Nowhere Men

Or why you should avoid AI-generated nostalgia-trips

Earlier last month, a 'new' song was released under the name of the Beatles, “Now and Then.” The song was originally a demo recorded in 1977 by John Lennon, with the words “For Paul” written on the tape. The then-remaining Beatles recorded parts for the song in the run-up to the release of the Anthology compilation in the mid-1990s, but Lennon's vocals proved to be too difficult to separate from his the piano on the same track, so the mix remained unfinished until now.

I had assumed the new track was some sort of AI-generated psy-op, and I was somewhat correct, at least: apparently AI technology was indeed used in the mixing and mastering of the song. As noted over on John Michael Greer’s Dreamwidth, however, the timing of the release is interesting.

The release of the 'last ever Beatles song' marks a watershed moment, in a similar way that the death of Elizabeth II did last year, regardless of your personal feelings about the institution of the monarchy (or, indeed, the Beatles). The Britain I grew up in, and the world that contained it, is gone; “Now and Then”, with its wistfully nostalgic lyrics, is a road-sign telling us as much. “You are now leaving the old world for good. Thank you for driving carefully.”

The Beatles themselves possess a certain gravitational force in the collective psyche; as a quartet, they evoke the archetypal wholeness that Carl Jung identified with the number four. If we treat modernity as a dream recounted by an analysand on the couch, the four Beatles appearing at this stage would surely remind us of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Both surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, have advocated for the Covid-19 vaccines, so they might have to battle it out between them to see who gets to jump into the saddle marked Pestilence.

This archetypal potency makes it strangely easy to weave the music of the Beatles into private, idiosyncratic mythologies, often facilitated by the intensely psychedelic nature of their post-1965 albums. According to the (highly questionable) 'Helter Skelter' narrative of the Manson Family killings, promoted by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi based on the testimony of Family member Paul Watkins, Charles Manson preached that the White Album and the Book of Revelation predicted the near-total genocide of whites, of which the Family would be the only survivors, and that the murders were an attempt to kick-start this process; while this is almost certainly untrue, especially as regards the true motive for the killings, the fact that Watkins and Bugliosi successfully introduced the narrative into the popular folklore around the case shows it was at least relatively easy to believe that a group of acid-twisted criminal drop-outs could pareidolically read hidden messages about imminent racial Armageddon in the music of the Beatles.¹

Something about their music makes people want to weave stories around them. Other strange Beatles narratives include the 'Paul is dead' meme, with apparent support from a forensic analysis of voice recordings; the mirror-image 'John is alive' theory; the suggestions of deep-state involvement in Lennon's assassination; the speculation that the band was manufactured by psychologists from London's Tavistock Clinic for social-engineering purposes; or, most bizarre of all, that all of their music was written by Marxist philosopher Thedor Adorno, brilliantly deduced from the fact that Adorno was a classically-trained pianist and, uh... that's it.

Any, all, or none of these could be true, for all I know.² A theme that recurs, however, is death and rebirth; as noted in Grant Morrison's The Invisibles (a comic book that I discussed here), the scarab beetle symbolizes the death and rebirth of the sun, rolling it along the sky like a great big piece of cow-dung. The scarab itself played a central role in one of Jung's tales of synchronicity in the analysis room, in which a beetle flew into the room as a patient was describing a dream of a scarab.

Jung himself had an interesting dream about the Beatles' home city of Liverpool, a city he never visited, in 1927:

The various quarters of the city were arranged radially around the square. In the centre was a round pool, and in the middle of it a small island. While everything round about was obscured by rain, fog, smoke and dimly lit darkness, the little island blazed with sunlight. On it stood a single tree, a magnolia, in a shower of reddish blossoms. It was as though the tree stood in the sunlight and were at the same time the source of light. My companions commented on the abominable weather, and obviously did not see the tree. They spoke of another Swiss who was living in Liverpool, and expressed surprise that he should have settled here. I was carried away by the beauty of the flowering tree and the sunlit island, and thought, “I know very well why he has settled here.” Then I awoke.

Earlier in the account (taken from Memories, Dreams, Reflections), Jung writes that one of the streets reminds him of Basel's Totengasschen, or 'Alley of the Dead'.

“Run, comrade, the old world is behind you” was daubed on the walls of Paris during the 1968 uprising; my mother used the slogan in the title of her PhD thesis on the Situationist movement.³ That sense of urgency, of “inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil,” as Hunter S. Thompson puts it in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has given way, in an appropriately Jungian process of enantiodromia, to a melancholic nostalgia. Perhaps the 'old world' wasn't so bad, after all? The rock'n'roll heroes that have adorned bedroom walls for multiple generations have been revealed to be shills for the machine in the lowest and most degraded sense. The cities we grew up in seem, at best, like uncanny theme-park versions of themselves, devoid of any rooted local culture, and at worst, like sets from a zombie film. And the theme song for that zombie film, playing over the end credits? The digitally reconstructed voice of a dead man, pining for something he felt he'd lost, finally released to harvest a few extra royalty profits for an industry that was already on its last legs twenty years ago: “Now and then, I miss you...”⁴

The world the Beatles represented has gone, and the release of this AI mash-up can be seen as a bleakly comical reflection of the way in which so many refuse to consciously accept this, but go on living in a VR simulation of the 20^th century. I'm sure Klaus & the Gang would love to bring this wry metaphor into literal reality; “ze old vurld ist no longer behind you, comrade! Relive ze tventiez centurhy viz ze latest immersive virtual rheality goggles! Ze first gulf war never happened, until now! Put zat in your pipe and smoke it, Baudrillard.”

What really happens is another question entirely. In a sense, VR simulations are themselves a product of 20^th century nostalgia; I'm old enough to remember when VR was “just around the corner”, and video-game companies were marketing 90s versions of Oculus Rift. As I noted before, failed VR projects like Second Life and the Metaverse were directly inspired by the cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s and '90s.

In the 21^st century, even the future is nostalgic.

1. Tom O'Neill's Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties is to date the most comprehensive summary of the evidence for deep-state involvement at every step of the way in the Manson case. Jasun Horsley's 16 Maps of Hell builds on O'Neill's case by turning the lens away from Manson himself, who increasingly appears to be as much a pawn as any of his supposed minions, and towards Roman Polanski.

2. I’m going to call bullshit on the Adorno one, though. Whoever came up with it is clearly unfamiliar with any of the processes involved in creating music.

3. Google Books lists it as having been published by Autonomedia in 2007, but this is incorrect - Autonomedia were going to publish it, but some envious leftoid put a spanner in the works.

4. On the last proofreading, I realised that if you removed the “and”, you’d get Jimmy Savile’s most famous catchphrase.