The Beatles: Life After Death— Resurrection or Resuscitation?

The idea of rock music as a secular religion is a familiar topic that has been beaten to death by now. The present discussion attempts to revive it in the metaphorical context of death and resurrection in the story of the Beatles. The well-known facts are presented here anew as indications of the self-mythologisation that was meant to ‘ignite’ the Beatles legend and keep it alive in people’s minds. A ‘sacred’, sealed corpus may be a candidate for immortality, but it loses the vibrancy of living, changing rock music. If life after death is to resemble life before death, the corpus must be opened and stirred up. The Beatles have documented themselves incessantly through their anthologies, but they have also recorded ‘new’ songs in the vocal company of the late John Lennon, remixed one of their albums (resulting in Let It Be … Naked), and recently gave their blessing to a soundtrack produced for a Cirque du Soleil show, with mashups of their recorded materials. The soundtrack offers new possibilities for intertextuality, a phenomenon common in the Beatles’ later repertoire. The Beatles present an interesting, complex intertextual web of allusions and allusions to allusions, including self-quotes meant to reinforce the corpus from the inside and support its canonisation, as well as external allusions that link the corpus to cultural traditions and boost its status. Does the Beatles’ self-canonisation, which continues to this day, in fact undermine the canonical status of the corpus that was ostensibly closed and sealed in the late sixties?