This little intro is probably textbook Dozie being too hard on himself swag, but I know my shortcomings in understanding the Beatles and their complex yet brief history. When I was born, John Lennon had already been dead longer than The Beatles' run lasted, so it's safe to say they were before my time. But I'm not some hardo that thinks they suck or are overrated; quite the contrary, I know they revolutionized music, influenced countless musicians, and for lack of a better term, changed the world forever.
Dozie's got nothing love and respect for The Beatles, they're just not my first choice (I'd rather listen to Steely Dan, but they, like basically every other group that came out after 1966, were influenced by the Beatles; even though my favorite Steely Dan song "Only a Fool Would Say That" mocks John Lennon's "Imagine") For those curious, my favorite Beatles songs are "Don't Let Me Down," "Help," "Here Comes the Sun," and "Tomorrow Never Knows."
I'm ​not here to debate John Lennon's potential hashtag bad guy-ness, whether or not the song itself should've been made, or what John and George would've thought of it. I'm simply here to talk about the song itself and acknowledge the remarkable fact that a "new" Beatles song hit #1 on the "Big 40" (which I guess is a global chart, but based out of England?) in 2023 (the same year that a potential WWIII debuted!).
Sure, John Lennon could've recorded himself mocking the mentally disabled or armpit-farting the alphabet with Paul and Ringo laying down the rhythm section 45 years later, and it would've topped the charts, but it's still pretty incredible...especially with how hot Taylor Swift is rn (I love "Cruel Summer" and don't care who knows it!) that a band half-full of dead guys accomplished this.
So how did we get here? Why is this 1970s demo seeing the light of day? I'm gonna outsource that to another publication. Work smarter, not harder.
via The Ringer:
"The song, which was written by John Lennon in the late 1970s and demoed on a handheld cassette recorder perched on his piano, was considered for the full-band treatment during the 1995 Beatles Anthology project, when the surviving “Threetles†(Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr) worked with producer Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra and Traveling Wilburys fame to finish a few of Lennon’s songs."
I'm terrified of AI. Sure, I have fun with CrAIyon, but the technology and its potential harm to society keep me up at night. I hope and want to live in a world where AI is used for good in situations like this (or solving all of life's problems), but it also feels like a fast-forward button to living in 1984.
We currently live in what I like to call the "Toy Story era of AI." Toy Story was, of course, the first fully-computer animated full-length film. At the time, the technology was groundbreaking, and while it still holds up pretty well for rewatches, it is clearly outdated. I'm sure in 10 years, we'll look back at 2023 AI and laugh (if that hasn't been outlawed) at its quality. We'll probably live to see a day where fully AI artists "perform" at the Las Vegas Sphere and other similar venues, but for now, we still gotta work out some of the kinks, as you'll see in the music video.
I'm no Beatles superfan. I appreciate and respect their music and impact on the art form itself, but this song gets ya boi a little emotional. "Now and Then" is not exactly Johnny Cash's "Hurt" when it comes to the emotions it resonates, but it undeniably has a little bit of an end-your-life vibe to it. You can't help but think about the Beatles ride, Lennon and Harrison's deaths, and the fact that Ringo and Paul are getting up there.
To director Peter Jackson's credit, the video isn't ALL weird, just ever-so-slightly-off animation that makes the John Lennon and George Harrison reanimations look creepy AF (it features them a little too much for my liking...but the archival footage was awesome). Despite the creepiness, I'm a grown fucking man; I can get past it and enjoy the song for what it is. Now, what that "is" may be is different to every set of ears, but I genuinely like it and have listened to it a bunch since it dropped last week. I just have to acknowledge how weird and low-key unnecessary the AI versions of Lennon and Harrison were. It was a little off-putting. Like there are undoubtedly people that watched this video and got the chills or had to straight-up look away. I bet it even caused a few cases of the "Heebie Jeebies." Despite PJ's acid-trip nightmare of a music video (FTR, I am NOT a LOTR guy), "Now and Then" is a beautiful track and a fitting official goodbye to the Beatles; it might even end up cracking my top 100 most played songs on Apple Music, which would be quite the feat considering it came out in November.
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