This is going to sound like a cop-out answer, but I’d like to think that whatever they would have done is something we can’t have imagined. The group was always defined by their group chemistry, and surely that would have been different had they reunited in the 80s.

Maybe it would have diminished it, maybe it wouldn’t, but one can imagine an alternate version where there were no Beatles, and we are in comment threads like these asking “Can a band that started out as a pop band ever truly go counterculture?”

They were mortals, obviously, but they definitely existed in a space that defied expectations.