(particularly the line "what they need's a damn good whacking"), "Helter Skelter", "Revolution 1" and "Revolution 9", and interpreted the lyrics as a sign of imminent violence or war. He and other members and associates of the Manson family repeatedly listened to it, and he allegedly told them that it was an apocalyptic message predicting an uprising of oppressed races, drawing parallels with chapter 9 of the Book of Revelation. New Left criticism Further to the betrayal they had felt at Lennon's non-activist stance in "Revolution", New Left commentators condemned The Beatles for its failure to offer a political agenda. The Beatles themselves were accused of using eclecticism and pastiche as a means of avoiding important issues in the turbulent political and social climate. Jon Landau, writing for the Liberation News Service, argued that, particularly in "Piggies" and "Rocky Raccoon", the band had adopted parody because they were "afraid of confronting reality" and "the urgencies of the moment". Like Landau, many writers among the New Left considered the album outdated and irrelevant; instead, they heralded the Rolling Stones' concurrent release, Beggars Banquet, as what Lennon biographer Jon Wiener terms "the 'strong solution,' a musical turning outward, toward the political and social battles of the day". Popular music and postmodernism Sociologists Michael Katovich and Wesley Longhofer write that the album's release created "a collective appreciation of it as a 'state-of-the-art' rendition of the current pop, rock, and folk-rock sounds". The majority of historians categorise The Beatles as postmodern, emphasising aesthetic and stylistic features of the album; Inglis, for example, lists bricolage, fragmentation, pastiche, parody, reflexivity, plurality, irony, exaggeration, anti-representation and "meta-art", and says that it "has been designated as popular music's first postmodern album". Authors such as Fredric Jameson, Andrew Goodwin and Kenneth Womack instead situate all of the Beatles' work within a modernist stance, based either on their "artificiality" or their ideological stance of progress through love and peace. Scapelliti cites The Beatles as the source of "the freeform nihilism echoed … in the punk and alternative music genres". In his introduction to Rolling Stones list of the "100 Greatest Beatles Songs", Elvis Costello comments on the band's pervasive influence into the 21st century and concludes: "The scope and license of the White Album has permitted everyone from OutKast to Radiohead to Green Day to Joanna Newsom to roll their picture out on a broader, bolder canvas." In early 2013,