Recently Paul McCartney announced that he is recording “the last Beatles song” with a John Lennon vocal Peter Jackson has excavated, using vocal isolation technology to clean up a cassette recording of a song John Lennon was working on before he was murdered in 1980. It’s the same tech Jackson had used on the Get Back documentary series and the recent reissue of Revolver, so the results are probably going to be stunningly clear. Much better than “Free As a Bird,” one hopes.
So naturally my sci-fi addled mind imagined the kind of android resurrection that Star Trek recently used in the Picard series. As Mary Shelley warned us long ago, this kind of reanimating the dead can have dreadful consequences. To be fair, the Rolling Stone article I link to above starts with the caveat that this isn’t what is happening: “No, McCartney did not feed a machine a whole bunch of John Lennon and/or George Harrison material, get the computer to spit out some goofy, cheap hall of mirrors imitation, and then mold that into something with Ringo Starr.”
For me, the more dreadful consequence would be never letting boomer nostalgia die. I love The Beatles, whose work like Shakespeare’s deserves a place in the world canon — and also a place in the public domain, but that won’t happen in my lifetime (or my children’s, for that matter.) The financial interests of the music publishing, record, and merchandising companies that comprise the Beatles Industrial Complex will do everything they can to prolong their hold the intellectual property as long as they can. Look up “Beatles YouTube copyright strike” to see what I mean.
So maybe re-jiggered versions of “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love” will follow?
I had wondered about that too. If the source tape survives, that might follow as inclusion on an EP with the new song.
If they still do EPs, that is.