The Curmudgeon: Strawberry Fields Forever
The new Danny Boyle movie, Yesterday, is a charming if lightweight picture. But before Richard Curtis’s script devolves to an all-too-predictable rom-com finish, the film does raise an interesting question: If the Beatles’ songs suddenly appeared without publicity, history or legend in today’s very different musical climate, would the public still respond to them? Would listeners embrace the music even if it arrived in inferior versions from Jack Malik, a struggling singer-songwriter from the smallest coffeehouses in Suffolk?
Yesterday offers a resounding yes to that question, and while I think the filmmakers overstate the case—after all, it took the Beatles several years of failed auditions before they gained any traction—the songs are still great in any context.
The movie posits that during a 12-second, worldwide power outage, all traces of the Beatles have vanished from stores, libraries, the internet and people’s minds. Only three people in the world remember them at all, and Jack is one of them. But as he tries to recreate the songs to perform them in public, he has no recordings or sheet music to consult, so he has to rack his brain to recall the words and chords.
Source: Savannah Sicurella/pastemagazine.com
