cover image Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four

Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four

, . . State Univ. of New York, $74.50 (249pp) ISBN 978-0-7914-6716-9

While John, Paul, George and Ringo have been (deservedly) deconstructed more than any other rock band, and an academic look at them is welcome, many of the observations made in this collection will leave fans asking, "So what?" In the opening essay, Penn State English professor Ian Marshall carefully explores the band's lyrics. He points out the confessional poetics of Lennon songs like "Nowhere Man," but isn't original when he compares that tune's themes of self-doubt to Thoreau's "mass of men [who] lead lives of quiet desperation." A more intriguing assertion is Marshall's point that The White Album is a work of "post-modernity" that reflects the fracturing of the band's media image as four lovable mop-tops and a "rebuttal" to the earlier Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band . Far more remarkable is William M. Northcutt's essay, which studies "death, loss, and the crowd" on Sgt. Pepper . Northcutt, who teaches cultural studies at Germany's University of Wuppertal, introduces the idea that the album's cover, with its famous portrait of the Beatles surrounded by cultural icons, reveals the band's distance from the crowd and its conflicted feelings toward fame. (Mar.)