Stan-culture has normalised calling modern pop-stars 'queens', 'icons', 'legends', or hint to some kind of immortality of their current favourite. Dehumanising popular artists and hyperbole is of course nothing new, but few seem to have a better claim to this status than The Beatles.
They literally invented modern music (probably) and fan-culture (we're sure) and teenagers (this one is definitely true). Go read one of the gazillion books that have been written about it to verify, but this is like the truth. And it's not that that's interesting to me.
It's the fact that they (unless they died, in which case rest in piece and thank you for the music John Lennon and George Harrison) STILL. FREAKING. TOUR.
This is not being ageist or anti-Beatles but more just in awe.
The Beatles were around so long ago they've seen legends come into existence, live a life, have a successful career, and then die again – and guess what? Somehow, somewhere, Sir Paul McCartney is still playing Hey Jude someplace.
And Live and Let Live. And Love Me Do. And Lady Madonna. And Can't Buy Me Love. And Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. (But for some reason not I Want To Hold Your Hand. I wanted to do like a side-by-side comparison embeds, but it's shockingly hard to find).
Like that footage is not ironically in black and white. Or for style reasons. Or Instagram. This was before colour television. And while we intellectually know all this, as we've been slowly publishing articles about the biggest artists of the 70s and the 80s (with the 90s and 00s on the way), there was just one statistic from an old blogpost that couldn't leave my mind.
The data we had, of the last 40 years of pop-music doesn't even reach the 60s. Technically Paul McCartney is not even from the 60s. His career started in the 50s. How do I know? Because on this graph we made in 2017, there is Paul McCartney, representing the 50s. All by himself.
As the sole artist in 2017's Top 100 Touring acts whose career started in the 1950s.
Forget about iPhones, they did not have colour-television. They must remember the moon-landing and HRM Queen Elizabeth II as some kind of spring-chicken serving serious Crown-realness, and heck maybe even the second world war. But that's not what McCartney is most concerned with, as he stated in an interview with the SDUT that he hopes to just continue "develop what I do".
His Freshen Up tour wrapped earlier in the year and he does not have another tour announced. There was no indication however that this was his last tour, so who knows, maybe next summer in Hyde Park there'll be yet another Yesterday singalong and Live And Let Live pyrotechnics.
But as Paul McCartney's tour has wrapped for now, the news broke that The Beatles' drummer, Ringo Starr is going on tour.
What's remarkable about Ringo Starr is that he's gone on to not just be 'the drummer from the most successful band in the world', but has carved out his own career as a singer/songwriter, a popular collaborator, and prolific music producer that continues to release music. His latest album came out last year.
So what can one expect from a Ringo Starr tour? He tours with a band of successful musicians who are able to perform their own songs, but also back him up on his catalogue, both his solo work and of course, the legendary Beatles one as well.
Surely these guys, the 77 and 79 year-olds, as the world's most successful musicians ever, like don't have to do this. So if they don't have to, it must be love. After all, love is all you need.
