The Beatles were at the heart of the cradle in which our contemporary world was nurtured. And George Harrison was the Beatle whose output was sidelined to the benefit of his peers Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Two documentaries on Netflix offer a chance to assess their relative contributions to popular culture. Do we thank Hitler for the dank irony that his twisted vision of a tyrannical Reich created the perfect climate for the great wave of cultural change that followed in its wake? Would the Sixties have been what they were without him? And the Twenties. A decade you would have loved to have lived through were it not for the knowledge that it was sandwiched, more or less, between the two world wars. Would the Flapper era and the Jazz Age now so closely associated with F Scott Fitzgerald have been what they were without the draconian mayhem that had been their precursor? And does this have any meaning for our current mess of a world?
Source: Tony Jackman/dailymaverick.co.za