TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS

Saturday, October 22, 2005

A man who admittedly has, in a journalistic capacity, flat-out fabricated something as basic to Beatles history as song titles, has been selected to write a "definitve" essay on the band for a special centennial edition of Variety.

From WhatGoesOn.com October 14:

"A new survey announced today (Friday, October 14) places the Beatles at the very top of the entertainment universe.
[...]
The full survey will be published in a special 226-page bound Centennial Edition of the legendary industry magazine, featuring the Beatles on the cover - and a specially-commissioned 2,500-word appreciation of the band by noted Beatles scholar and producer Martin Lewis.

[...]

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Cable televisoin viewers may know Martin Lewis from his obnoxious, screaming face talking head appearances on cable television where he obseqiously slobbers over Britain's monarchy and denies the obvious murder of Princess Diana. But he also has an admitted history of peddling lies about the Beatles.

From Los Angeles Times January 10, 1999:

"After the three Beatles “Anthology” sets and hundreds of bootleg releases, four Mop Top ‘songs’ remain unheard, highly prized and shrouded in mystery - much to the frustration of the most devoted Beatlemaniacs: "Colliding Circles," "Pink Litmus Paper Shirt," "Deck Chair" and the politically-charged John Lennon polemic "Left is Right (And Right is Wrong)."

But humorist and Beatles historian Martin Lewis is blowing the cover off the matter in a one-man presentation in which he's confessing to having ‘written’ the songs.

In truth, Lewis only wrote the titles - the songs themselves are merely the matter of fan fantasy.

Lewis says that as a young journalist in London in the early '70s, he was asked to write a story for the British publication Disc about unreleased Beatles tracks. Fearing that the real ones he had came up short, he padded the piece with four titles he'd made up. Years, later he was both thrilled and mortified to find that his Beatles 'songs' had worked their way into legend - turning up in supposedly authoritative books on the Fab Four.
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The one honest thing about the Variety piece is its title, calling the Bealtes the "icons of the century." After all, due to the efforts of people like Martin Lewis, we have been fed stories about the beatles that consist of little more than a wall of illusion. Knowledge of these entertainers as real, complex human beings has been obfuscated and we are tols stories of cartoon characters, of icons, not of real people. (Indeed, "Pac-Man" is another top icon listed by Variety.) So strong is the iconography that more than one person can play the role of the icon "Beatle-Paul" and the masses can't see.

Are you one of them?

Labels: beatles

| Posted at 14:46 | PERMA-LINK |

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