1: First Find your Prophet

2: Turn Sharp Right till you see the Lizards

3: Adorno: The Lost Bing Years

4: It Would be Nice to Think

The paranoid method goes like this. Find your prophet, say Aldous Huxley, then assume that his nightmare Brave New World is actually what he wanted to bring about. Huxley's experimental mescaline trips obviously fitted him into the frame as a corrupter of youth and International drug-peddler. More bizarrely, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, who wrote influential academic papers on the addictiveness of popular music in the 1940s and 1950s has been transformed into a monster who advocated pop as a form of social control. Not content with theorizing, he proved his point by applying the whole addictive bag of tricks practically, penning all the Beatles hits for them before dying in 1969 at the age of nearly sixty-six. I do not know if other groups had their backroom composers in residence. Hindemith and The Who? Henze and Boy George? Are these academic fiends responsible for all pop music or just the famous bits? All those sweaty herberts bashing away in back rooms had better give up and go home. Clearly the Hamburg experience enabled the fab five to tune in to the Deutsche zeitgeist and it must now be clear why John Lennon had go: Frau Adorno wanted her share of the royalties!

So far as I can trace this piffle, it appears to emerge from the American Religious Right. Incapable of seeing any evil in capitalism, they have to explain why the world is in deep shit some other way. And they derive the stuff from the an American neo-fascist dealer in nightmares named Lyndon Larouche. In his books and articles, the wickedness of the world is all down to a few deranged millionaires, academics and, delightfully - to those who had thought them utterly useless - the British Royal Family! Spotting a gap in the market, enterprising UK sports commentator David Icke developed a broader and yet more lurid mythos, apparently allied to green issues and mistrust of corporate globalism, revealing a world-wide conspiracy of child-abusing lizards. Compared to this, Adorno penning the Beatles music seems a rather mild case of mistaken attribution.

In this hall of mirrors, lack of evidence is certain proof of a cover-up. As for Adorno, his essays were written mainly at the time when pop music meant Glenn Miller. To have leaped from Schoenberg pupil to writer of Love Me Do was clearly an artistic conversion somewhat more Damascene than Kurt Weill's journey from Busoni pupil to composer of September Song. Probably the most fruitful area for the rock journalist who wishes to distinguish him or herself would be an investigation into what our Theo. was up to in middle-life, or "The Lost Bing Years" as we lounge-lizards like to call them.

Now I came across this strange theory by typing Adorno into a search-engine and seeing dozens of mysterious references to the Beatles. It would be nice to think that the rather larger contingent of people typing The Beatles into the same field might get really nosey about the real Theodor Adorno, pupil of Schoenberg and Alban Berg. Just kidding.

 © James Beswick Whitehead, 2001

version II, 20th March, 2001

minor revisions, 9th July, 2006