The Beatles on Love, Politics, and Religion

This is an essay I wrote back in junior year for English class. It was supposed to be a simple four page essay on anything we wanted, but I kind of went overboard. And when I mean overboard, I mean I wrote an 18 page essay on the Beatles. I felt like I should put this up to show that I didn't get into music reviewing just a few weeks ago. Plus, it's a work that I greatly enjoyed writing and showed me a new side of myself that I didn't know about before. Thanks!

From a pub in Liverpool to the Apple Corps rooftop in London; The Beatles were (and still are) the most influential band to exist. Their works ranging from hard rock to pop ballads to psychedelics which helped pave the way to modern music as we know it. With their experimentations of completely polar opposite music throughout their albums, The Beatles formed the mold of today’s music with love, politics, and creativeness. The Beatles are just like wine, for it becomes better the older it gets.

The Beatles were known to experiment with all kinds of music, ranging from hard rock to psychedelics to orchestral. Even with such variety of sounds, their songs all had different meanings that went with or even against the rhythm and melody of the song. These meanings had joyful and uplifting lyrics that would would make someone happy to hear, but also with meanings that showed the pain and powerful scenarios that The Beatles lived through. But through the amount of change that The Beatles went through, their message was clear on real world situations. During the 1960’s, a new movement was flourishing in the Western world with political and religious clashes happening about what is right and wrong and who we are as individuals. The Beatles were apart of this movement with songs that pushed the boundaries of what has not been done before in terms of style, message, and creativity. The Beatles’ influence on the world is shown throughout their most superlative albums with commentary on human emotions, political affiliations, and religious life.

The Beatles consisted of Sir James Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Richard Starkey, also known as the Fab Four, with a multitude of other artists replacing a few members during the early stages of The Beatles. Their first hit, “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, launched them into the music scene. Unlike many bands at the time, The Beatles did not become a “one hit wonder”, but rather a sensation. All across the world, the plague “Beatlemania” hit the young generation like a storm with rock and pop songs of romance. The Beatles were a phenomenon which with the world has never seen before. After tours in all 6 continents, The Beatles decided to stop touring and settle down to create albums that weren’t simply rock and pop. The creation of such albums with grand scale music production with which the world has never seen before include Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, and Abbey Road. Each and every album that The Beatles created a shock that was felt all around the music industry in which they all took from the The Beatles. Their creativity, imagination, and ability to create such masterpieces were unheard of before. Rolling Stone, a heavily respected music magazine, listed every Beatles’ album in their “Top 500 Influential Albums of All Time” list, with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band being ranked as number one. The Beatles towards the end of their career as a group had conflicting views that prevented them from working with each other. On April 10, 1970, McCartney announced he was leaving The Beatles, which by the end of the year The Beatles dissolved through a suit. While the band members each went their separate ways to create music that was amazing on its own, The Beatles took something from each member to create music that was filled with glory. To state that The Beatles were a “good” band is an insult. The Beatles were not just a simple band that lasts a few years then sinks into obscurity. The Beatles fabricated the music industry into what it is today and influenced major points of modern music.

In 1965, The Beatles were now stepping into a new era. They wanted to shed away their persona of being a boy band with rock pop tunes that showed a healthy boy-girl relationship which was inspired by artists such as Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley (Miller). Taking a new approach, The Beatles wanted to see what they could create with showing the reality of what love can be. Using folk melodies from Bob Dylan and The Byrds, The Beatles were confident in exploring directions that the music industry was scared of going into because of how ambitious and unknown it would be received as. This album also brought upon a major change in The Beatles that would mold them into being more creative, psychedelic drugs. By diving into daily intakes of marijuana and LSD, this broadened the creativity and ingenuity of The Beatles for the future (Unterberger, Rubber Soul). This album changed the world’s perspective of media consumption of what love can be, turning a listener’s heart into a Rubber Soul.

The song “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” changed the attitude of which The Beatles had been going along with for the past five years. It was the first appearance of the sitar from Harrison taught by Ravi Shankar, a musical guru from India (Biography.com). This introduction of Indian rock to the Western world was received quite well, being claimed as the first rock band to ever use the sitar. Many western musicians became interested in using the sitar and Indian influence, including Donovan's "Sunshine Superman", the Yardbirds' "Shapes of Things", and the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" (Everett). This song’s story goes through the meeting of a woman that a man converses with in her room for hours, then falls asleep. The song is allegedly about Lennon’s affair with his wife at the time, Cynthia Lennon. This song doesn’t have much meaning in it itself, but it exemplifies the creativeness of The Beatles with implementing Indian instruments with their music which would carry on with future pieces such as “Love You To” and “Within You Without You”.

The song “Nowhere Man” was claimed as one of the first Beatles song to not be about love or romance (Unterberger, Rubber Soul). With its three person chorus, The Beatles were stepping out of their normal boundaries with a song that didn’t include words to swoon a woman with. This marked a significant part in music history due to music at the time being a mainly love oriented market being able to move out of that area and speak about more philosophical story-telling songs. The meaning of the song lies with the real life situation that Lennon was dealing with throughout his life. He was not an active person and would really work only when there was a deadline. Lennon was trying to think of a song for Rubber Soul because there was a time limit in which The Beatles had to finish the album but no ideas were coming out. Suddenly, after five hours of thinking, he thinks of his existential crisis of being “nowhere” and creates a tune in his head.

The song “Girl” brings out a melancholic tune with depressing lyrics that heavily contrasted The Beatles’ previous works since then. With The Beatles being built upon pop rock songs about loving everything about a woman, Girl shows the ugly side of what love is. The song’s meaning works with the story of an abusive woman that does not reciprocate the love that the man gives to her. The song has also become known to be a statement about Christianity because of the line “Was she told when she was young, that pain would lead to pleasure”. This line implies that Christianity is built up on the idea that you must suffer to receive “pleasure”, which is Heaven (Spark).

The Beatles became established artists who have grown as both a band and individuals. With Harrison exploring Hinduism, Lennon diving into psychedelic drugs to gain inspiration, McCartney noticing classical music as a nearby future possibility, and Ringo creating new drumming patterns on the spot that would change drumming forever— the Fab Four was flourishing with new ideas (Campbell). The Beatles were now becoming more politically involved and speaking volume about current situations happening in the world, especially for the upcoming “Summer of Love” of ‘67. The Beatles also shed light on philosophy which spoke about human emotions. Harrison began raising awareness of Hinduism, it was starting to spread towards the West. Combining ballads with rock, psychedelics with Indian influence, and hard hitting poetic songs, this album shot through the world like a Revolver.

The song “Taxman” is about a spoof about a tax collector taxing people for every little thing (Prown, Newquist, Eiche, p. 28). The “Taxman” refers to the British government doing a major income tax on its citizens. This “super tax” was an income tax, being as high as 95% for The Beatles due to their popularity. This particularly made Harrison mad, due to his anti-material beliefs that were enforced through Hinduism. Harrison would continue throughout his life as a Beatle and a solo artist to be against the idea of possessions such as money. He wrote this song out of frustration of what the tax was doing to the band and even included the names of Harold Wilson and Edward Heath; the former was the leader of the Labour Party and the latter the leader of the Conservative Party, the two largest parties in British politics (MacDonald, pg. 200). "It's a song that goes regardless if it's the sixties, seventies, eighties or nineties," Harrison declared. "There's always a taxman."

The song “Love You To” features Harrison with bringing back Indian classical influence since "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" with the sitar and the tabla, two major instruments in Indian music. Going back to his religion of Hinduism, Harrison pays tribute to the Indian culture with attention to detail and mastery of instruments (Unterberger, Love You To). Hinduistic ideals are shown throughout the lyrics, with lines of peace and anti-materialism. Harrison took psychedelics while creating the song, such as marijuana and LSD to become more in touch with the vibes that Indian music had. “Love You To” is considered by musicologists to be the first song that brought Indian music to the West (Gould, p. 353).

The song “Eleanor Rigby” focuses on the loneliness of the elderly and humanity in general. It shows how life goes on by and grows but we push away people, putting them in situations of solitude. The story of the song goes with a woman named Eleanor Rigby who was married but now a widow and a Father McKenzie who is a pastor at a church that Eleanor Rigby goes to. The song continues with telling about how each one was not getting recognized by anyone and living in a lonely town. Father McKenzie’s sermons are written but never said, possibly because nobody goes to his church anymore. At the end, Eleanor Rigby is buried by Father McKenzie in the church. This song has a somber impression, but carries important ideas about humanity as a whole. We each strive for companionship but loneliness can override that (Unterberger, Eleanor Rigby). It also has a subplot about how church was starting to die off due to Father McKenzie’s sermons that “no one will hear”. The song was released just weeks after Lennon's remarks, "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now."

Hailed as their greatest album, The Beatles struck the perfect chord that set off a musical arrangement that is considered the most influential album in the world. Before the album was created, The Beatles spent 3 months in India to “rediscover” themselves and to take a break from the amount of pressure that was constantly on them. The Beatles wanted to escape the pressure of their fans wanting them to perform live once more, so McCartney had an idea for the band. He insisted, "Why don't we make the album as though the Pepper band really existed, as though Sergeant Pepper was making the record? We'll dub in effects and things." Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band took over 129 days to create. This long period of time was not due to laziness, but because the fact that The Beatles were creating sounds that the world would be shocked to hear. From the hard-rock “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” to the string quartet led “She’s Leaving Home”, The Beatles display their extensiveness for creating new sounds (Hannan, p. 61). Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club!

The song “With A Little Help From My Friends” shows the community that The Beatles have established. Even throughout the amount of bickering that the Fab Four had between each other, this song shows how they’re still good friends at the end and trust each other. The human emotion of friendship has been around since the beginning of man, and The Beatles are no exception to this. The song entrusts that having friends is a good experience that everyone should have (Rolling Stone, “With A Little Help From My Friends”). It as well speaks for the participants at the “Summer of Love”, in which the idea of friendship flourished from everyone there.

The song “Within You Without You” showed Harrison’s precision of Indian classical music and Hindu beliefs. The song itself took bits and pieces from a live radio show that Ravi Shankar was apart of. In this song, Harrison tells about resurrection, a common theme in Hinduism that once one dies, they will come back as a new person. As he soothingly sings, “And to see you're really only very small, And life flows on within you and without you”, he speaks grandiosely about how we are small compared to the circle of life and death (Pollack). This strong Hinduistic belief carries through Harrison’s solo career, especially in his feature album, Living in the Material World (Rabey). Hinduism helped Harrison get over his fear of death, especially when his lung cancer ended up killing him in 2001. With bringing Hinduism to the West, more people were being exposed to the idea of resurrection, something that was thought to have only happened to Jesus Christ. This battle of clashing religions allowed more expressions for the youth of the West.

Quite possibly the grandest scale song produced by The Beatles, “A Day In The Life” is sometimes considered the greatest Beatles song to exist (Rolling Stone, “A Day In The Life”). The song itself speaks about a man dying in a car, then talking about a man’s daily life, and finally ending with a stunning loud crescendo of strings and brass that lasts 45 seconds. The man who dies in the beginning is a reference to Tara Browne, a 21 year old male with a fortune yet kills himself in a car accident. This is more likely a reference to using drugs to leave this world. The song progresses into a cheerful simple piano beat that describes a working class man’s morning routine for work. Mixing Lennon’s somber and thoughtful beginning with the story of a man dying in a car with McCartney's upbeat piano number of an average day man creates a magnificent masterpiece that has shown how much music has grown to that level of intrinsics. The only way out of the routine of life is to blow your own mind (not death, but drugs), which he experiences with the orchestral crescendo at the end. Maybe the man kills himself in the end. Maybe he's just so empty that he does not care. Maybe the repetitive aspect of life killed him in the end. Or maybe he just wakes up and runs to work again the next morning. “A Day In The Life” is a mini opera exploring the subjective state of any man including their thoughts, dreams, ponderings, epiphanies, despair, desperation and transcendental drug influenced highs. With “A Day In The Life” being the ending track of one of the first concept albums of all time, it exceeded anyone’s expectations of what was possible. The final chord, considered one of music’s most famous final chords, the E chord, finishes the song with such emotion and power it carries throughout the listener’s whole body. It fades away as if you are just getting farther away from it while the chord perpetuates through all time. David Crosby, the singer for The Byrds, described his experience on the finale of “A Day In The Life”. “And when they got to the end of the piano chord - man, I was dish-rag. I was floored. It took me several minutes to be able to talk after that (“Music Notes: Please, Please Me”).” Simply taking stories from a newspaper and combining with a philosophy of mundanity created a song that transcends what people were capable of even thinking. Instead of keeping it happy like most of the album, the Beatles end the "show" and then show us that they're not just screwing around by capping it off with this song that seems to bring us back down to the reality of life and stand alone on the album.

The breakup of The Beatles were not because of one simple cause, but over time each one was separating from the original stance of what The Beatles were. With Brian Epstein’s death in 1967 due to a drug overdose, the Fab Four’s chemistry was imbalanced due to Epstein being the one who held The Beatles tight as friends. Harrison became less involved with The Beatles because he wanted to focus more on his solo career as a songwriter and producer. Throughout Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, each member wanted to involve their own styles such as McCartney’s pop/rock sound and Lennon’s experimental and lyric based vibe. Yoko Ono, who would be Lennon’s wife soon after the breakup, would interrupt the band’s work with trying to involve her own suggestions during writing sessions, creating friction between Lennon and the others. On April 10, 1970, McCartney declared officially that he was leaving the band due to being in constant fights with the other band members. From there, each member decided to leave the band and on December 31, 1970, McCartney filed a lawsuit to finally end The Beatles (Hertsgaard, p. 279).

Once the dissolvement of The Beatles had finished, each band member formed their own music stands with themes each one focused on. Lennon moved to the United States where he lived with Yoko Ono, his wife at the time, where he focused on creating music that stood for Communism, an ideology that was contrasted from the Western world’s way of thinking. Harrison focused on creating music that would show his appreciation for all religions, but mainly on Hinduism. McCartney focused on reordering his life from being a Beatle to becoming a man who stood for equality and love. Ringo focused on working with other large name musicians such as Elton John and Bob Dylan, people who influenced the Beatles during their time.

The Beatles had evolved from boys singing to screaming Beatlemaniacs at Shea Stadium to men on the rooftop of Apple Corps. No other band has ever put as much effort, dedication, and creativeness that would set the bar high for future artists to follow. Their music is incomparable to what music was before then because of how much change The Beatles brought to the music industry. Though it was only eight years that the Fab Four were together, they molded both hemispheres with their ideas of politics, religion, and human emotions. Through the amount of work that The Beatles put into their music, it sprung ideas for music composition that still is used today.

To end a perfect story, The Beatles wanted to have one last concert before they left. On January 30, 1969, The Beatles performed on the rooftop of Apple Corps with power that has not been seen before with any other band. Within 42 minutes, The Beatles showed the world how much they had grown from mop haired teenagers to hippie enthusiasts to matured adults. Unfortunately ending due to the Metropolitan police, Lennon told the crowd before they left…

"I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we've passed the audition".