Mrs Tsk *: The new edition of Mousse magazine is out, and in it you’ll find my...

The new edition of Mousse magazine is out, and in it you’ll find my essay about the Abbey Road webcam, which I became strangely fascinated with during December. I’d sit on my tatami mats in Osaka, watching London tourists line up in real time to reproduce the Abbey Road sleeve. Better yet, I’d catch the cam in the middle of the night, when nobody was there, the Beatles were forgotten, and I could listen to the subtle sounds of traffic and rain. Below are some key paragraphs from the essay which give the gist of my argument against the tyranny of the “iconic” archive.

Being mentioned in a Beatles album title has helped Abbey Road studios survive, without a doubt. Everything pictured on that Abbey Road sleeve saw its value increase. The white VW Beetle, registration number LMW 281F, parked with one wheel up on the kerb was later sold to a collector, and the license plate sold separately for more than the car itself would have been worth. Even a shady American tourist captured acidentally in the shot, Paul Cole, was tracked down and congratulated. He’d become “iconic”.

Iconic. Iconic. Iconic. Christ, how I hate that word! It’s a word that describes a repetition which becomes an orthodoxy, and ironically with repetition this word has itself become an orthodoxy. Something becomes “iconic” when it is repeated so much that a dull sheen of familiarity rises off it, like the weary domesticity of a TV celebrity whose face, and whose absurd hairstyle, we’re no longer capable of seeing without the framing context of fame. For the good of our souls we really ought to be paying attention to new, fresh, strange and challenging things. Instead, we pay attention to the same old comforting, familiar bullshit. Iconic is the nicest word for it. Lazy might be a better term.

If I try to reverse-engineer the possible thinking — the “manifesto”, if you like — behind the Abbey Road cover photo, I come up with something quite different from orthodox iconic values. I come up with something like the Ram Dass slogan (the radical psychiatrist, his mind set free by Timothy Leary’s acid, actually learned it in India from his spiritual guide, Bhagavan Das): “be here now”. I imagine The Beatles saying “Let’s call the album Abbey Road. Forget concepts of elsewhere, forget disguises and images and illusions. Let’s talk about where we actually made this music. Let’s show ourselves, dressed as we are now, on the street where we made the music.”

By stepping free of stage sets and costumes, in other words, The Beatles were attempting to demythologise themselves, to disinvest themselves of the burden of their own iconic status. But of course their worldwide fame was not so easily escaped; Midas-like it transforms even the most humdrum surroundings, making the mundane glamourous rather than the glamourous mundane.

I ought to be an ideal target consumer for the products of the Generation X nostalgia industry; box sets of remastered CDs, coffee-table books fixing precise details of recording sessions, bus tours of Rock Legends. But I hate all that stuff, and here’s why. Our inability to move on from the past has made us unable to properly invent the future. We’ve forgotten how to forget, and as a result we’re drawn inexorably into the all-consuming black hole of an unsurpassable archive. We know how to recreate, but not how to create. We are miserable, dismal epigones. We are all Oasis, parasites nesting on the shoulders of giants, pilgrims rather than prophets, so awed by “there” and by “then” that we’re totally unable to be here and be now, and even less able to prepare for a future that might want to feel any nostalgia for us.

And yet here I am, at the Abbey Road webcam. It’s still raining in London, still dark, but I can hear a few foolhardy birds beginning to sing. O lucky birds, to live in a society without archives! At the crossing, nobody is imitating The Beatles yet. But they will. Just give the sun a little time to rise. The logic is inexorable.