Missives from Another World: Literature of Parallel Universes
“He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times.”
—Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)
“And you may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful house’/
And you may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful wife.’”
—Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime” (1980)
1.
By the release of their 17th album, Everyday Chemistry, in 1984, The Beatles had been wandering for years in a musical wilderness. Their last cohesive venture had been 1972’s Ultraviolet Catastrophe, but the ’70s were mostly unkind to the Beatles—an output composed of two cover albums of musicians like Ben E. King and Elvis Presley, rightly derided by critics as filler. Meanwhile, The Rolling Stones released their brilliant final album before Keith Richards’s death; the disco-inflected 1978 Some Girls which marked them as the last greats of the British Invasion. By contrast, The Beatles’s Master Class and Master Class II were recorded separately and spliced together by engineers at Apple Studies; a two-star Rolling Stone review from 1977 arguing that “Lennon and McCartney don’t even appear in the same room with each other. Their new music is a cynical ploy by a band for whom it would have perhaps been better to have divorced sometime around Abby Road or Let it Be.”
Maybe it was the attempt on John Lennon’s life in 1980, or the newfound optimism following the election of Walter Mondale, but by the time the Fab Five properly reunited to record Everyday Chemistry there was a rediscovered vitality. All of that engineering work from the last two albums actually served them well as they reentered the studio; true to its title with its connotations of combination and separation, catalyst and reaction, Everyday Chemistry would borrow from the digital manipulations of Krautrock bands like Kraftwerk, and the synthesizer-heavy experimentation of Talking Heads. The Beatles may have missed punk, but they weren’t going to miss New Wave.
With a nod to the Beatlemania of two decades before, Lennon and Paul McCartney sampled their own past songs, now overlaid with flourishes of electronic music, the album sounding like a guitar-heavy version of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s avant-garde classic My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. A formula that would define this reconstituted version of the band, now committed to digital production, and whose influences are seen from Jay Z’s Lennon-produced The Grey Album, to the tracks George Harrison played with James Mercer in Broken Bells.
By asking Enoand were a decidedly lo-fi affair, but by the era of the Macintosh, the Beatles had discovered the computer. Speaking to in 1998, said “You know, we were always more than anything a couple of kids, but John was always into gizmos, and something about that box got his attention, still does.” , officially the band’s pianist since was also a zealous convert to digital technologyIn Marcus’s Preston told the critic that “They were a bar band, right? Long before I met them, but I was a boogie-woogie guy too, so it was always copacetic. You wouldn’t think we’d necessarily dig all that space stuff, but I think the band got new life with that album.” From the nostalgic haziness of the opening track “Four Guys” to the idiosyncratic closing of “Mr. Gator’s Swamp Jamboree,” was a strange, beautiful, and triumphant reemergence of The Beatles.
