Now and Then: The ‘last’ Beatles track? I couldn’t care less

Now and Then is the "last" song by The Beatles, created using recordings spanning four decades with the help of artificial intelligence.

OPINION

As the Fab Four’s Now and Then is released, it’s time to ask why artists sully their cultural legacies with a slew of ephemera, writes Ben Lawrence.

By tomorrow evening, the world will have whipped itself into a frenzy about Now and Then, the “last” song by The Beatles, which has been cobbled together from recordings spanning four decades with the help of artificial intelligence. In certain quarters of the media, this is being treated as the musical equivalent of finding the lost city of Atlantis, but if it turns out to be a revelation – and snippets shown in a “making of” video suggest otherwise – I will eat my phonograph.

I predict that Now and Then will be best filed under “ephemera”, and that it belongs to a long list of marginal music from great artists who really should have known better. Nothing of this sort ever sets the world alight: these songs serve as footnotes to distinguished careers and sometimes feel in danger of besmirching legacies. If I were a cynical person, I would suggest that the Beatles song is a money-making exercise devised by those who don’t need any more.

Often, such things occur after an artist’s death: see the avalanche of material that followed the murder of Tupac Shakur in 1996. Last week, a deluxe edition of Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls was released with an additional 47 tracks – the original album contained a mere 13. I realise that there’s an anorak quality to this, a desire for completism and an obsessive need to own every bit of someone’s work as a way of getting closer to them – but enough is enough. Most of the time, there’s a reason why works remain hidden: they are not up to the same standard, and artists have either been self-aware in expunging it from their canon, or told it isn’t good enough by those who control the purse strings.

It’s also a way of feeding the beast in a modern world crazy for “content”. And the problem isn’t limited merely to music. I remember the enormous fuss concerning the release of Donald Cammell’s “lost” film Wild Side. Cammell died in his early 60s having released only a handful of films, notably the psychedelically seductive Performance (1970) with Mick Jagger and James Fox. When the director’s cut of Wild Side (2000) appeared after his death, its self-indulgence was abundantly clear. In fact, director’s cuts rarely add anything to the original, often detracting from their brilliance. The cut of Richard Kelly’s 2001 masterpiece Donnie Darko, which stripped away all of its (crucial) ambiguity, is a case in point.

Writing, a cheaper and potentially endless artform, has given us all sorts of unwanted juvenilia, epistles and downright scribbles from F Scott Fitzgerald, Vladimir Nabokov and many others. The most famous recent example is Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee’s first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, which was published in 2015 shortly before her death. The demand for something else by Lee was understandable, a figure who had remained almost entirely silent after the publication of her sole novel in 1961. But really, while Go Set a Watchman doesn’t spoil Mockingbird’s legacy, it does feel like an unnecessary addendum to a brilliant book.

The Beatles: George Harrison (left), Ringo Starr, John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

Lee perhaps realised that our artistic powers are fleeting. The received wisdom holds that your peak is limited to a short contiguous timespan (I am still waiting for mine) and it tends to be when you are young (oh). Perhaps the answer is to find eternal youth, as Abba have done recently with their show Voyage. But to endorse this would be to suggest that I think the future of the arts lies in the hologram – and I will have to resign.

Now and Then, the new song from The Beatles, was released this morning, along with a 12-minute documentary, Now And Then - The Last Beatles Song, written and directed by Oliver Murray, released at 8.30am NZT on The Beatles’ YouTube channel.