The Multiverse Music Selection
One of the greatest things about having a Multiverse, even one of the Marvel Sort
Is the slight variations in music you will find. The great songs you remember from your youth might never have been written in another Universe.
Then again, even greater songs might have been.
This was subject of what may have been the worst movie made about music by people who evidently love the music they were making the movie about
Normally I don’t like to smack talk movies because people who worked their asses off might be hurt, and hey, this movie has great cinematography, acting, music, and just about everything but somehow, in this one, they found a universe in which the Beatles never existed and the only effect it had on music or the world was that Oasis never existed either.
I mean I get it, in this article in my long running series trying to evaluate the actual critical standing of the Beatles (instead of just claiming greatness and leaving it at that as most critics have done since their heyday)
I wrote
half of these songs sound like Oasis, the other half like every other band that has ever existed.
This will of course only be amusing to members of the aging cohort that remember who Oasis were.
and it sure is fun to beat on Oasis even when you really love some of what they did.
But if the Beatles really are at the number 1 spot in the Rock and Roll hall of fame for musical innovation and influence (shared with Chuck Berry)
You would think their complete absence from the world would have had some more drastic effect.
Look at The Google Scene
The Beatles don’t exist, but the Rolling Stones do and not only that the old version of the Rolling Stones but current version of the Rolling Stones is still going!
The band that the Beatles helped to get a contract exists in the world that the Beatles did not exist in, and in their current setup.
Again — the filmmakers who evidently love the Beatles and wanted to establish that if the Beatles did not exist people would so love their music that any guy making covers of them removed from their historical context would end up skyrocketing to international stardom while also having a world in which the absence of the Beatles has had no important side effects on anything!
The plotting and premise are so bad it ruins anything good about the movie.
Don’t just take my word about it, I asked Agent 99 as well —
message (19 to 99): Hey 99, it’s 19, I have a question did you ever see the Movie Yesterday?
message: What are you talking about? I was busy yesterday, I have shit to do, important shit, I didn’t go see any movies.
message: -No I mean there is a movie called Yesterday. About the Beatles not existing.
message: let me look it up… no I haven’t seen that, why in the world are you asking? Is it any good, it was made by that guy who made fast zombies right?
message: I think it sucks but I’m just interested in your take on it, the film suggests a world in which basically everything is the same only the Beatles didn’t exist.
message: well the Cantelwitz conjecture (that there is a simple reality maintaining function preventing most time alterations from creating real permanent branches in reality), means that branches over the long run tend to collapse, thus there are not an infinite number of long running branches across all Multiversal possibilities, that however does not mean that you cannot have many, many branches that take significant amounts of time to collapse back into their parent branches.
message: thanks, that was really helpful, so uh my question is if it si likely that a branch 40 years or so after the Beatles would look exactly the same as a world with the Beatles except minus the Beatles. Do you understand?
message: yeah, thanks for confirming what I always suspected — that there are in fact stupid questions. And the answer is no, if you were missing George, or Ringo, there would be minimal changes at worst. But removing all 4 of them together would have many side effects. Most of them collapsing to a state of reasonable synchronicity within 50–60 years, some taking centuries, and some of them creating extremely long running non-collapsing branches — for example Universe Ølife which killed off most people in a nuclear war in the mid-60s was a universe without the Beatles — obviously it had some other things that went wrong but mainly my theory has always been it was the finding of Cuban ties to the Kennedy assassination in connection with the Beatles not providing the important entertainment and mood-lifting boost after the assassination that sent America down a dark spiral whi..
message: yeah good, thanks that’s all I needed to know.
message: ok good, try not to bother me again for the next year. I have stuff to work on.
It’s nice to have a time traveler to ask questions of, it sucks that it has to be that guy.
But anyway this Yesterday has been a pretty big derail, because what I really want to talk about is the branches of reality which I guess don’t last that long before collapsing back into the main branch but which often have slightly different things that we can appreciate, like that one branch in which England loves Vinegar and Chutney fries in the 90s, delicious stuff!
And one thing that you can find in these branches that are great — different music.
For example there is the branch where John Taylor started his own funk band way early, and Alannah Curie ended up joining Duran Duran, which benefited from having a female perspective around.
Or these branches which we have written about before
Yes, one of the best bits of the Multiverse is how it opens you up to new musical sensations and lets you know just how fragile what you grew up listening to was, how vastly different the sounds that informed your youth can be.
This article was written by IG Agent 19, with some input from Agent 99.
