Let It Be is a disparate album, going all sorts of different places at once, never unified. Harrison says they'll be back together, but he has always been a force for peace, a quiet influence in all our lives, and unobtrusive. He wrote "Nothing's Going To Change My World," perhaps as a stand of defiance against the forces of corruption, but eventually felt the compulsion to split. All we do know is that staying with the Beatles he felt inhibited and closed off from his music.
Never, for example associating himself with ABCKO, and thus somehow less tainted. From this distance it appears as though he stayed close to his music. Paul never got so involved in the business. But the Beatles succumbed finally to the hardware of the business they helped resurrect, and that is the ultimate tragedy of their demise. The Stones in "Sympathy for the Devil," Godard's brilliant film now making the rounds, and Phil Spector is not around to bail out the group on the ledge of defeat. And simulation is what they have always stood against.
The result was nothing live at all but a group of very famous people, heroes of our time simulating live performance. There is a photograph of the group buried in their equipment, performing before cameras. This album is a sad attempt to recreate the days when they played before actual people and not George Martin and millions of dollars of sound equipment. The rest of the album is hackneyed, originally supposed to signify the Beatles attempt to get back to rock and roll, to where they once performed live. "Let It Be" is Paul's most beautiful song, reminiscent of everything he has ever written, a culmination song, beautiful in its own right. They are message songs, allegorical in the traditional Beatle form, and they both signal themselves to ultimate failure. They are "Let It Be," a McCartney creation and "Get Back," also Paul's. There are only two songs which get anywhere and we have heard these so much they have lost their lustre. John Lennon and Paul McCartney are not writing together, haven't been for two years, and you can see the whole thing falling apart in Let It Be, which required the slick hand of Phil Spector to pull it out of the troubled and terribly muddied waters, a valiant rescue effort but one which nevertheless refuses to emerge into the genius and originality of any of the other Beatle albums.
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