Revolver

Beatles game: imagine the album you are listening to is the newest Beatles album, the one closest to the core, the one that makes everything else irrelevant, the most real and defining set of songs, the suddenly necessary capstone to a catalog that has just been completed; hear it as the final Beatles album.

the black and white thing: you can hear vast nothing in every song; it's anti-acoustic: the aesthetic of pure tape world; this music takes place nowhere; the sounds are cut out and pasted over white, scarily free, contained by nothing (this is more than a projection of the collage on the cover, you can hear tons of unclaimed acoustic space (the Beatles had obviously been impressed by death (the second appearance of McCartney's "Taxman" solo means no one played it in the first place. Mechanical reproduction: there are no Beatles. The meaning of "Paul is dead."

"She Said She Said": you can imagine Lennon doing the knee-bend dance, so it's still the old Beatles.

Beatles game: all Beatles is the old Beatles, Liverpool basement music, Hamburg stage smashing music (hence The Beatles, finally mastering the thing called "Beatles." With the Beatles, Meet the Beatles, all these oblique approaches, then The Beatles. It doesn't mean "just these four men," like, "the earnest men in these four photos, more or less doing things individually", "these four finite humans, epaulets off, no mystery bus, KISS without the makeup," no, it means "this force finally knows itself"

paranoid feeling listening to the remaster that this is not the Beatles; is it possible that my cut-and-pasted-over-white-space perception is actually the product of some form of digital editing, one that's primarily conducted visually? Is it the same as the Cirque du Soleil Beatles album, bits lifted and crunched and reanimated? Is this normative, final interpretation of Revolver essentially the same as Rock Band?

Beatles game: the catalog in reverse. Like, they know the nasal count-off is the first thing you'll hear after the crashing piano chord and the runout loop. Please Please Me as the final development of a spirit set in motion by Abbey Road.

Seven levels is not some abstraction. That's how many times the idea you start with is transformed into something other than itself before you're dumped back into the room where you actually are. Seven songs on each side of the record. "But there are only six chambers in a revolver." Yes, but the hole in the center of the cylinder turns makes it seven; seven/the hole/death is what makes it spin. The water swirls around the sides only if it can get out the bottom. Rubber Soul, Death Picture, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Is the revolver motif a continuation of the Rubber Soul flirtation with Country & Western (like Cowboy George on the cover)? I am personally wigged by the lost mid-career Country Beatles.