Yesterday (hm) I was at the
Champs-élysées Fnac (a kind of smarter
Virgin megastore) and I couldn't resist the temptation to listen to
One, the latest
Beatles compilation.
Silly me.
I should have known I couldn't resist the
temptation to listen to the whole
album. 27 songs, 27 pieces of pure
happiness. The vendor at the desk glared at me. The guy behind me (who wanted to listen as well) glared at me. At some point I had the uncomfortable feeling that the whole
human population of the store was glaring at me with hateful eyes.
I didn't care. I didn't surrender the
headphones until the last note of
Let it be vanished between my ears. And long after that (sitting on a
métro seat going back home) I was still thinking : "what's the point of making
pop music after
the Beatles ? How comes we've got
Radiohead,
Oasis, the
RHCP, and plenty of other bands to suit just about anybody's
taste - but yet nothing so
universal, so
direct, so
evident - so quintessentially
popular as the good old
Fab Four ?"
And there, under the dim neon light of the
parisian subway, I kept wondering at the disturbing fact that the greatest album of year 2000 had been made by a band which had been founded forty years ago...