The White Album — The Modern Beatles
Reviewing the Albums of the Beatles that sound Modern Enough to Exist Now — #4 in A Series.
The White Album — The Modern Beatles
Reviewing the Albums of the Beatles that sound Modern Enough to Exist Now — #4 in A Series.
In the Sgt. Peppers article I said “So this is the big one, the album that is in the public imagination as the one cementing the Beatles status as the greatest band of Rock and Roll”, which is true, as far as it goes, and it doesn’t go much further than the public imagination.
For critics it is often Revolver that is the best, John Lennon once claimed this album was the better one — an opinion I agree with although not because Lennon said it. There is a bit in the essay “To Speak Meaningfully About Art”
There are artists who cannot talk meaningfully about art because they cannot differentiate between what they like and what is good, but they have a good instinct for what they can use in making what they want and things that they must go against.
Which, yes, I don’t think Lennon had the ability to speak meaningfully about art because he did not understand that what he liked was not necessarily the best way things could be.
Furthermore in the companion article “Speaking Without Meaning About Art”
it was noted that
the creator of a work often has multiple reasons why they want to obfuscate the sources or meanings of the work.
And I think Lennon as a person describing their art and the reasons for it, and the relations he had to his co-creators, was not a very trustworthy person.
Preambles done, the way these reviews work is I do as much of an in-depth analysis of each song as I think it deserves, or as much as it pulls out of me, I try to focus on how it might seem to someone encountering the song now, but of course also just ttrying to describe what potentially makes the song worthwhile.
SIDE ONE
Back in the U.S.S.R.
I like this song, but let’s face it, it’s sort of cheesy. A nice Chuck Berry rocker / Beach Boys parody, and once you have the concept “Back in the U.S.S.R” instead of “Back in the U.S.A” this is the totally non-surprising result.
Sure “Let me hear your balalaikas ringing out” is a nice line but essentially it is a funny Beach Boys parody extremely competently done.
Obviously in the historical context it meant or at least implied something more, given the cold war, but historical context doesn’t last.
I like this song, because it is really to my taste, but I’m not sure it is really that good.
Who should do cover of this song?
Jack Malik, he should do a version while on the way to be a fronting band for Ed Sheeran in modern day Russia. I bet he would do a killer version.
GOD — THAT MOVIE SUCKED!
As an incidental issue the lyrics
The Ukraine girls really knock me out They leave the West behind And Moscow girls make me sing and shout That Georgia’s always on My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my mind
in a song entitled Back In The U.S.S.R in the modern day might have totally different political overtones than it did when originally written.
This is a different kind of oldness than just sounding old, evidently some kids nowadays don’t know what the U.S.S.R was, which is OK with me, nobody can know everything, and I’m uncertain if the name of a defunct nation state should not be one of the bits of knowledge that gets dropped from the modern mind as non-essential.
It’s pretty hard to write things that will last forever, countries change, political parties shift allegiance, language evolves, but The Beatles do have more of a tendency to also do stuff that is just really of their time lyrically, for example in Yer Blues when Lennon feels the need to namecheck Dylan and Mr. Jones. A reference that perhaps lasted one decade well, but now is almost completely meaningless to anyone not a boomer or a music nerd, and the music nerds might think it especially lame.
It’s a weird habit, given they are also prone to a lot of nostalgia.
Anyway the U.S.S.R thing is not their fault, just like if the U.S splits up in the next decade to several warring regions and that continues on for a couple decades then Springsteen’s The Promised Land will not have any particular meaning to a 20 year old kid of that dystopian future, it may still sound relevant, but lyrically it would be like hearing Tam Lin and stories of riding with the Queen of the Fairies, just as now some weird country with initials sounding like USA but which isn’t USA that collapsed 33 and a half years ago as of this writing is really a fantasy for the modern listener.
It’s perhaps a bit difficult to choose who should cover this song, it’s an “old” sounding song, but a fake old sound. A Beach Boys pastiche for a Beach Boys sound that the Beach Boys were moving away from at the time. Just as the lyrics are ironic or sarcastic, depending on how you want to view those moods, so is the sound.
Billy Joel covered it in 1987, which is very a propos
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Which at least actually took place in the U.S.S.R — take that Jack Malick!
So I don’t really have any reasonable suggestion — every version that I have ever heard has been not as good as the Beatles because the structure of a Beach Boys pastiche is so strong that basically everybody follows that, and when a band is following that structure, what is the chance that they have the singers able to hit the high shouty bits as well as McCartney and Lennon?! What’s the chance they can do reasonable Beach Boys harmonies? The chances are slim to maybe a boy band, which fair enough, we can say that’s how the Beach Boys and The Beatles both started out.
I don’t really get the urge to cover a song and knowing you will always come in second place to those who did it first.
There’s two types of covers, those in which the bands are enough like the ones who did it first that they can do something very like the original but bring their own slight variation to it and it still sounds good, and then there are the covers that make the song new, almost unrecognizable.
Back in the U.S.S.R needs the second kind of cover, and that’s why I think Apashe with Instasamka, doing a sequel to this
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A time travel odyssey, a parody, something new could come out of it. Maybe Pussy Riot should be involved.
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Dear Prudence.
This song is just on the side of my taste, a little bit less jangly and not my taste. Also the lyrics are not especially great, so it is just barely to my taste. But I like it much more than one would expect, given how little it is like what you would expect I like. So given the theory about detecting quality outlined in the following article
I guess that means it’s pretty good.
But it is a song that doesn’t really reward any great analysis, not to say that people don’t do it
in fact I would say this song, while not a great one for analysis, is quite good, and trippy sounding, and by The Beatles during their Maharishi time — so it is a great song for inspiring the most pretentious statements possible from Rock critics — which is pretty damn pretentious!
Who should do a cover? They already did it.
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Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Another song that is just barely on this side of I like it. It’s a nice poppy song but this song, despite having that McCartney pop sensibility that lets it go down easy, is pretty damn “cringe”.
In fact, given the changing fashions of Racism and Anti-Racism over the years
I suppose if you had some kids listen to it and afterwards tell them it was the Beatles the first comment would not be anything about how cool it was, but rather questioning why they were trying to sound Jamaican, although really the guy they are trying to imitate is Nigerian singer Jimmy Scott-Emuakpor
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For someone familiar with our modern discourses about these kinds of things the song does feel somewhat icky.
Who should do this song?
Well, No Doubt did it in ‘97.
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I generally love No Doubt but I don’t like this song for them, but I gotta say they look like they love playing it, so that’s good.
Who I’d like nowadays — Nadia Rose. Just thought of that. She could make something out of that song that was not so cringe, and maybe also way over the line into loving it territory.
maybe there might also be some things about the song that she might like to talk some shit about.
Wild Honey Pie
The lyrics, man. I tend to like well written lyrics, with clever phrases, there is something to be said for the brilliance of this song that I remember it as having decent lyrics when actually it is just the phrase Honey Pie, repeated over and over again.
Other than that, not much to say here either.
Who should do this song?
I think Bjork. But, oh well, let’s talk some more about this song.
This is generally regarded as one of the worst Beatles songs, and in the context of its time, yeah, it’s a stinker, it is 53 seconds and doesn’t go anywhere, artistically it does not have the level of finish of much else they did.
But let’s think of it in the context of today, it is totally a nice playlist filler you can drop in to segue between songs, just as it was in this album, it has about three parts that you could sample and use to build something out of. I could totally see my favorite jokey but with ability to groove white hip hop buddies BBNO$ and Yung Gravey
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Grab themselves some Wild Honey Pie and run with it.
This song is the secret sauce for somebody’s next big hit.
The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.
The rhetorical point of this song is nowadays so universally agreed upon that it is a big yawning cliche.
Again it’s a song I sort of like, it is somewhat too my taste, but when listening one has to get into the music and get past the preachy moral rhetoric and that is sort of difficult for me, because I listen to the lyrics.
That said the lines
“Not when he looked so fierce,” his mummy butted in “If looks could kill, it would have been us instead of him”
always makes me laugh.
Who should cover it? I don’t know, since it’s set in India I sort of think it would be cool if someone Indian did something to it.
It doesn’t really seem Hanumankind’s type of thing though. I would like to hear Talwinder Singh Sidhu’s take on some Beatles, but not this song. I don’t know but I think it should be essentially redone, from the viewpoint of someone from India, seeing these colonialist hunters coming over to kill Tigers for sport.
If looks could kill there might have been self defense, but these rhymes do kill the lines that fill get more intense and its us against them. All the children say…
Maybe Arivu
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While My Guitar Gently Weeps.
And Harrison brings the classic on this side. Again a song that is not so much to my taste that I quite like, but it has sort of worn itself out in my head so I don’t listen too much to it. It makes a good addition to playlists though.
I’ve noted before that until Costello there was no great writer in Rock and Roll who could write a song that Bob Dylan couldn’t have written.
That said the Beatles often came close, often because the songs were quite British but other things as well bring forth this observation.
Dylan could have written this song but he would not have written the lines
I don’t know how you were diverted You were perverted, too I don’t know how you were inverted No one alerted you
Or at least not with the same meaning of perverted. Dylan, like probably everybody else in rock and roll would have needed to make some libidinous observation with perverted, that is to say sexual perversion but Harrison it seems to me means the original, non-sexualized, meaning of perverted —
of a change for the worse, to an unnatural state, the character Harrison is talking to has been perverted by society to be a worse version of the person they could have been, of who they were meant to be.
The Beatles lyrics are seldom clever all the way through, they do not have a surfeit of cleverness or depth, but they are not all simple either.
I appreciate good lyrics, and the Beatles sometimes had very great parts of songs that otherwise were lyrically pedestrian.
We already know about the cover of course
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Happiness is a Warm Gun
HAH HAH — I get it — The Gun is a Penis!!
Wow, pretty deep.
OK, not especially fair, and actually I like this song a lot and it is to my taste. I like it a lot more, personally, than all the other songs on this side. But it is sort of cringe because the metaphor of gun = penis is so common nowadays.
The problem was that while clever guys, the Beatles were not that deep, and Lennon was generally not as deep as he was given credit for and that he liked to pretend he was because of issues I suppose. What they were, were guys who very much exemplified the zeitgeist and were maybe slightly ahead of the curve, and were great musicians with lots of money and reach. That allows one to seem very deep when you are only at middling depth.
Although maybe I am being put out by memories of old hippy parents talking between themselves while listening to the song about how not very many people probably got the connection to the gun = penis thing, meaning evidently that people thought that it was a straight ahead song and that John Lennon evidently was singing “Happiness is a warm gun” non-ironically.
Anyway, that’s the kind of thing that makes you not respect the music of the older generation as much as it might deserve.
Who should do a cover — well it would be nice Prince, but not happening for obvious reasons so someone who can actually make the song sound salacious.
Maybe it should be a woman.
Lady GaGa.
SIDE TWO
Martha My Dear
At this point of course I’m used to it, but this is such a weird rock and roll song, especially for its time.
The two groups that might have done something like this at the time — The Who, and they would have been extremely sarcastic about the square old slightly misogynistic workaholic fuddy-duddy who really does seem to maybe love his wife, as far as he can, and the Kinks — and I’m not sure what they would have done with it.
As is often the case it sounds old fashioned, because it is the whole Nostalgic for a Britain that is vanished and gone kick that The Beatles often get on, but whereas most nostalgic groups will varnish over the distasteful elements of the rosy-tinted past The Beatles show it without highlighting it, it is more like reportage into the mind of a person that does not exactly think the Beatles are that good but probably does not detest them either.
I think Paul McCartney really liked to imagine himself a nice common sort of bloke having a happy, not especially interesting life, with a nice sensible middle-class job, sometime in between the two world wars. Perhaps as a solicitor in a charming little village.
Who should cover this song. It has been covered by several artists.
Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass covered it, which I guess really helped bring out its dorky side and made it sound awful.
None of the other bands that covered it really should have I think, Phish and World Party are sort of interesting but it just feels like no…
I think maybe Father John Misty. But it is hard for me to really think of a song where the singer could completely slip into the character who is calling Martha a silly girl without sounding like a real jerk. Because just about everyone would tend to highlight that aspect of the song. I think Misty would be a jerk in the song.
Maybe The Divine Comedy?
But actually I think maybe the easiest way to achieve the result of a song where the singer is sort of a demeaning but affectionate jerk, of a minor enough jerkitude that one can overlook it, to the object of their affection is for the character calling Martha silly girl to be a lesbian.
I would like the song to be sung by Benee (who may or may not be a lesbian, I don’t know, I just mean the character in the song should be)
Do I like this song, no, but it has some catchy bits. And also really, I do put this forward as an example of the genius of the Beatles, because they do songs that really it seems nobody else does.
I’m So Tired
I love this song — it is extremely to my taste. As well as being to my taste I think it is a great song.
But still, it’s another song that is a bit weird. Most bands making this song would try to make it about trying to get laid, being extremely horny. And I guess it may be, but it just doesn’t sound like it. Frankly, I don’t ever think there has been any Beatles song, even the ones ostensibly about sex, that has sounded like these guys wanted some sex!
For all the snark that Led Zeppelin’s Lemon Song has ever engendered at least you felt this was sung by someone seriously intent on engendering.
I mean it just does not sound like Lennon wants to see this woman to have sex with her, because I guess Lennon, like the rest of the Beatles are actually mature, as I’ve pointed out in others of these reviews, and he really misses the woman because he values her company — not just because he is in need of sufficient worship of his phallus by a willing receptacle, which would by the obvious vibe if the Rolling Stones had done this song.
I wonder if the early years drained the ability to sound sexually charged out of them, all those high pitched Little Richard type yells McCartney could do and you never feel really like if this guy doesn’t get laid soon something is going to burst.
They really do sound like hand holding is good enough, Miss. Which I mean, was not the case, but that is what they sound like.
This is really one of the things I like about this song, is the fact that in the end I have a hard time thinking anyone doing it and not increasing the erotic charge.
That said if it were to be covered I’d maybe like to see an increase of the erotic charge, but not necessarily. I’d like to see Anderson .Paak do something to this song. He doesn’t have to increase the erotic charge, hey, he probably find something else just as good. I believe Paak has sufficient musical imagination for any task put to him, so whatever he did with this I think would be probably as great as the original and maybe unexpected.
Blackbird
So evidently this is about racism and its assumed hopeful end in that time during the 60s and especially American racism
Blackbirds are of course often used as symbolizing black people, but McCartney is so abstract you would be excused for not picking up on it (although I believe Charley Manson did, so perhaps I am also somewhat obtuse).
To me it was always some nice poetic imagery that never connected to race in anyway, indeed what it always reminded me of was the poem by Wallace Stevens
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
I Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird.
II I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds.
III The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.
V I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.
VI Icicles filled the long window With barbaric glass. The shadow of the blackbird Crossed it, to and fro. The mood Traced in the shadow An indecipherable cause.
VII O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you?
VIII I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
IX When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles.
X At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.
XI He rode over Connecticut In a glass coach. Once, a fear pierced him, In that he mistook The shadow of his equipage For blackbirds.
XII The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
XIII It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.
Even back when I actively disliked Stevens I had to say I found at least half of this poem worthwhile, later I have learned to not dislike him and the poem has improved by another 30%.
And funny enough I thought this poem was about Blackness in America, well no, that’s inaccurate — I felt a memetic tugging of the meaning of the poem towards blackness in America, despite much of the poem really just being about blackness. and I guess others did too, or at least were caused to make answer poems in which that was the assumption.
I guess I should write about that elsewhere as we’re getting off subject, but even so I never picked up on the Blackbird in the song was about blackness — and the song is somehow a bit bleak in the lyrics — for example
Blackbird fly Into the light Of a dark, black night
Does not sound like McCartney’s usual I’m going to be cheerful about this if it kills me!
I guess we know which cover, does that shut up the whole “all their songs sound old and out of date” canard? And I guess the cover brings the song back to be explicitly about blackness. Nice.
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Piggies
I know everybody thinks that Lennon was the sarcastic guy who could say some mean things but Harrison wrote this song and Taxman. There is a tendency for people who do a lot of work on their own spirituality and whatnot who luck into being able to make lots of money from a creative pursuit that does not require a lot of integration with the needs of others to think that they are better than everyone else (I mean really, he only had to deal with Lennon and McCartney, he wasn’t an employee at a big company, he didn’t have to sell real estate etc. etc. That is very little interaction with others to get your stuff done and earn your daily bread — look at all those greedy bastards out there mucking around trying to get ahead in life, I’m going back to my mansion and play my guitar!)
It’s sort of cringe.
Who should do the cover?
Drake and Kendrick Lamar, let’s get some peace here!
Hmm, that may be the meanest worst thing I’ve ever said, or then again, probably not even close, I’m just feeling it at this moment.
So, now really? Maybe Kendrick Lamar, really. I get tired of every cover I see of Piggies being really note for note, it’s a very mean song pretending ironically to be a sweet children’s song, nice, but now we know, and we know it is a mean song. It needs to be done with someone who can be mean to the level it really demands.
Kendrick Lamar is super mean, just ask Drake! I love him for this song.
Rocky Raccoon
Another cringe song that I’ve always loved but really, in a modern context Lennon’s attempted black mining hills of Dakota accent can be somewhat annoying. Or wherever he thought that accent belonged. Lucky he doesn’t commit to it wholeheartedly, so whatever.
Who should do it — Lil Nas X.
On Edit: So this morning I was laying in bed thinking about Plunder by The Felice Brothers
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And then this article, and then it came to me that of course the Felice Brothers should be the ones to cover this song.
Don’t Pass Me By
This song always struck me as related to I’m So Tired somehow, which I suppose thematically it is.
I quite like it, although probably the most interesting thing is of course the British vocabulary, the sort of archaic note of the clock on the mantel shelf, which again most rockers would never have thought to consider the clock as being on the ‘mantel shelf’, too much specificity there.
Who would I like to hear do this song, I like the song quite a bit so someone who won’t mess with it much, that sounds a bit old fashioned maybe.
Nathaniel Rateliff And The Night Sweats
Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?
I have always hated this song! When I was younger I just found it gross of course, the old out of shape hippies having sex in the road — disgusting!
I mean these are not the people you are driving down the road you see them having sex in the middle of the road you slow down to look, Jesus. The original “Get a Room” shouted from a passing Aston Martin DB5.
That said if I listen to it nowadays I hate it even more. It really does fall into the problem of The Beatles not really sounding too urgent about sex, why don’t we have sex in the road!!? It’s a rhetorical question of course — I’m not really interested. I’m just wondering why does social convention keep us from doing that, isn’t it interesting? And the answer would be no, because nobody wants to see you having sex in the road, please keep your clothes on, in fact, something less form fitting would be appreciated.
Who should do it, someone who sounds like they might like to do it in the road.
Doja Cat? Someone with a high sex drive, or at least a noticeable one. And definitely someone you would be like, this is a performance worth catching here people!
I Will
This is another one of those lovely songs that I don’t much care for. I think it is probably pretty decent, but not anything to write home about.
Lyrically reminds me of Do I love you, Indeed I do.
Who should do a cover. Someone wispy.
Hazlett, hell he sort of sounds like it
Julia
The same thing I said about the previous song, applies to this one. It is very nice. It fits well in a playlist if you need some down comfort space for that part of the playlist when people need to calm down a bit.
As I was listening here to I will and Julia together I realized this is good music to relax to. The Beatles often made music to relax too.
Relaxing music is different than music to get really stoned and trip out to, because those are very tiring and get you totally amped up even though you are ostensibly doing nothing but lying in a beanbag chair. You are on an epic killing monsters in space or something similar. These songs have all the psychoactive demands of a dandelion blown apart in a soft summer breeze.
That’s nice, because there are very few people who can actually do that kind of music anymore, but it’s also not to my taste that much.
Who should cover it — maybe Belle and Sebastian.
SIDE THREE
Birthday
I always hated this song, but then again I always hated the Happy Birthday to You song (which is the same melody used in the Italian birthday song so by extension I hate that), Joyeux anniversaire — the French birthday song is ok, although somewhat lachrymal — I do sort of like the Danish Birthday song but really only the beginning and the part where they do the whole picking out of instruments.
It may be that I just hate birthdays.
It does seem like a lot crap to go through to get some presents (which if you’re lucky one of them will be good — this luck however is highly dependent on your age) and some cake.
Who should cover this song, I honestly don’t know so I went to look up who has, and I have to say I hate every group that has covered this or at the very least hate this song for them — including and especially… Sammy Hagar!?!
So who would I choose.. Parquet Courts, maybe?
Yer Blues
This song is pretty much to my taste, but I can’t help noting it has some real flaws. In fact maybe it isn’t that good.
Now this is not the usual take, the usual take is that it is one of the greats — example ranking
8. Yer Blues
This track sees Lennon take on the blues to deliver a song that stands tall among the greats he attempted to emulate (see: Sleepy John Estes, John Lee Hooker). The result is evidence that Lennon rarely did wrong — even when he himself half expected to.
And this fits well with my personal experience of the song. It’s great.. but.. the flaws.
The major flaw is it references another song by another artist that is existing at the same time, and not in some clever way by taking a musical snippet from it, or reversing some lyrics, but by just referencing the character and the artist who made the song, as well as putting an interpretation on that character that doesn’t actually seem correct.
Really — was the problem of Mr. Jones that he was suicidal? Or was Mr. Jones suicidal because of his stress of not understanding what was going on. I don’t think so, and if he was I guess it would make Dylan seem more mean-spirited than he normally is.
We could maybe assume that this flaw is not that big of one, obviously The Ballad of a Thin Man has lasted in popular culture relatively well, it’s not quite as bad as if Lennon is referencing Bowie’s The Laughing Gnome, but still it is annoying lyrically and especially if you were a later generation listening to the song you might think “who, what?”, if the greatness of a work of art is its ability to last across generation this line is a detriment.
Also lyrically I would say the song is reaching for something you often see in the sixties, due to Dylan’s influence, that for want of a better term I will call “Poetic Depth”. Dylan really introduced this property to Rock and Roll music where listening to it you think it could function as poetry, and by that I don’t mean just a line or two (that you could always get) but the whole song.
With lines like
My mother was of the sky My father was of the earth But I am of the universe And you know what it’s worth
it seems like a clear reach for poetic depth, which I think is a quality that Lennon as a song writer might reach at lines but mostly not sustain across a whole song (sometimes he did, but mostly not), this also worsens the song — especially given knowledge of its time frame and the much more poetic offerings around, and the reference to Dylan which cannot help but call to mind a much better lyricist to those who know who he’s referencing.
So yes, mentioning Dylan in your song is probably a mistake whether or not anyone knows who he is. It seems the musical equivalent of the cinematic sin of telling, not showing.
This song for me, someone who really likes the song, trying to evaluate it dispassionately seems like a song that is almost great, annoyingly almost great.
Obviously the Dirty Mac already covered it, but that seems sort of to go against the spirit of finding a cover band in the context of these articles
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So, who do I want? La Luz
Maybe they can drop that one line that sort of sucks and come up with something better.
Mother Nature’s Son
There’s also been a feeling for me that the narrator of this song, the Mother Nature’s son themselves, seems a bit simple.
It’s a variation of the kindhearted simpleton
with extra dimensions of being preternaturally musically gifted (a McCartney, if you will) , and loving nature
But I guess I’m getting sort of off-track here, I like this song but it just doesn’t really seem to fit with, well, everything else here — without this song this side would be:
Birthday, Yer Blues, Everybody’s got something to hide.., Sexy Sadie, Helter Skelter..
That just seems to work better. But also the pastoral idyll it paints just doesn’t seem to fit with the Beatles as a general rule, the sound really goes down to the quote from the earlier article delineating the idea of the Beatles old sounds and their new
half of these songs sound like Oasis, the other half like every other band that has ever existed.
Well here’s a song that sounds sort of like a band that existed, somewhere…
Who should cover this song, I guess it’s a cop-out but I think it would go really great with Love on a Farm-Boy’s Wages — so XTC.
Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey
This song is the sort of thing that is normally to my taste, and I can’t stand it. Why, not sure why, it is thematically linked in my mind with Why don’t we do it in the road, but that’s not really it. Maybe it’s all the hippy-ness, the outside is in and the inside is out stuff, panto-depth.
But following the idea that things that are not to your taste that you like are probably pretty good
It follows that things that are to your taste that you can’t stand might not be very good.
But bad or good, who shoud do the cover?
I think someone funky and hard at the same time, somebody with a handle on the psychedelic. Fantastic Negrito
Maybe I would learn to like this song after all.
Sexy Sadie
Breaking the rules is a very rock and roll thing to do, but The Beatles don’t seem to appreciate it. Neither would I or most people, this goes back to the McCartney is a nice guy article
There is something very rock and roll about being an asshole.
Anecdotes abound of Rock Stars being assholes, and let’s be honest — if you were to live in a world for any length of time with Beatles level of fame you would probably be an asshole
Essentially the Maharishi was an asshole and Lennon didn’t appreciate it and wrote a great song taking him down, the revenge of an artist.
Probably that’s why I like this song so much. Although it also feels that Lennon still appreciates Sexy Sady for all that.
As for who should do it, someone who can talk shit but also maybe like who they’re talking shit about.
I suggest Lady Gaga, with someone else (her choice). Of course because of the way things work it would probably flip the meaning of the song, if a woman sings it but especially Lady Gaga she would become the Sexy Sady of the narrative, an interesting twist.
This has been your Illuminati Ganga authorized Pierre Menard moment of the day.
Helter Skelter
This is one of my favorite songs. Evidently McCartney wrote it to let Pete Townsend know what’s what, or something like that.
Anyway part of the original impetus for these articles were some online comments by some people who claimed never to have liked any Beatles, and to be really into classic Rock, and then they listed a pretty narrow range of bands.
But anyhow this really makes me think of my mother, who disliked Elton John, she didn’t dislike his music but had an aversion to his looks, and so if she heard an Elton John song that she liked if you told her it was Elton John she would dislike it.
So what I’m getting at is if there are people who don’t like any Beatles song it seems most probable to me that they don’t like any song they learn is by the Beatles, the range of styles and the fact that the Beatles were each very different types of musicians makes other explanations strange. Unless it’s just they haven’t heard a very wide range.
Who should do a cover of this song. Well I don’t know, U2 did a cover of it
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I don’t have the deep-seated aversion to U2 that some people do, but there is something very irritating about the whole stealing it back.
U2 has at times been great but have the ego of artists who are invariably great, and they have varied too much in quality to be allowed those egos. That, in summation, is everybody’s U2 problem. They’re U2 but they act like they think they’re at Prince, Bowie, or Dylan level. Or McCartney level for that matter, a fellow whose elevator went to the top for a long time and never acted one tenth as full of himself as U2.
As for the whole Manson family thing, how “stupid American” can you get.
This video shows a traditional British Helter Skelter.
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Essentially a fast slide for deprived kids after WW2 who probably thought it the pinnacle of fairground technology. McCartney wrote a song about something less scary than a middling roller coaster to prove he was a badass rocker too!
A story as old as time, man, people didn’t have to die, but Charlie Manson was too stupid to know what the fuck was even being referenced by the art he was consuming.
This is actually why I dislike the hard rock covers of Helter Skelter
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They’re all about the murder. OOOOO we’re badass hard rockers, we don’t care about some lover and dancer no we want to chop people up because we badasses, ooh listen to us, how tough we are oooh, we have big penises, but we don’t do anything as trivial as have sex with them we keep them buttoned inside tight leather chaps while chopping people up!!1 OOOH SUPATOUGH!
Anyway, it’s pretty pathetic, although, I also have to admit the version above is good. Really good, except it’s what everyone tries to do. It’s a murder song!! Yayyy! HARD ROCK.
I get sort of tired of the hard rock, because one of the things that is great about this song is that as hard as it it, it still has plenty of roll. I would like someone to cover it that could bring out the roll.
Who I’d like to do it?
I’d say The Detroit Cobras — but Rachel Nagy died a couple years ago and that’s really the voice I wanted. So unless either Heaven or Hell graces us with a bootleg we’ll have to look elsewhere.
Maybe Shovels and Rope
Ah shit, they already do it.
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Hmm, no not quite what I was looking for, but close, this is the problem I talked about with Back In The U.S.S.R earlier, you track too close to the original song you might have problems because it turns out — hey, you can’t scream quite as high as McCartney in his prime. But they do get close. Respect!
SIDE FOUR
Long Long Long
I dislike this song.
The quote I’ve used before
half of these songs sound like Oasis, the other half like every other band that has ever existed.
is pithy but wrong, or not exactly accurate, many songs sounds like a weird amalgamation of several bands at the same time, this song is one of those. It sounds like those dreamy formless spiritually pure white pseudo-hippie bands of the 90s — which in some ways the Beatles were the blueprint for, psychedelic because that labels tends to cling to anything formless and flowing. But then it has those drums above the song.
When I say I dislike the song I’m wrong also, the song is great as Playlist filler.
As previously discussed, playlist fillter is the connecting point between important songs. That is to say you construct a playlist as a thematic whole with a correct playing order, at some points you want to mark a movement between two songs, and this song is just really good for marking those movements.
Of course it is 3 minutes long and I would prefer my filler tracks be a bit less, but in the right situation I suppose I would think this was a fine solution to moving between otherwise incompatible songs.
Who should cover it
Revolution 1
You never seem to hear this song anymore. Maybe carrying pictures of chairman Mao and related revolutionary acts from the time period have fallen so far out of favor that the song seems especially old fashioned, lyrically.
The song also has some of those cringe lines already mentioned — the whole free your mind instead is so hippy that it might spark annoyance.
Also the whole co-opting the establishment from the inside theory is going to look suspect to younger generations, who I want to see cover this song actually would be a young and coming punk band do a really fast run through and call the song “OK, Boomer” because, well, rock and roll really.
In the irony dept. I would point to the interview excerpted here
Waving Chairman Mao badges or being a Marxist or a thisist or a thatist is going to get you shot, locked up. If that’s what you want, you subconsciously want to be a martyr. You see, I want to know what you are going to do after you have knocked it all down. Can’t we use some of it? If you want to change the system, change the system. Don’t go shooting people.
OK, so maybe I suggest Kneecap for the cover
Honey Pie
I like this song, but not enough to listen to it. It’s hummable, it’s catchy, the lyrics have some bright spots. Its nostalgic faux-flapper tone inspires a feeling of fondness.
It is, again, great for a playlist as a song that leads you to the main things and I guess that’s what it does here in the album. It’s sort of weird to think about that albums, as sequential small bits of music when first heard functioned as a playlist for its listeners.
Who should do a cover of this song. There are few covers of this song, but most — like this recent one by The Bygones (who I guess formed from doing a cover of this song), play up its antiquated, nostalgic nature.
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And maybe that’s good, most bands that would try to do a nostalgic pre-1960s sound would do so ironically. I certainly like irony as much as the next person, but I also appreciate when people can be non-ironic. McCartney as a general rule writes non-ironic songs. His nostalgia is truthful.
So who should cover, there’s the problem, most sincerely nostalgic bands are nostalgic for a rural past, but this is an urban past, of ballrooms and well dressed fellows mooning over some gal who has a job in the U.S in the movies.
But I want to hear a version that isn’t so nostalgic but also still true to the song, somehow. I’m real fussy like that.
So who should cover it — maybe Vampire Weekend.
Savoy Truffle
My real weakness as a music critic is I have a hard time separating lyrics, theme, and the music itself. I am that outlier who actually listens and cares about what is being said
So repeating the favorite quote in this context
half of these songs sound like Oasis, the other half like every other band that has ever existed.
Which musically they do, but often lyrically if you put it together with the music you’re wondering what were these guys on, and then you go, oh yeah, Acid.
This is sort of in a weird space, it is pretty much a great song, about a box of chocolates, but on the other hand it is about a box of chocolates, so it seems it can’t really be that great a song. This is somewhat ridiculous, great art should be able to be about anything, but also it does seem that if something is going to be great it should not be about something trivial, like a box of chocolates. I guess I am the kind of guy who slightly prefers Tom Waits at his craziest to Bryan Ferry at his most romantic, and so this song is great slightly edges out this song is trivial for me, but at the same time it doesn’t feel crazy enough to be a rock and roll song about a box of chocolates.
Who should do this song?
I don’t know. Let’s try Shannon And The Clams
Cry Baby Cry
Lyrically part of this song is another one of Lennon’s Children’s songs, I mean really. I believe Lennon or Lennon/McCartney was one of the greatest children’s song lyricists of the last century. I suppose the King of Marigold lives on in Ben & Holly
The king of Marigold was in the kitchen Cooking breakfast for the queen The queen was in the parlour Playing piano for the children of the king
A very British, Andrew Lang Fairy book type of song
Do I like this song, not really actually. The cry baby cry, make your mother sigh part is catchy but not so much to my taste. But I think it is a pretty good song nonetheless, because of the tension between the fairy tale lyrics and the chorus.
Who should cover this song? Well Naked Eyes did a nice cover
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but it is just very much on point. So I guess that matches the whole “The Beatles sound either like Oasis or every other band ever” theory, because it sounds like Naked Eyes.
But I think it would be nice to have someone that makes it sound sort of different, to bring out the transcendental and fairy tale aspects of the song — so obviously I would recommend..
The Polyphonic Spree
Revolution 9
This is totally 100% playlist filter, and so pretentious and awful. I hate this song and in the context of things that are good but not to my taste, it’s just barely good enough to have in a playlist — if it was maybe 1 minute long, not 8 minutes. 8 minutes of experimental noise is still just noise. Experiments of experimental noise will always succeed in that way.
Who should “cover” this?
Maybe DJ Shadow, he could add in rhythm!
Good Night
Ringo Starr’s version of When you Wish Upon A Star for Stay Awake sounds better
In fact they sound sort of similar, these good night lullabies do tend to sound similar as they drowse you away into the land of Nod.
So who should cover this song — Ringo Starr with Herb Albert.
If you would like a good book about the White Album, we recommend The White Album: Revolution, Politics & Recording: The Beatles and the World in 1968 — affiliate link below
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