Book Description

A real breakthrough in terms of applying a theoretical protocol to biographical material has come with Henry W. Sullivan’s unpromisingly titled The Beatles With Lacan: Rock’n’Roll as Requiem for the Modern Age. Sullivan provides an excellent analysis of the Beatles’ career – perhaps, along with Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head (Fourth Estate, 1994), the best so far available. But in using the work of Lacan, Sullivan offers a psychoanalytic framework to discuss personality and creativity. He also provides a provocative analysis of the roots of rock’n’roll, arguing that the paternal guard of the time, born in the first two decades of the twentieth century, were traumatized on a subconscious level by the mistakes of their parents and, in losing respect for them, turned a blind eye to, and as a result tacitly supported, the flaunting of moral codes by their own sons and daughters in the 1950s and 1960s ‘without having been placed under any real obligation to do so’ [p. 13]. It is out of this that the Beatles’ individual biographies are discussed. Furthermore, Sullivan argues that what gives the Beatles and their music their real distinction is their location, temporally, between the modern and the postmodern world views. The albums ‘between Rubber Soul in 1965 and Abbey Road in 1969 constitute ... the first popular post-Modern classic’ [p. 172]. This is an innovative though never obtuse piece of writing, and stands as the first real attempt to theorize the Beatles’ life and work. The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory covering the year 1995 (vol. 5, section 14, pp. 196-97) by the young British film score composer David Buckley