The Beatles - Revolver

I’m not really into rock, but this album I love beyond words — I genuinely can’t explain it. Anyone with even a passing interest in rock will find the name “the Beatles” thunderously familiar. Yes — they stopped being just a band a long time ago. They are the Beatles, they are a culture, they are a byword for a legendary era.

That generation of rock-and-roll kids was so fervent, so soaring, so free, so optimistic. It suddenly strikes me how grateful I am that they existed — in this tangled, overgrown society, that I can still hear their pure, lovable voices feels like a real redemption, a real comfort. I wasn’t born in the sixties, and I wasn’t lucky enough to be born in the seventies or eighties either — I was born in the early nineties, branded with the label “post-90s.”

Right now, I find myself hysterically nostalgic for the sixties. I want to grow my hair into a long mop and howl “She Said She Said” at the top of my lungs; I want to shout “Long live Chairman Mao” beneath a sky full of fluttering flags. I want to march with French students in their student movements; I want to take to the streets in a frenzy with the hippies… The pity is that the times are no longer the sixties, and I am what’s called “post-90s.” We indulge ourselves recklessly; we fall silent and say nothing. We march forward optimistically; we grow weary of the world and despair.

And yet, in the end, we can never be as simple and pure as you were. I’m truly envious of the people of the sixties — you got to worship Chairman Mao as a god, to believe in him so fiercely you couldn’t pull yourselves free. Let me borrow a line from Marilyn Coffey’s essay, collected in The Sixties (Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences Press, 2000): Oh! How enchanting! This is how life moves forward! This is how life refuses to be abandoned!