The entire catalog of the greatest band in history finally went on sale digitally this month, and the world . . . yawned.
Which is a relief, actually.
In their first week on iTunes, The Beatles sold 2 million songs, which sounds fine until you realize that the top single peaked at No. 54, with none of the albums even cracking the Top 10. Ke$ha, P!nk and other groups with punctuation for names ruled the charts. Even Gwyneth Paltrow belting out Cee-Lo Green’s “Forget You” in front of a bunch of fake high school students on “Glee” beat Paul and the boys in the buzz department.
By contrast, “The Beatles 1,” a collection of hits released in 2000, moved more than 31 million copies and was the bestselling CD on planet Earth during the last decade.
For an Apple “event,” the digital coming of the Beatles was a rare fail.
Surely Steve Jobs knows that he can’t count on nostalgia to sell, right? Not in 2010. Not anymore.
This was the year we ran out of old things to celebrate. This was the year when Corey Haim died and “The A-Team” bombed and nobody cared that “Star Wars” is going 3-D or that “Revolver” can be sucked right out of the air for $12.99.
After a decade of overdosing on yesterday, after retreads and rehashes, after reunion shows and reunion tours, we’re done. We’re exhausted, tired of our own cultural past and all the celebration necessary to make any piece of it relevant again, even for a moment. The Police took a lap. Michael Jackson inspired a year-long nostalgiathon. We loved the ’80s, we loved the ’90s, but can we just be done now? The Boomer and Gen-X pop catalogs and TV reruns have been warmed over so many times, it’s hard to remember when any of it mattered — or why.
And forget counting on the Millennial crowd for a kick of look-back cash. There isn’t much so far this century to remember foldly, much less resurface for wistful remember-whens. Heck, the best part of the last 10 years has been looking back on the previous 20.
Who even has the luxury anymore of time to reflect? We’re busy! The DVR is full of vampires, and Twitter is blowing up about Kanye, and there’s something new right over there, don’t you see it! Must we listen to stories about The Stones, again, when Bristol Palin is stumbling on “Dancing With the Stars”?
People still fall in love while listening to The Beatles, and “Abbey Road” is best enjoyed straight through in its entirety, just the way God intended. But can we agree that we’re done collectively bonding over it in public? And not just The Beatles. Pink Floyd, Def Leppard, “90210,” Smurfs, all of it is being let go.
The pace of pop reinvention has sped up enough to make nostalgia irrelevant anyway. Hollywood is out of things to remake, so it’s rebooting “Spider-Man” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Superman” — movies and shows that were already remade — with all new stars and the same storylines.
Don’t worry about catching up on the “new” versions, these will make Tobey Maguire and Brandon Routh and Sarah Michelle Gellar obsolete.
The Beatles are caught in the cycle, too. The iTunes deal is just another reboot, on the heels of last year’s Rock Band video game or their albums getting remastered so they could sell at Starbucks.
How can we get nostalgic for something that never goes away?
What’s replacing the once-endless resurfacing of ancient rock stars isn’t much better, though. The enemy of nostalgia these days is the singing teenager show “Glee,” which is influential well beyond the reach of its ratings. Each time the cast issues a muzaked vanilla-pella remake of a Journey or Queen anthem, our connection to the original gets stretched, faded, washed in hard water.
Reboot The Beatles, or “Spider-Man,” or Britney, or JFK, or anything, enough and we’ll forgot what it felt like the first time. All we’ll have left is the copy of a copy of a feeling. Or a badly autotuned cover version.
This is the year, too, that the “Glee” cast broke The Beatles record for the most singles placed by a group in the Hot 100 chart. It’s a big number (71), but Lea Michele and a bunch of other people whose names you won’t remember 30 years from now, blew right past it.
The year’s truly big nostalgic moment — not counting the awkward mourning of Gary Coleman and unnecessary resurrection of Betty White — was the “Glee” homage to Britney Spears. The episode gave full idol-worship treatment to her iconic albino snake-and-bikini dance from the MTV Video Music Awards.
What gets lost in this 2010 prime-time celebration is the connection to the original, what made the teenage blonde’s belly dance, surrounded by exotic animals, truly transcendent.
Britney’s most over-the-top performance aired live on Sept. 6, 2001.
It was the last pop culture fiasco before the event that changed it all. But now all you need to remember is the scrubbed-up “Glee” version, and doesn’t that somehow feel better?
Glenn Gaslin is the author of the novel “Beemer.”