Neighborhoods Should Grow Like The Beatles

Thoughts on continuity through change

I think a lot about the question of neighborhood character versus dynamism/change/etc. How can you formulate the idea that places, as places, exist—that it means something to be a member of a local community and to live in a specific place—while at the same time allowing for places to evolve? In other words, how can we distinguish localism from NIMBYism?

One analogy you can draw is with people. People grow and change but remain the same. Their “character” is not reducible to their external appearance, or any particular moment in their life, but something deeper than that. Cities, towns, and neighborhoods can be understood like that. Change is part of being a place. Not worse, just different.

A more fun way of putting it is that cities should grow like the Beatles. The Beatles are a good analogy because there is a clear character and continuity to their work, but also a great evolution. Fans think of the early Beatles (pre-Rubber Soul), transitional Beatles (Rubber Soul/Revolver) and late Beatles (through to Abbey Road). Most bands don’t have multiple different, distinct sounds.

You can prefer one era over the other, but you can’t say that one of them is “really” the Beatles and one (or more) is a departure or a violation or a betrayal. They’re all the Beatles. And more importantly, they all flow together in the context of the band’s work—in the actual, rooted, once-in-time way that their body of work came together.

Rubber Soul stands alone as an album, of course, but it clearly also bridges the band’s early and late styles. This is, you might say, like a settlement that began as a small town growing rapidly into a city. If the Beatles sound ended there, it would be still be complete. But it didn’t end there.

Conversely, you might not like the early Beatles albums, but there would be none of their more sophisticated work without that solid base. If Sgt. Pepper is Manhattan today, Please Please Me is Manhattan in the 1600s. Everything that is mature today grew up once and started somewhere; everything in an early state might reach that point. Or might not. It’s all okay. There is no Platonic form of a place up there in the ether from which the actual place as it exists on the ground can diverge or somehow be less real in comparison. “The lads” and “the studio magicians” are the same four actual people. They are what they are, and each particular, timebound thing they were fit into the context of the whole evolution.

NIMBYism makes as little philosophical sense as arguing in 1966 that the Beatles should be forced to keep making standard rock/pop albums.¹ It is kind of wistful to hear Rubber Soul and realize that this was the last time the Beatles would put out an album where they were all singing catchy, legible songs in tight harmonies. (I’ve always thought of Sgt. Pepper a bit like modern art; it can be appreciated, but it just isn’t quite as satisfying as the formulaic but expertly refined work of the earlier Beatles.) But nothing can be done about that, because they were real people who grew out of and into things.