These kids today, with their long hair, loud music, and matching Nehru jackets…wait, what? That’s right, 2009 is turning into 1964 all over again, thanks to a little video game that you may have heard of because every news outlet devoted time to it last week. An obscure band from a seaport in England, a band that broke up forty years ago, has managed to reinvigorate the video gaming industry. You might have heard of them, even.

The release of “The Beatles: Rock Band” has elicited mixed feelings from yours truly, not the least of which because I can’t help but hope one or more of my friends who managed to buy it might invite me to live out my John Lennon fantasy. When I was getting into the Beatles at the ripe old age of thirteen, the Beatles weren’t exactly current. We’re talking 1993-1994 here, before the “Beatles Anthology” TV documentary/multiple-CDs/tie-in cereals made the group suddenly relevant again. I totally missed out on the Nirvana “grunge” movement of that decade, Weezer was more my speed in terms of contemporary rock, but nothing got to me at that tender age quite as much as John, Paul, George, and Ringo. My cultural backwardness didn’t exactly endeavor me to my peers; a lot of them were convinced that the Beatles were just “old.”

The Beatles, for all intents and purposes, were my first love musically, and like first loves in other aspects of life I eventually moved on from them. I got into other kinds of music, mostly from the decades after the Fab Four split but before Paul teamed up with Michael Jackson, and eventually I caught up with the much more current musical scene. Nick Hornby made a great point about allowing your musical tastes to evolve: you can only listen to the classics before you need something new to engage your ears. It’s like eating at McDonald’s every night instead of trying the other restaurants, I guess.

So imagine my surprise when suddenly, inexplicably, the Beatles were “cool,” and it was okay to like them. I’d thought they were cool for years, even if I didn’t always admit it. Where do kids get off suddenly liking something that I’d loved for years? I felt like the ageing hipster who felt like he’d “discovered” a band only to disown them upon the moment that someone else started listening to their records. I’d read all the official histories, gone through brief periods of being sick of listening to their songs before suddenly missing that distinctive sound and blaring it from my speakers twenty-four-seven. To use a metaphor from the TV show “Cops,” the Beatles were my meth-abusing no-good husband, and I was the battered-but-loyal trailer-park-dwelling wife.

I’m okay with kids liking the Beatles, I am. I’m less snobby about my own fandom, there was a time when I considered those who claimed an affinity for England’s best export as suspect. But I also fell in love with a girl once because she thought it was cool how I shared a birthday with John, so take that as you will. On some level, I could argue that it’s a little unhealthy to be that infatuated with the past and with a group who, by all rights, shouldn’t have any relevance beyond the immediate scope of their initial recording period. After all, it’s hard to imagine “Rock Band: Jonas Brothers” or “Guitar Hero: Fall Out Boy” coming out forty years from now (if Obama has his way, video games will be determined by death panels, of course).

But then again, the best aspects of pop culture tend to have a way of staying around much longer than their disposable nature merits. People still listen to the Beatles, whether they’re fashionable or not. Right now, thanks to an innovation that would have never occurred to the lads when they first stepped into a recording studio, they’re relevant once more. I might have qualms about the nature of this relevancy, but for those who have the game I have only this to say: “play on, player.”