You Know I Need Someone

November 4th, 2023 | Jib-Jabbin' about Famous Musickers

5.1 Minute Read, 2 Hour+ Watch

So in case you’ve been living under The Rock™ for the past few days, The Beatles released a new song this week. Yes, those “The Beatles” and yes, it really is a new song.

You can read better write ups about the song and its creation process on better websites, they should be easy to find.

I think the over-the-top marketing push of this being both “new” and “the last” Beatles song has really made this into something of a cultural touchstone. I heard this song on multiple radio stations this week, and even the making of youtube video released by The Beatles channel has 5.7 million views in just 3 days.

We’re in this neat little zeitgeist moment of “hey the beatles are trending in 2023 and it’s not because another one of them died” which is pretty cool. It’s fun to live in these fleeting moments when they happen and that’s what I’m doing now. I mean, fuck, it’s an official Beatles release of new content, in 2023. If the Beats are your favorite band, you just got the ultimate goodbye gift. It’s cool stuff. I’m not paying for any of this shit so who cares; it’s just fun. We should have more fun.

Since I was never really a classic Beatle-juicer as a kid, I’m not losing my mind over this release. Mostly I’ve just been revisiting my favorite tunes and enjoying the simple act of listening. Here’s what I’ve been jammin’ out to, and why I jam out to them:

Help! because of Rodney Mullen:

Rodney Mullen VS Daewon Song Round 1 was the first skate video I ever watched and it set the tone and/or ruined my expectations of skateboarding going forward. Rodney is an absolute wizard and his casper slide tricks are probably the hardest flatground-turned-street tricks ever performed. I had never heard Help! before this video but it stood out at the time, and still stands out today, as something energetic and modern sounding. It’s not necessarily the first thought to pair it with a skate part, but shit does it work.

Eleanor Rigby because of Thrice:

Like any good millennial kid I had that period between age like 14 and 17 where I was super into emo music and wore lots of stupid clothes from Hot Topic. While I never went particularly overboard to be scene’d out, all my playlists at the time were basically a non-stop medley of boring white dudes whining and screaming about someone breaking their heart or whatever. Man, what terrible music that I absolutely unironically love and still listen to regularly.

And so at some point around 2005 or 2006 I heard Thrice’s cover of Eleanor Rigby and just totally loved it. This is a hilariously perfect emo cover of a Beatles song, it even has an extended outro of a growling vocal, haha. It’s so dumb, I can’t stop listening to it.

Hey Jude because of The Royal Tenenbaums:

Hey Jude, famously written about the book Moby Dick or something (I’m not a music history expert, you should fact check this) is an all-time jam that immediately lifts anything it is featured in. A pretty good example of the song doing all the heavy-lifting is whenever this thing popped up in Ted Lasso with everyone like singing it together around town. Talk about unearned heft, hoo boy.

If you want to watch something good that also uses Hey Jude, point your eyes to the opening scene of The Royal Tenenbaums and settle in for 6 minutes of joy. If you’ve never seen the tenenbamzos and you watch this video and then don’t immediately want to keep watching the rest of the movie, you should take a long look in the mirror and consider if you are a person or an invasion of the body snatchers, uh, snatched-body-person-thing, cuz this shit rocks. I don't even care, I don't need to explain it, Tenenbaums rocks. That's it.

I probably like more Beatles songs but I can’t think of them at the moment. They wrote Enter Sandman too, right?