Beatle Obama
There was no Beatle about the Bush, but Barack Obama is the "Fab One", according to Gerard Baker. From The Times:
You have to go back to the Beatles' first US tour to find a transatlantic trip freighted with the sort of pregnant excitement that attends the one Barack Obama is about to make next week.
The faces of the crowds expected in Berlin when he arrives on Thursday will be portraits of the same devotional ecstasy that greeted the Liverpool quartet on their way from JFK to Manhattan that February day in 1964. In London next weekend Gordon Brown will play Ed Sullivan to the Fab One, hoping to borrow, just for a day, a little of the superstar charisma to bolster his own ratings.
The parallels between the former Quarrymen and the son of the Kenyan goatherd don't stop there. Both built their success on a pleasing facility for the harmonious marriage of words and cadence. (“We have a righteous wind at our backs and we stand on the crossroads of history”, says the Senator. “Please please me, whoa yeah, like I please you!” sang John and Paul.)
Just like the Beatles, Mr Obama is a prodigiously talented revolutionary, the tribune of a rising generation, whose evident talent is only slightly compromised by an unsettling precocity. He hasn't claimed to be more popular than Jesus yet, but looking at the latest opinion polls in secular Europe, it might just be plausible.
Here are some more songs by Obama the Beatle:
The Taxman
All You Need is Love
Michelle, Ma Belle
Love Me Do
Ob A Me, Ob A Ma
Get Black
Posted on 7:54 AM by Mary Jackson
Comments
18 Jul 2008
reactionry
Tanner Stages Of Despair
I won't attempt to add to MJ's splendid list perhaps taken from Ali Obama's Top 40 Thieves of Copyright, but will toot my own pathetic verloren horn by recalling an entry which made it to Radio Dar al-Darb's coverage of songs banned by China for the Rolling Stones' tour, Sympathy For The Foreign Devil. I've also recently had excuses to reminisce about the childrens' books, Millions of Cat Stevens and (see Hugh's coverage of the train in the Lackawanna* painting) The Little Rocket Engine That Could Reach Tel Aviv.
* I 'umbly submit that next month NER should display a lesser known work which depicts a Shaker community, (now extinct) The Lackanookie Valley. And I mourn the recent lack of whistle-stop campaigning by Elmo Tanner. Given the current alternatives, he should be a choo-in.
