Culture
Music Critic Invokes Beatles Comparison, Refuses To Name The Committee That Approves These
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
A glowing, full-throated review of a new Pretenders documentary, published this week to considerable attention, has reignited a debate that music criticism has quietly refused to settle for approximately fifty years: who, exactly, is allowed to invoke the Beatles comparison, under what circumstances, and whether there is any body on earth empowered to revoke it.
The review in question is, by most measures, a genuinely lovely piece of writing. It describes Chrissie Hynde as possessing "the feelings of punk in her bones" while simultaneously crowning her "the most romantic songwriter of that entire scene," a distinction that required, apparently, no acknowledgment that romanticism and punk were, at the time, conducting a fairly public divorce.
The Pretenders, for those who missed them, were a genuinely extraordinary band. Hynde formed them in Hereford in 1978, recruited three local men who would both die within four years of each other from overdoses and drug-related causes, made an astonishing debut album, and then kept going, which is itself a kind of heroism nobody has written a documentary about yet. The new film, by all accounts, handles the tragedy without flinching and the music without condescending. This is rarer than it sounds.
And then, in the final third of the review, the critic arrived at "Kid," a 1979 track from that debut record, and deployed the following sentence without a helmet on: "a song so happy and sad at the same time that it's worthy of the Beatles."
Worthiness. Beatle-worthiness. The single most inflation-proof currency in the history of music journalism, handed out here like a loyalty stamp at a sandwich shop.
Elton John, reached for comment on a matter he was not asked about, told a gathering of close friends last Thursday that "the Beatles comparison is the most powerful tool a critic possesses and also the one they reach for when they have run out of the smaller tools." His publicist clarified that Elton was speaking generally and not about this review specifically, though nobody had suggested otherwise until the clarification.
What makes the deployment remarkable is not that it is wrong. "Kid" is a beautiful, genuinely disorienting song. It opens like a lullaby and closes like a small private grief, and Hynde sings it with the specific exhaustion of someone who has already figured out the ending. It might be worthy of the Beatles. It might also be worthy of Joni Mitchell, or Gram Parsons, or Townes Van Zandt, all of whom are presumably waiting in a different queue.
But the Beatles comparison does not ask to be questioned. It arrives, it settles, it rearranges the furniture. Once a song has been declared Beatles-adjacent by a credentialed reviewer in a publication with a masthead, it becomes load-bearing. Other critics cite it. Documentaries quote it. The press notes for the Blu-ray will reproduce it in a pull quote next to a photo of Hynde looking magnificently indifferent to everyone's opinions.
The punk-romanticism contradiction, meanwhile, has been left entirely unexamined in the piece, which is a choice. Punk, as a movement, was philosophically committed to the idea that sentiment was a con and beauty was a trap laid by people trying to sell you something. Hynde, the review argues, smuggled genuine romantic feeling through the barricades anyway, which is either an act of quiet genius or proof that the barricades were never as effective as the leather jackets suggested.
Both can be true. That is, in fact, what the song "Kid" is about.
The documentary opens in limited release this Friday. The Beatles have not yet issued a statement on whether the comparison was accepted.
The story we are making fun of: https://variety.com/2026/film/reviews/pretenders-review-chrissie-hynde-tiff-1236860631/