vox" being the original form)
- not1ofU 5y agoTIL what that actually means (the wiki bit below). Its also the name of a hearing aid company in Ireland [0], making it even more ironic. Pretty sure this is where the name originated from. Found out that (according to wikipedia)[1]: "is an alteration of bonavox, a Latin word which translates to "good voice"." [0] - https://www.bonavox.ie/ https://www.bonavox.ie/ [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bono https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bono
- tssva 5y agoHe is far from alone in thinking that. Even among music critics that are generally positive about U2 there has always been a fair amount of criticism of his voice.
- WalterBright 5y ago
- klelatti 5y agoIf you enjoyed this then there is a good chance you will also enjoy Ian Leslie’s ‘64 Reasons to Celebrate Paul McCartney’, one of my favourite reads of 2020. https://ianleslie.substack.com/p/64-reasons-to-celebrate-paul-mccartney https://ianleslie.substack.com/p/64-reasons-to-celebrate-pau...
- aidepast 5y agoThey were blue-collar artists. They just tried. They did not wait for ideal conditions. Solomon in Ecclesiastes 11 preaches such wisdom. They planted seeds without bothering to check the weather. Some of their seeds sprouted anyway, while those who waited for perfect weather, never planted at all, and grew nothing. "Genius" is just practice, and deliberate at that. You don't see it. It's not some dramatic characteristic that you see in Paul McCartney, or whoever; No, John Nash was not intensely examining numbers and equations as they were dramatically floating around him like in "A Beautiful Mind". He did exactly what you do, only without the neuroticism; without the time-wasting; without the rumination. Just plant the damned seeds. See what happens. Stop wasting your time ruminating. Imagine if Bach, or Da Vinci, Palestrina, Van Gogh, or Von Neumann decided to wait, and wait, until everything was just right, before they begin their studies/work. Nobody today would recognize those names. You would not be able to listen to Missa Papae Marcelli. It would just not exist. These people would be called "workaholics" today, an incredibly unfortunate term. Bach wrote over 1,000 pieces in his career. Van Gogh has over 900 paintings in less than 10 years. As far as I can see at this point, "geniuses" are simply people who do not waste their time. Q3/Q4 of the Eisenhower Matrix is another planet to them. They live on the "Important" row, and they utilize that time. To tie this into the HN community - think of the people who "want to learn to program" and yet they spend all of their time ruminating on which book to read, or language to learn, et cetera.
- klelatti 5y agoIt’s a necessary but not sufficient condition. Not everyone who works as hard as the Beatles achieves what they did.
- nickff 5y ago>"Not everyone who works as hard as the Beatles achieves what they did." Definitely true that they had a remarkable result, but I don't know of anyone who actually works/worked that hard and 'failed' (by any reasonable definition). Most people tend to dramatically overstate their persistence and work ethic.
- 5y ago
- WalterBright 5y agoI find it implausible that 4 school chums from Liverpool turned out to be musical geniuses. It's much more plausible that they were reasonably smart, really loved music, and worked very hard learning to play. Once one learns to play well, moving into composition is a natural step. It's unsurprising that the Beatles' music they created as a group was better than what they did afterwards (much better). After all, if you're John Lennon, who is going to tell you your latest song sux, and btw, here's an improvement to it? Nobody but a fellow Beatle.
- paperoli 5y agoIt seems you're looking at the probability the wrong way. There are thousands of chums all over the world making music. Some had more talent and were therefore more likely to become successful.
- cammikebrown 5y agoSo why aren’t there a bunch of bands like the Beatles? Are you saying nobody worked as hard as them? They were only together less than a decade.
- vlunkr 5y agoDepends on what you mean by "like the Beatles." If you mean popularity, it's because there's only so much room culturally for artists to reach that level of popularity. They are essentially the mascot for Rock and Roll music and there's no changing that.
- WalterBright 5y agoLed Zeppelin comes to mind.
- sangnoir 5y ago> Are you saying nobody worked as hard as them? I think very few bands since have worked as hard as the Beatles. Their 2 years in Hamburg playing long hours in night clubs daily is something few bands can do (or would want to), and that forged them into something special (not just in technical musicmanship). The Beatles never shied from putting in the work.
- verisimi 5y agoThere are surely intelligent and capable people, but I tend to think the term 'genius' is used when there is a branding exercise being undertaken.
- WalterBright 5y ago> using a show to perform songs from the album they just made is what ANY NORMAL BAND WOULD DO. But no. John and Paul get together before Christmas and decide they have to create a whole album’s worth of new songs, That kind of struck me. I save all my presentations, so I can use them again. But I never do, I always gotta make a new one.
- anonu 5y ago> Since it aired, he has been getting texts from fellow writers who, having watched it, now have the urge to meet up and work on something, anything, together. It's like some form of "recency bias". Its a similar effect to when the Tennis US Open is in NYC and in the weeks before and after the event its impossible to get a tennis court.
- wolverine876 5y agoI almost always dislike HN comments that find fault, but: encomiums, anomie, Antipodean, recce, &c. I love language and people using the rich breadth and depth of it, beautifully and resonantly. Here, these words are either misused or my understanding of the author's meanings are far off the mark, over and over, to the degree that I don't know what they could mean (beyond misuse of these words). I haven't seen the documentary, however, so maybe that is the case. The essay doesn't need them, these words fall (IMHO) awkwardly into sentences.
- michael_nielsen 5y agoThey seemed fine to me. If I was his editor I'd have changed encomium, but it's not terrible. Anomie and Antipodean seem well used. In particular, I enjoyed and found thought-provoking his replacement of the cliche "agony and the ecstasy" by "anomie and the ecstasy". I've no strong opinion on recce, which is not a word I regularly use.
- iainmerrick 5y ago“Recce” is the kind of word you might use in the Scouts or Territorial Army, so it has some macho outdoorsy connotations that work really well here. Lovely writing overall. I especially agree that “the anomie and the ecstasy” is delightful.
- wolverine876 5y ago> I enjoyed and found thought-provoking his replacement of the cliche "agony and the ecstasy" by "anomie and the ecstasy" Ha. I didn't catch that (though I still think anomie doesn't make sense there - see the other subthread).
- egypturnash 5y agoFrom the American English dictionary Apple provides... Encomiums: a speech or piece of writing that praises someone highly. Lou Reed, not noted for his gushing encomiums about fellow artists, said, “They just made the songs up, bing bing bing. They have to be the most incredible songwriters ever - just amazingly talented.” Anomie: lack of the usual social or ethical standards in an individual or group. I think we learn something along the way, too: that the anomie and the ecstasy are inseparable. Antipodean: relating to Australia or New Zealand (used by inhabitants of the northern hemisphere) I wondered if [Get Back] was the result of a man who, locked down in his Antipodean editing suite, had waded too deep into his material and lost control of it, a Kurtz in the Beatle jungle. Peter Jackson is from New Zealand :) recce: another term for reconnaissance (only found in the British English dictionary) We see how much [Paul McCartney] relishes his physicality, scaling the gantry, climbing the chain, leaping up to the rooftop for a recce.
- digbybk 5y agoIt’s surprising to me how many of my disparate interests, unrelated to my work in software, are represented here in HN.
- JaggerFoo 5y agoThe author should post some of this to Wikipedia. Then a greater audience can read details they may have missed from the series - and possibly re-watch it with a different perspective. Peace and Love
- zabzonk 5y ago> Then a greater audience can read details they may have missed from the series - and possibly re-watch it with a different That is what Wikipedia is for? Who knew?
- motohagiography 5y agoOnly half way through and this is epic. Written beautifully. Thank you.
- ssklash 5y agoWhat I wouldn't give for an equivalent film about Led Zeppelin making one of their albums. Though I feel like they'd be the last band to ever agree to it. I first thought watching Get Back might "spoil" the magic of how the Beatles made records. But somehow seeing all the quotidian banality and hard work made it all the more impressive.
- asimpletune 5y agoThe quotidian \ Aches and pains \ Of being \ A being
- mr_sturd 5y agoI loved the slight glimpse you get of it on It Might Get Loud. Jimmy Page taking about When The Levee Breaks in the house where IV was recorded.
- JaggerFoo 5y agoNothing to do with the article, but I liked looking at the culture, at the time, in the film. Like the old man in the trench coat and pipe, that walks onto the roof across the way during the second take of "Get Back". You see him again during the song "Dig a Pony" - I guess he liked the Beatles, I wouldn't have guessed.
- Rebelgecko 5y agoThe interviews with people on the street during the performance were funny. I got the feeling that the interviewer was looking for older people and trying to get them to say it was a noisy nuisance. One of the first people shown was an older woman talking about how lovely it was to hear music on her way home from work.
- kstenerud 5y ago> This is strange, in a way, since the series does not present an obviously alluring portrait of creative collaboration. Its principal locations are drab and unglamorous: a vast and featureless film studio, followed by a messy, windowless basement. The catering consists of flaccid toast, mugs of tea, biscuits and cigarettes. The participants, pale and scruffy, seem bored, tired, and unhappy much of the time. None of them seem to know why they are there, what they are working on, or whether they have anything worth working on. As we watch them hack away at the same songs over and over again, we can start to feel a little dispirited too. Are you kidding me?? This is probably the most inspiring part of the whole show! This is how you create things. It's a long, "unglamorous" slog full of dead ends, muck & mire, and discovery. This is what gets an artist excited - the oeuvre in gestation, the birthing pains, the grim determination depsite not knowing whether you're pursuing genius or madness! Gets me fired up every time. The completed creation is usually a bit of a downer, like when you finish a good book.
- anonymousDan 5y agoIt's interesting to contrast all the praise for this video with the criticism of the very idea of group brainstorming as a useful activity in another article posted on HN the other day (sorry can't find link). Why is that? Which is it - surely this could be classified as group brainstorming?