Number Nine

When asked by “Desert Island Discs” host Kristy Young why she had selected the Beatles’ cover of Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” to take with her to her desert island, Christine McVie (of Fleetwood Mac renown) responded by emphasizing what she called the “space” audible in the track. Like many Western composers of her generation, she valued this “space” for its potential, the invitation to experiment with musical expression. Or so McVie said. But, as a cover of Chuck Berry, this space might also be heard as separation, that is, as the racialized difference, the dermal schema structuring the loop between rock and roll and rock. However, in listening to the track as engineered by George Martin, one also senses that “space” and specifically “separation” apply immediately to the sound of the instruments and the voices. The four musicians are playing together (the backing track), at the same time, and yet this playing together is shot through with a certain distance, as if part of what mattered about the Beatles is precisely this sonic articulation of a cooperative singularity. Whence the electromagnetic force of monaural, as opposed to stereo, mix downs. Quite apart from what the songs were about, the “musicking” performed in and with the material advanced a sociopolitical proposition about collaboration, cooperation, and transformation. And, to be clear, the Beatles was only one “group” among hundreds of the day.

In 1968, in the wake of their tempestuous sojourn in Rishikesh, the Beatles set to work on the album that came to be called, in blatant if oblique reference to the busy cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles. Having abandoned the road for the studio, the Beatles had already displaced performing with assembling “songs,” a development that culminated in various compositions being recorded in separate Abbey Road studios by individual multi-instrumentalists. Setting aside the gustatory matter of whether the resulting “white album” is good, it distinctly re-engages the space McVie hears in the Berry cover differently. Instead of emerging as the sociality of the recorded sound-scape, space here resonates as a splintering that feels corporatized, as if the space of possibility that enervated youth culture and popular sound was undergoing a certain capture, a certain reterritorialization.

Perhaps one of the more intriguing manifestations of this phenomenon is manifest in the most controversial track on the album, “Revolution 9.” Originally conceived as an elaborate outro to “Revolution,” this six-minute piece radicalized the cut-and-splice techniques already heard on Revolver and Sgt. Pepper. Assembled by Lennon, Harrison, and Yoko Ono, “Revolution 9,” in bumping the Beatles onto a surface of effects, can be heard to hustle to higher (or is it deeper?) ground where the reduction of the band/group to the team (an emergent capitalist sociality) was still up for grabs. In this sense it did not fit (neither McCartney nor Martin wanted to include it), but for that very reason it sticks out and points at an event taking place in popular sound in 1968.

To think this event, however tentatively, one needs to listen chiasmotically, that is, listen to the listening that arises at the point where things are crossing and crossing over. Howard Goodall has demonstrated that the Beatles constitute an enabling point of contact between Western pop and the avant-garde, an observation that shines immediate light on the presence of Stockhausen among the cameos mounted on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. Phrased more musicologically, what Good-all’s point allows us to hear in “Revolution 9” is the echo there of Stockhausen’s “Hymnen,” an open work made up of ten national anthems (Hymnen) composed for tape accompanied by musicians in 1967. Although unclear, the piece’s title with its immediate evocation of Hymen (same in English), a term whose structural intricacy—an impa/ossible between—Derrida elaborated in Dissemination (1972)—would appear to name the very crossing traced in “Revolution 9.” Less unclear is that the sonic encounter between pop and the avant-garde was decisively mediated by two spiritual figures from India: in the case of the Beatles, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; in the...