The Beatles ended as a rock band in 1970, the year John Lennon sang that “the dream is over” on his first solo album. Yet the Beatle business rolls on, revising the history of the band’s miserable demise in Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary Get Back, and now through the necromantic futurism of the AI-powered “Now and Then,” the last song and video to feature all four Beatles.
Yoko Ono calls the new release “a bridge” to 1978, when Lennon recorded the demo. A conceptual artist, Ono is conceptually correct. McCartney, a sentimental artist, has extended that bridge in time back into the Beatles’ lifespan by impersonating their late '60s sound. Digital trickery extends that bridge into the future we are now entering, when all music is digitally malleable because all recordings can be broken down and recombined.
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“Now and Then” sounds like Harry Nilsson on Quaaludes. It is mediocre and self-pitying even by the sludgy standards of Lennon’s solo balladry. It is also unfinished. And it is not a Beatles song. Like the other post-breakup releases, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” “Now and Then” is a Lennon demo from the 1970s, spiffed up to promote a Beatles reissue by the band’s surviving members.
McCartney, Harrison, and Starr finished “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” for the 1995 Beatles Anthology collection. They tried to finish “Now and Then” at the same time. The quality of Lennon’s 1978 demo was too poor, though. Improved recording technology and AI now allow the reduction of background noise and tape hiss and the isolation and boosting of Lennon’s voice and piano. The release of the remastered “Blue” and “Red” collections offers a commercial pretext.
The Anthology producer Jeff Lynne said in 1995 that “Now and Then” had “a chorus but is almost totally lacking in verses.” McCartney said at the time that it “had a beautiful verse” but “didn’t have a very good title” and “needed a bit of reworking.” They had half a song, but not the good half. That, McCartney confirmed in 2012, was why George Harrison “went off it” and why the track wasn’t on Anthology. In 2021, McCartney described how, in 1995, he had appealed to Harrison, “But it’s John!” Harrison replied that it was “f***ing rubbish.”
The producer, Giles Martin, son of George, now claims that Harrison was rubbishing the sound quality of Lennon’s demo, not the song. Harrison’s widow, Olivia, now claims that Harrison objected only to “technical issues” and would “whole-heartedly” have completed the track today. “John would have loved it,” Paul McCartney reckons. Why would Lennon have loved sounding like the Traveling Wilburys on SSRIs?
The dead return to life in Peter Jackson’s video. Beatle Paul and Beatle Ringo “perform” with Dead John and Dead George to a parody of the late-'60s Beatles sound. Paul and Ringo have recorded their parts in separate locations, so even the living seem out of joint. Harrison floats in wearing the psychedelic pirate suit he wore for 1967’s “Hello, Goodbye” promo film. Lennon goofs off in the gloom of a '70s studio, his eyes like those of a dead fish. Lennon and Harrison look us in the eye from the great beyond. McCartney and Starr look past the camera.
This is the wrong way round. The dead are supposed to keep an eye on posterity. Instead, they are present among us. We are reunited with the Beatles in a disembodied Shangri-La, a happy valley of the imagination where the four are still fab and the motorcade never passes the book depository: “When I was a boy / Everything was right.” Young Paul upstages Old Paul, and Young Ringo jams with Old Ringo. Young George cannot go the digital distance and is last seen as Midlife George around the time of the Windows 95 launch. Young John looks old because he is dead and thus forever young.
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“I am he as you are he as you are me,” Lennon sang on “I am the Walrus,” “and we are all together.” We are not, but it feels like we are. As we experience a human response to a machine-made stimulus, our skin crawls. The insult is not just to chronology or taste. The revulsion is the uncanny valley effect. Our feelings are manipulated by fakery, and it feels deeply wrong. AI is not yet good enough to impersonate humanity so well that we accept it intuitively and emotionally. But it is now good enough, or bad enough, to fake the previous era’s gold standard, a Beatles record.
The Beatles were the greatest unifiers of the age of personality and popular song and also pioneers of mind-altering tech weirdness. It is only right that their sonic ghost should escort us into the uncanny valley, where “nothing is real.” To hear what awaits at the exit, listen to Dustin Ballard’s AI-generated “covers” of the late Johnny Cash singing Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” and Taylor Swift’s “Blank Slate” like the ghost of Hamlet’s father playing Ophelia. These tracks are real and not-real, neither good nor bad, uncannily familiar and sadly hollow, and thus “nothing to get hung about.” The dream really is over. Who knew the future would be so boring?
Dominic Green is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Follow him on X @drdominicgreen.