Under the Sign of the Blackstar: Ten Years of David Bowie's "Blackstar" (Part One)

I started this blog ten years ago as a place to collect all my (very) occasional music writing. I've published twenty pieces in the ten years I've been keeping up with it. Some years, like 2020 (understandably) I've published a number of pieces. Others, like last year, I only published one. In honor of the tenth anniversary of keeping a regular music blog, I would like to update it on a more regular basis. 

I thought that a piece on the tenth anniversary of David Bowie's death as well as the release of his final album Blackstar I would publish some writing I did a while back. I had the idea of writing a book length essay with an SAT-like title "Bowie:Brexit::Prince:Trump." This book would be about 2016, the deaths of Bowie, Prince and my father, the passing of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. As you can see, the Bowie part was pretty much finished, but I had a hard time writing the Prince section. I might go back to it at some point (maybe the tenth anniversary of his death in April), but I wanted to share the Bowie section as its own separate essay. 

Additionally, the essay has become a tribute to Joshua Clover, the poet and essayist, who passed away last year. His book on the music of 1989, which I have admired since its publication in 2009, is a significant influence on how I frame the discussion of 2016, both the year and the music of that year (specifically, here, the music of David Bowie). The essay is also a tribute to the late Mark Fisher, whose work Capitalist Realism has become short-hand for describing the aesthetics of whatever stage of late capitalism we have been dealing with in the 21st century. Both Clover and Fisher died tragically young, with those left behind wondering what their essential work could have contributed to our ongoing discourse about art, capital and protest. 

David Bowie, Blackstar (Columbia Records, 2016)

---, The Next Day (Columbia Records, 2013)

Joshua Clover, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This To Sing About (University of CAP, 2009)

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There Really No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009)

Edward Said, On Late Style (Penguin/Random House, 2007)

Bowie—Brexit

“In the history of art late works are the catastrophes”—Theodor Adorno “Late Style in Beethoven” 

In the middle of 2016, after the deaths of both David Bowie and Prince Rogers Nelson, memes started popping up all over social media essentially echoing the same sentiment: “I’m not saying David Bowie and Prince held the universe together, but…(looks around).” Assuming the posters of said memes don’t literally believe that Prince and Bowie were omniscient beings that held the fabric of spacetime together (honestly, verdict’s still out), what was it about their deaths that resonated so much with the state of the world in  2016? Certainly, Bowie and Prince were much beloved both for who they were and the music they made. The melancholia people felt after their sudden deaths transferred onto a political terrain that seemed to slip further into darkness. Another brilliant musician who died later that year, yet whose death seemed less metaphysically shattering to the world at large, Leonard Cohen, would ask: “do you want it darker?” 

However, I argue that Bowie and Prince’s deaths resonate not only because of their proximity to both Brexit and Trump, but because their deaths, maybe more than any pop star deaths in recent memory, appear as evidence of a foreclosure of historical possibility. Brexit was an attempt to reinstate a provincial, conservative governance and culture in the UK, against the cosmopolitanism of the common market (a problematic assertion, to be sure). It was also an attempt to close off the UK from outside cultural influence, while stripping domestic cultural institutions for capital. In many respects, the culture and politics espoused by the architects and supporters of Brexit are antithetical to the culture and politics (even if only tacitly expressed) of David Bowie’s life and aesthetics. 

There are years in which every event that happens seems nominally connected to the other events in the year. There are other years that imbue meaning to every event within its otherwise sidereal temporality: 1939, 1945, 1968, 1989. 2016 will be, if it has not already become, one of those years. All of the events of 2016 seem like a catastrophe piling up on top of one another until it was impossible to breathe. Joshua Clover explains this phenomenon with regard to 1989:

"These events all belong to 1989, the category—and just as well to ‘1989,’ the concept. One, a container into which can be tossed songs and images and newspaper articles and punctual happenings, anything with a date on it […] And the other, a shorthand for what happened, for the experiential dimension of a capacious swath of history: an index that becomes more impacted, more challenging to unpack, with each passing year" (Joshua Clover, 1989 5). 

So if we are going to ask the question of “what happened,” and then accept the challenge to unpack it, we have to start at the beginning of the year: January 2016. On January 10, 2016 David Bowie died of liver cancer. His final album, Blackstar, was released two days earlier on January 8, though the title track and video had been released at the end of 2015.  A “Black Star” in physics is a theoretical body similar to a black hole that captures light and warps spacetime. A CD single version of the title track released in France represents the phenomenon. 

The song itself is very much in keeping with the thematics and musical ambition of Bowie’s best work. Yet, there is also something very different here. If we link the song to its obvious precedents, “Space Oddity” and “Ashes to Ashes,” we note the difference. Even if the former is about suicide, it is a sublime suicide, a willingness to give oneself over to the space/oceanic feeling antithetical to the ego. The latter is also about killing off something, but here it’s Bowie killing off a persona that brought him fame but destroyed his body. In both instances there is the hope of something greater than the character: a childlike wonder at metamorphosis, a grown up realization that there is a cost extracted to that sense of wonder. “Blackstar” could easily be read as the conclusion of this trilogy: an artist, at the end of his life, announcing the symbolic and literal death of his greatest creation as well as the creator. However, this time the titular symbol has to do with that which sucks in all light, all meaning. We see something receding along the horizon, but, to the viewer, it will recede forever, even if the star, here Bowie, will be gone before we notice. Within the aesthetics of his career it’s a masterful move, a sublime ending to the narrative.

In a ridiculous literal manifestation of this phenomenon, Elon Musk launched a car into space playing “Space Oddity” after Bowie died. I hope that Bowie would have seen such an action as tacky and obvious.

In that sense, Bowie’s “Blackstar” is very much in line with Adorno’s discussion of Beethoven’s late style. Here’s a representative example that could apply to Bowie’s song and video: 

“He lights it with rays from the fire that is ignited by subjectivity, which breaks out and throws itself against the walls of the work, true to the idea of its dynamism. His late work still remains process, but not as development; rather as a catching fire between the extremes, which no longer allow for any secure middle ground or harmony of spontaneity. Between extremes in the most precise technical sense” (Adorno, Essays on Music 567). 

This describes the music of “Blackstar,” which has been described as everything from art rock, to hip-hop influenced, to free jazz influenced as well as Krautrock among other musical genres. It swings back and forth between the skittering drum and bass of the opening section to the more melodic and Bowie-like middle section, to the darker turn in the later parts of the song to the final wordless moaning vocals of the end (not too dissimilar to the vocals at the end of “the Man Who Sold the World”). It’s easy to hear late style in what is Bowie’s final album, since death was immanent. But Adorno wants the late style to be something more than merely “subjective.” 

“If, in the face of death's reality, art's rights lose their force, then the former will certainly not be able to be absorbed directly into the work in the guise of its ‘subject.’ Death is imposed only on created beings, not on works of art, and thus it has appeared in art only in a refracted mode, as allegory. The psychological interpretation misses this. By declaring mortal subjectivity to be the substance of the late work, it hopes to be able to perceive death in unbroken form in the work of art. This is the deceptive crown of its metaphysics. True, it recognizes the explosive force of subjectivity in the late work. But it looks for it in the opposite direction from that in which the work itself is striving; in the expression of subjectivity itself” (Adorno, 566).

In this interpretation, Bowie’s death is not the most significant aspect of the song’s lateness. Yes, his death informs the lateness of the music (and the lyrics), but both the music and lyrics are some of the most dynamic Bowie has ever done. Even the length of “Blackstar,” matched only by “Station to Station” in Bowie’s catalogue, suggests that Bowie has a lot to say and show. That Bowie was recording demos for new songs weeks before his death suggests that his immanent death made him create more, and more dynamically, not less.

Adorno brilliantly, formally presents why late works may not represent an artist in decline, but is elusive on the why of the lateness outside of subjective considerations. Edward Said, writing in 2003 near his own death, adds this to our understanding of late style: 

“With death and senescence before him, with a promising start years behind him, Adorno uses the model of late Beethoven to enduring ending in the form of lateness but for itself, for its own sake, not as a preparation for or obliteration of something else. Lateness is being at the end, fully conscious, full of memory, and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the present” (Said, 14). 

Said’s necessary admixture of Adorno’s politics with his aesthetic concept of lateness applies to Bowie’s “Blackstar.” It haunts us not just as one of Bowie’s final songs, “Lazarus,” is far less oblique about its death references, but because it does seem to musically figure death in the present as such.

"To work through the silences and fissures is to avoid packaging and administration and is in fact to accept and perform the lateness of his position” (Said, 15 emphasis mine).

“Lateness therefore is akin of self-imposed exile from what is generally acceptable, coming after it, and surviving beyond it” (Said, 16). 

“There is therefore an inherent tension in late style that abjures mere bourgeois aging and that insists on the increasing sense of apartness and exile and anachronism, which late style expresses and, more important, uses to formally sustain itself” (Said, 17)

Bowie’s last two albums, The Next Day and Blackstar are perfect illustrations of this difference. The former was a self described “rock album,” which often looked retrospectively at Bowie’s career. The first single of that album was “Where Are We Now?,” a song that thematically reflects on memory and mortality more than anything lyrically on Blackstar.  Listening to “Where Are We Now?” The listener might be forgiven for thinking that Bowie was facing his own mortality, something he is literally doing on “Blackstar:”

"In the villa of Ormen, in the villa of Ormen

Stands a solitary candle, ah-ah, ah-ah

In the center of it all, in the center of it all

Your eyes"

“Villa” is an odd word to chose, regardless if we believe that “Ormen” here means a physical space or a Crowleyan invocation of the serpent. If we go with Bowie’s original quasi-homonym “all men,” then the villa is a metaphor for the self, albeit one with a specific linguistic and historical meaning. The notion of a physical space one inhabits as a metaphor for one’s own subjectivity was not invented by David Bowie in 2016. Yet the choice of word is interesting: villa’s have always been associated with land ownership and wealth. At the center of this estate, the estate that stands in for “all men,” stands a candle. Again, we can find any number of cross-cultural references to the flame of life that burns inside each person throughout history, with the eyes being yet another way to center subjectivity. The music is some of the most experimental of his career, and the song “Blackstar” is one of the longest. The only other song in Bowie’s catalog that tops 10 minutes is the title track of “Station to Station”, another Crowley influenced album that has something to say about subjectivity and experience. Yet that song is about striving, either fueled by cocaine or love, for something that, even so, the narrator of that song acknowledges is “too late.”

At this point into Bowie’s song comes a great dialectic: the cosmic being that we’ve been following for Bowie’s entire career becomes his opposite, growling like a horny devil, revealing himself to be not just a black star but “the Great I AM!” This is the general translation of the original name for the Hebrew God YWEH:

"Exodus 3:13 And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them?

Exodus 3:14 And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.”

This moment is understood as the creation of the edict against representing God: how can you represent that which has no quality of being other than that which is? Bowie’s YWEH is the opposite, immediately he gets you into all sorts of trouble: you’re going on a trip where you’ll need your passports and sedatives. At this point the “hopeful” melody returns, but it’s mixed up with the new, material concerns of the great I AM: "I'm a blackstar, way up, on money, I've got game," and if he’s going to take you “home,” its not the same home where the spirits will be rising. At this point we have a repeat of that ascension, but it’s embedded within the darker, sarcastic monolog of “the great I AM.” 

What’s left behind after the “spirit” rises a “meter” and “steps aside,” is a life without meaning, but also without the necessary pleasantries of the burning candle in your villa. Maybe the candle tipped over and burnt the villa to the ground: 

"I can't answer why (I'm not a gangstar)

But I can tell you how (I'm not a flam star)

We were born upside-down (I'm a star's star)

Born the wrong way 'round (I’m not a white star)"

This loss of meaning is a career-long concern. The first mention of Crowley in a Bowie song is “Quicksand,” a song, the stirring chorus of which goes: 

"Don't believe in yourself

Don't deceive with belief

Knowledge comes with death's release"

What knowledge comes with death’s release? That it’s all meaningless? Sure. Young people figure that out early on. I don’t think he’s talking about transcendence after death here, as some seem to think he is. But, within the type of nihilism that Crowley profited off of most of his life, there’s a certain power and struggle that comes to the person who feels as if he’s thrown off the shackles to declare “I’m destiny!” (Bowie was a so-so reader of Nietzsche at this time). And certainly the earthly “bullshit faith” and the knowledge that comes with death’s release stand on opposite ends of this subjective actualization. 

Not the black star of Bowie’s late work: He knows our spirit is only going to rise a meter before the person who takes his place is going to give you the knowledge the young Bowie could never imagine. Even he, the Blackstar, the one who is to receive this knowledge upon death, doesn’t have a “why,” he only has a “how:” “we were born upside down/ born the wrong way ‘round.” It’s significant to think of this why/how dichotomy in terms of Adorno/Said’s “late style” descriptions: this Bowie/Blackstar figure can only stand apart (“spirit rose/ and then stepped aside”) and explain how this all works. “It is in, but oddly apart from the present,” as Said remarks.

So what is this present, from which Bowie’s “Blackstar” is both in and oddly apart? If we return to our initial discussion of the interrelatedness of “Blackstar,” “Ashes to Ashes” and “Space Oddity,” we can trace Bowie’s lyrical position vis a vis history and politics: “Space Oddity” remains closely tied to the year 1969 with its post-2001 visualization of space, the sense of wonder that comes with the moon landing, and the utopian ideals that were always masking the military-industrial undertaking that was the “space race;”  “Ashes to Ashes,” from our perspective, anticipates the Regan-Thatcher 1980s sense that the experimentation and radical change which occurred in the previous two decades is the antithesis of work and productivity (“my momma said/ to get things done/ you better not mess with major Tom”). If one were to take a purely negative view of what came after “Ashes to Ashes,” just think of Todd Haynes’ bloated, blonde, Let’s Dance-era caricature at the end of Velvet Goldmine: tan, healthy and utterly vacuous (to be fair, I like some of Bowie's 80s music, but as both an aesthetic and aspirational body of work it purposely reproduces the sheen of MTV's ultimately reactionary surfaceness). 

If those two songs cannot be divorced from the historical and political context of their release, then what of “Blackstar?” If we return to the idea offered at the outset that certain years suck all events into a vortex of meaning, then certainly the song/album’s ultimate release in the year 2016 must also submit to this. To do that, however, I want to lay out both what I see as the most fruitful path of analyzing music politically and historically after 1989, and what the current political historical moment means with regard to popular music.

Two quotations from Joshua Cohen: 

“‘Pop music’ is always at least two facts: the cultural artifact of the song and all that it communicates; and its popularity, its having been claimed by enough people to enter into mass culture. A song may communicate historical experience—including the experience of the end of history—in several different ways” (Joshua Cohen 1989 2).

“And yet, confronted with the impossibility of representing the historical situation while within that situation’s thronged core, pop music still manages to register at once the foreclosure of historical experience, and to develop forms, affects, and cultural schemas that cache within themselves the knowledge of what had been lost in that foreclosure, and how history might be again reanimated.” 

I’ve often thought about Joshua Clover’s brilliant book 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About. I taught it several times and since it marries music, history and politics it is a framework I often return to in trying to analyze popular music. What Clover was describing in that book can be found two paragraphs above the previous quotations. The end of history as proposed by Francis Fukuyama correctly diagnoses a symptom of the end of the cold war—Clover refers to it as “the corresponding loss of bearing and narrative”—but choses to diagnose the symptom as proof of the physician’s ultimate success in curing the patient.

Clover writes: “This, then, is the situation. The antagonism that had been the story of the century, that provided for its structure and thus its navigation, has vanished—to be replaced by ‘this effacement of narrative coordinates and conceptual distinctions.’ The experience of this vacuum, left when structuring antagonism disappears and is not reinstated, manifests itself equally as a crisis of culture […] By the late twentieth, however, such a cultural vantage point has collapsed. This isn’t a failure internal to culture, but an unfolding of the developmental logic of the market state itself” (127). 

This diagnosis was written in 2009, in commemoration of the end of history’s twentieth anniversary. It was published the same year as Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and I believe both books speak to one another, and, in turn, speak to the political and cultural context of “Blackstar.”

In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher takes the work of Fredric Jameson, among others, to diagnose how much further capitalism has “seeped into the very unconscious” as to become unremarkable. It’s power, according to Fisher, mirrors what Clover says in 1989: “The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all previous history: one effect of its ‘system of equivalence’ which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value” (4).

This is the solution to the crisis of culture engendered by 1989: with the loss of antagonism offered by the pre-1989 history, the vacuum can only be filled by late capitalism. Of course, Fisher is smart enough to realize that this analysis of post-Fordist capitalist culture was already well-analyzed by Jameson in his Postmodernism book. Jameson’s study, however, couldn’t diagnose the state of culture after the period in which he was writing, and, as Fisher correctly points out, is old enough to still hold the antagonism between modernism and post-modernism as a possible theater of cultural struggle.

For the then current moment (2009), that struggle has already been settled: “Capitalist realism no longer stages this kind of confrontation with modernism. On the contrary, it takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted: modernism is now something that can periodically return, but only as a frozen aesthetic style, never as an ideal for living” (Mark Fisher Capitalist Realism 8).

According to Fisher what we now have is “capitalist realism[…] more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a king of invisible barrier constraining culture” (Fisher 16). In describing the central disaster of Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 Children of Men, the sterility of the human race, Fisher writes: “There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from a present as to seem like the caprice of a malign being” (Fisher 2) 

To bring Clover and Fisher together, it is the post-historical moment that captures this atmosphere Fisher describes here. Capitalist society sustained itself with Obama slow-jamming the news on the Tonight show as spectacular evidence that everything was fine. Even the re-writing of the Bush presidency and the War on Terror has been a retrospective justification for the maintenance of the new world brought about in 1989. What would be the opposite of this? Fisher argues that the foreclosure of that possibility is the symptom of capitalist realism, par excellence.

If I were going to attach a year to the atmosphere Fisher describes above, 2016 would be the year. Faced with a real threat from the right in Donald Trump, neoliberalism simply retreated to the comfortable narrative of another Clinton in the White House. Assuming that the electorate across the U.S. would prefer that to whatever reheated white-nationalist authoritarianism for dummies Trump was offering up. As Fisher and Clover could tell you, that narrative had exhausted itself most likely by 2008, but seriously seemed finished in 2016. This would suggest, then, that 2016 is similar to 1989 in that a certain narrative, even possible antagonism played out on the cultural stage, became unmoored after November 2016. The atmosphere had changed. It is into this atmosphere that David Bowie released Blackstar. 

I chose Blackstar and Bowie’s death in 2016 not only as cultural artifact that belong to the category 2016, but one that belongs to 2016 the concept. Bowie, beyond controlling the moon and the stars according to people on social media after his death, also is a perfect subject for both illustrating the tenants of, as well as the transformation of, the modernist/postmodernist struggle and what has come after. If there is one pop artist who embodies both the modernist streak of antagonism that belies taste, as well as the post-modern ahistorical need for reinvention, it’s David Bowie.

The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola

Beatles '64 (documentary)
A Hard Day's Night (film, 1964)
A Hard Day's Night (UK record, 1964)
Beatles For Sale (UK record, 1964)
                                                            "We were the army that never was."
                                                                                             -John Lennon to Marshall McLuhan 

    A while back I shared the introduction to a book project on the music of 1964. Had I continued with the project, I wanted the second chapter to be about the Beatles. In a weird way, I've always felt that, despite being the biggest band in the world at the time, the music the Beatles made in 1964 has always been a bit underrated, overshadowed, as it were, by the albums they would release for the rest of their careers. In the introduction, I tried to do a good job of explaining why that is, how the music and lyrics the Beatles were writing at breakneck speed in 1964 were seen to be immature compared to the "adult" subjects (one night stands, self-alienation, disillusionment) and musical sophistication (sitar, harpsichord, strings) they would release in 1965 and after. 
It would appear that this view might have changed given not one but two documentaries within the past eight years (The Beatles: Eight Days a Week and now Beatles 64) that cover 1964 fairly extensively. I found Eight Days a Week to be pretty forgettable. It seemed to exist so that there would be reason to remix and remaster the Live at Hollywood Bowl tapes and wrap a documentary around that. Honestly, centering a Beatles documentary around "the touring years" was always going to be mixed blessing: no one doubts that the Beatles could be an amazing live act, but, more often than not, the touring years as the biggest band in the world was merely an excuse to get them in front of as many screaming fans as possible. They couldn't hear themselves and no amount of remixing and remastering can help us hear them in this context either. 
In-between these two documentaries focused on the early Beatles came Peter Jackson's epic nine hour Get Back documentary. There's an interesting mirroring between these two periods: the Get Back/Let It Be project was the Beatles attempting to return to the type of music they could easily play live if they wished. If the two 1964 documentaries are about the ascendency of the Beatles, then Get Back is the descent. The two 1964 documentaries show the Beatles moving out into the world, even if that world is seen from the back seats of cars and hotel rooms; Get Back is about what happens when you're stuck in a room with four people with whom you've been stuck in rooms most of the decade and you realize you can actually open the door and get out. "See you at the pub, lads." 
Get Back is pretty much universally loved. I love it. I find the opening 20-30 minutes of the second episode, after George has left the band and Paul is waiting on John (then going through heroin withdrawal) to arrive, to be some of the most emotionally devastating material ever associated with the Beatles. Since Get Back in 2021 there has been a feeling that the desire for more Beatles "content" (god help me) might be waning. There was the great Revolver box set in 2022 but 2023 saw a remix/remaster of the red and blue greatest hits records coupled with the "final" Beatles song "Now and Then," a song cobbled together from a John demo, recordings of George playing guitar in 1995 and Paul and Ringo playing instruments and singing in (presumably) 2023. The recording also apparently features a stew of AI selected Beatles moments throughout their catalogue to make the final Beatles' song more Beatles-like. It's a song that I enjoyed listening to when it came out and haven't thought about since. 
So when Disney+ announced it was releasing yet another Beatles documentary in time for the holidays--along with a box set of all the U.S. albums in mono--there really wasn't much excitement. There was definitely a feeling that the Apple/Disney monolith that had turned the Beatles into another franchise (the Beatles Collection is a tab on the Disney+ app along Star Wars and Marvel) was scraping the bottom of the bottom of the barrel. Yet, yet Beatles 64 is actually pretty good and interesting. I think the first thing that suggests we might not just be dealing with another hagiographic depiction is the involvement of Martin Scorsese and his long-time collaborator David Tedeschi, who had previously worked as an editor on Scorsese's documentary about George Harrison, Living in the Material World as well as Scorsese's documentary about Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review. 
The Rolling Thunder Review film, especially, playfully warped and outright lied about its subject, with said subject happily engaging with aforementioned lies throughout the film. Such things might be expected of Bob Dylan, but you rarely see the post-break up Beatles as anything other than god-like figures from whom nothing but the truth is emitted. The closest the group had to a trickster (and, therefore, was the rawest member with regard to the truth) was John Lennon. George loved to lie about the group itself, but reserved that for parodies such as the Rutles. Paul was too busy not taking himself seriously to bother with not taking his former group seriously. Ringo was a tiny train conductor at some point. While documentaries like Get Back produced epic, nearly ten hour narratives about our demigods and whether or not they would perform up on the roof, the Beatles have never really experimented with their history the way Dylan has. Just as the albums mixed for Blu Ray/Atmos/Dolby etc have a sonic uniformity that never existed on the original albums, the narrative the Beatles have finally settled upon is somewhat uniform in its presentation. The documentary Beatles 64 doesn't really play with that narrative much, but what it does is open its heart to the world and let the world come in. 
My favorite part of the documentary takes place in Harlem, with archival footage of a reporter asking several different groups of African Americans what they thought of the Beatles. Little kids are kind of indifferent, teenage girls (unsurprisingly) are entranced and offer up who they think the cutest Beatle is. Finally the interviewer finds a youngish African American man to give his opinion: "I think they're disgusting," he says indifferently, behind sunglasses. "Disgusting?!" the interviewer responds, taken aback, "well, who do you listen to? Who isn't disgusting?" "The Miles Davis quartet." As someone who has loved Miles Davis and the Beatles all (well, in the case of Miles Davis, most of) his life, I found this moment a wonderful reminder of both the amazing music being created at this moment in time and, yes, how absolutely (to put it milder than the aforementioned interviewee did) inconsequential something like "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" would sound to someone listening to Kind of Blue in 1964. 
What Beatles 64 does is chronicle the material culture that was produced from the Beatles' trip to America, the land of commerce, in 1964. People proudly show their cheaply made Beatles wigs. We see archival footage of young women (who all look like my mom of her friends in the New York of the early 1960s, which means that this whole review must be taken with a grain of salt because several times I actually broke down watching this thing, missing my parents and realizing that what I am watching is a memory of a world I was only obliquely aware of, yet a world that so impressed itself upon me that I would not know what my identity would be were I not raised amongst this stuff) stalking the Beatles in a hotel, asking the camera operators if they've seen the Beatles anywhere in the area. Leonard Bernstein's daughter talks about wheeling the TV into the dining room so that she could show her father the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. My favorite sequence, whether real or a little bit of editing trickery I'm not sure, is a young woman in a kitchen with her family watching the Beatles perform in Miami during their second appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. She seems entranced, not in the ecstatic way the young women in New York are, rather she focuses on the TV and kind of sways her head to the music, oblivious of the family surrounding her. And before I could think "there's something Lynchian about the scene," sure enough David Lynch shows up as a talking head, with actual footage he took from the Beatles show to which he went, eyes moist, talking about the Beatles and the healing power of music in general (I wrote the paragraph before Lynch passed and now realize that this is most likely Lynch's last filmed appearance).
As for the Beatles themselves, it's fascinating to see them here, looking almost identical to the Beatles they would play in A Hard Days Night. Yet, in that film, the Beatles play cool, detached, versions of themselves, seemingly always one step ahead of the crowds, the managers and all those who want something from them. We understand that they are cool, while everyone around them tries to access some of what makes the Beatles the Beatles. In a scene I think about often, George is pulled into am advertising executive's office, assuming he is a Beatles fan rather than an actual member of the group. When the executives show him styles that they know will be a hit with teenagers, George points out that the styles are "grotty," short for grotesque. He's quickly ushered out of the office. There's a fascinating doubling going on: the true Beatles fan would never be so co-opted as to fall for the "Beatles" fashion sold to young people in 1964. Not only do you feel that to be true, George himself has confirmed that for you. This is the beginning of what Thomas Frank would call "the conquest of cool:" assuming the Beatles are trying to sell you something, i.e. more Beatles records, the Beatles themselves are distinguishing what they are selling from what the Beatles' industrial complex is selling. 
Contrast this to the figure of Murray the K. A disk jockey who seemed hopelessly hokey in his Beatles wig and hipster phraseology. In a much later interview, George Harrison seems genuinely perplexed as to how Murry the K managed to ingratiate himself to the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein so that he would constantly be interviewing, following, haranguing the Beatles during their American visit. At any moment the viewer expects that one of the Beatles, any of the Beatles, will tell off this weirdo but they do nothing but humor him in his increasingly ridiculous and pushy appearances throughout the documentary. If the Beatles in A Hard Day's Night were all knowing, impervious to the foolish press, managers and fans, the real Beatles represented in Beatles 64  really did seem to be deer caught in the preverbal headlights of the global village (McLuhan is genuinely a co-star for sections of this documentary). 
But what about the music? If anything gets lost in both Beatles 64 and maybe A Hard Day's Night, it's the music. Historically, the Beatles of 1964 weren't really about the music, even if the talking heads in the documentary give lip service to it. Given the music that would come after 1964, it's difficult to justify a discussion about the music independent of the media onslaught that accompanied it. And yet I think the music is remarkable. In fact, I wish the music could be divorced from the tours, press conferences and television appearances that accompanied it. Because, of course, what the artists were doing while the hurricane swirled around them was document their feelings. First, it should be noted that in 1963 the Beatles released two records that featured a mix of originals and covers taken from their Cavern and Hamburg days. The third record from 1964, A Hard Days Night, features no covers. The opening guitar riff from "A Hard Day's Night," the first track of A Hard Day's Night, has been the subject of decades-long speculation. The emotional depth of songwriting by Lennon and McCartney is as good and significant as anything they wrote later on. 
My entire book on the music of 1964 (were it to ever be written) would be called Someday When We're Dreaming, a lyric from "Things We Said Today" from A Hard Day's Night. I think the Beatles of 1964 are just as complex and exploratory as anything they did for the rest of their careers. The idea that they would all be dreaming someday about what they had already said in 1964 suggests that they themselves never desired to separate the artistic endeavors undertaken as the Beatles. So much of the Beatles music is about anticipating some future idea of self ("When I'm 64") projected against some version of the self in childhood or some state of immaturity ("Strawberry Fields"). They were already mature enough to express how time in relation to the self is a malleable concept for the songwriter. The I, i.e. the ego, is the defense mechanism against the tempest of past and future which moves the subject in time. "I'll Cry Instead" is about the wounded ego that both must express itself and cannot express itself for fear that it will be mocked and belittled. The ego cannot give itself over to the precipice of oblivion so it can only coyly ask in the subjunctive "If I Fell...Would you promise." It's worth remembering that around this time the Beatles met (and apparently got high with) Bob Dylan who mistook the "I can't hide" of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" as "I get high." When corrected, Dylan apparently asked "why would you want to hide your love?" For the wounded egos that populated Beatles lyrics, it's pretty clear why love would want to be hidden. 
Beatles for Sale is the follow up record to A Hard Day's Night. It returns to the older format of originals plus covers, but the originals are the most complex lyrics the band had released up until that point. "No Reply" is, along with any number of other songs in the catalogue, John's very disturbing ease in which he falls back into the angry, violent, stalker-like boyfriend. Only to be followed up by John's overwhelming self pity in "I'm a Loser," which might very well be a sequel to "No Reply" in so far as this is the kind of self pitying shit a man who'd been stalking his ex might say to his friends after a few drinks. That said, the idea that Lennon might be so nakedly honest on a Beatles record is already a fascinating step forward from anything they had recorded previously, The next track "Baby's in Black" is all de-tuned drone and faux-murder ballad. The dual harmonies (beautiful in parts) seem incapable of understanding why their latest paramour is still mourning for a past love. It's their own take on a murder ballad but, given they seem like perfectly nice boys from Liverpool, there's no murder here. "I'll Follow the Sun" could be Paul's credo: no matter how dark things get, you should just follow the sun. "Mr. Moonlight" is the closest the Beatles got to exotica. 
Beatles for Sale is the end result of Beatles 64 (not A Hard Day's Night). By the end of the year the Beatles are clearly tired, alienated from themselves, commodified too many times to give a shit any longer. The album itself is combination of so many things (Dylan's influence, something unheard before, a bunch of covers they'd been playing since before they were signed) that it almost can't help but be a harbinger of things to come. No wonder Capitol in the states didn't know what to do with the record. It was spread out over several releases where it made even less sense. This was a band tired with being the band they were in A Hard Day's Night as well as the band depicted in Beatles 64. I'm not sure it was even an aesthetic choice. They physically couldn't be the band happy to entertain people like Murry the K all the time. They'd have one more year of doing shit like that, but by the end of 1965, the band went on a wildcat strike, ready to withhold any new Beatles music until they had some time off. The Beatles were conscripted into some kind of role, but they also realized the power that comes with being that which those in power wish to conscript above all others.