The Pain of Belief--Our Blankness After the Beatles Left (1974)

The Pain of Belief--Our Blankness After the Beatles Left (1974)

What was that all about, I wonder. Staring at the record jacket, I mutter the question again for what must be the hundredth time. The Beatles. Why were we so obsessed with the music created by those four men?

The Beatles were not just pop music to us, even though they have become a myth. It was "something we could believe in. At a time when wars, revolutions, teachers, and parents were no longer something to believe in, the Beatles' music was the only thing that made us feel something. Behind that light chord progression, there was indeed a resonance that seemed to reach to the end of the world.

But that too passed away in 1970, when the Beatles broke up. It wasn't the end of the world, but something snapped in our hearts. It wasn't so much that they were gone, but rather that something we believed in had disappeared with a resounding thud.

Now, in 1974, the streets are filled with glam rock, folk songs, political vacuums, and cynicism. The student movement has crumbled, and the turmoil of the oil crisis has shaken the lives of ordinary people. Records continue to play in Tokyo's coffee shops, but no one listens to them.

So we say to ourselves, "The Beatles...well, I liked them. We liked them, but not anymore. But the truth is, we still want to believe in them, and somewhere along the way, we can't let go of the feeling that we want to see them again. My sensitivity that allowed me to believe in them back then supports my current ironic self. In other words, the "pain of believing" is what keeps me alive.

The youth culture of that time was struggling to maintain "emotional precision" in the midst of self-denial and resignation. Everyone was tired of politics, broken by dreams, and still wanted to believe in something. The Beatles' music was that "something," and we are still walking in the void left by its loss.

The music will continue to flow, but that "time when everyone believed" will never return. That is why, in the irony and silence of the present, we remember the heat of the past.