Right behind its status as the most sprawling and eclectic
of The Beatles’ albums, “The White Album” is best known as The Beatles’ most
fragmented record. It is known as the album on which the Fab Four essentially
became four fab individuals masterminding their own sessions while either using
the other three guys as backing musicians or approaching each track as a
veritable solo endeavor.
Ironically, The
Beatles through a Glass Onion: Reconsidering the White Album is one of the
most cohesive multiple-author essay collections I’ve ever read. In fact, most
of its thirteen essays read more like chapters in a single-author work. Each of
those section shares the same seriousness, competence, impersonal tone,
clarity, and tendency to quote large chunks of other authors’ works. This lends
the book a straight readability that the usual inconsistent multiple-author
collection does not offer. More than one author even shares the same quirks,
such as the inclination to compare “The White Album” to Joyce’s Ulysses and the mistaken belief that “Why
Don’t We Do It in the Road” immediately follows “I Will”.
The stylistic consistency of The Beatles through a Glass Onion would be little more than mildly
interesting if the authors didn’t unite to provide an illuminating portrait of
an album that has already been very widely discussed. Yet they accomplish this
by keenly examining all of the album’s key components—its writing, its
recording, its cast of characters, its politics, its unique contributions by the
four individual Beatles, etc.
Towards the end of the book there are quirkier chapters on the
album’s influence that begin to buck the uniformity of all the preceded it. These
includes discussions of Tori Amos and U2’s covers of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” (one
of the more academic chapters) and Danger Mouse’s mash up of “The White
Album’s” and Jay Z’s The Black Album
(a slightly more lyrical chapter than the others). Because they are about less
essential topics, the mild stylistic variations are fitting rather than jarring
and help widen the perspective of an album with a particularly sprawling world
view.
