The Beatles - The White Album

The bose-nug dichotomy is a theory of personality based around doglike or catlike characteristics. Basically dogs are seen as enthusiastic and spontaneous, or "bosy" and cats as aloof and organised, or "nuggy". The White Album is most definitely the Beatles' bosy album. Having written a ridiculous amount of music in a short time, they simply decided to enthusiastically chuck it all together and fill 2 LPs to the limit, as opposed to methodically separating the gems from the B-sides. It might be a fun but controversial activity to be nuggy and slim the White Album's contents down to a single album. I'd start with the navel-gazing "Glass Onion", "Bungalow Bill", "Don't Pass Me By" (sorry, Ringo), "Savoy Truffle", "Cry Baby Cry", "Long Long Long"...

But that still leaves about one and a half albums of great and astonishingly varied material. A miser would say we only need one of Paul's bright-eyed ditties "Blackbird" and "Mother Nature's Son". Or that we don't need four songs with girls' names in the titles. But I'm happy with its bosy overindulgences, such as the avant-garde tape wankery of Revolution 9, the ridiculously gooey ballad "Good Night", and their dabble in every contemporary music style possible. There's also nothing wrong with one-idea piss-takes like "I'm So Tired" or "Why Don't We Do it in the Road". And of course the good songs such as "Happiness is a Warm Gun" or "Helter Skelter" are just plainly good. Although however many times I listen to it there's will always be a feeling that I don't know it well enough, so what I write now might certainly be edited in the future.

April 25, 2004

8 out of 10

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