Secular Music

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The Beatles really started the whole long-haired hippie business four years ago, and who knows whether they developed with it or it developed with them? All those hours of analysis are a gauge of how important the Beatles have become to … us.

One song on Sgt. Pepper, "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite", seems to me deliberately one-dimensional, nothing more than a description of a traveling circus. It fits beautifully into the album, which is kind of a long vaudeville show, but I feel almost certain it has no "meaning". Yet one girl, age fifteen, writes that it presents "life as an eerie, perverted circus." Is this sad? silly? horrifying? contemptible? From an adult it might be all four, but from a fifteen-year-old it is simply moving. A good Lennon-McCartney song is sufficiently cryptic to speak to the needs of whomever listens. (p. 45)

One of the nice things The Beatles do for those of us who love them is charge commonplace English with meaning. I want to hold your hand. It's getting better all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. "Fixing a Hole" … is full of such suggestive phrases. I'll resist temptation and quote only five lines: "And it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong or right / Where I belong I'm right / Where I belong. / See the people standing there who disagree and never win / And wonder why they don't get in my door." This passage not only indicates the intricate things The Beatles are doing with rhyme, skewing their stanzas and dispensing almost completely with traditional song form. It also serves as a gnomic reminder of the limitations of criticism. Allow me to fall into its trap by providing my own paraphrase, viz: "in matters of interpretation, the important thing is not whether you're 'wrong' or 'right' but whether you are faithful to your own peculiar stance in the world. Those who insist on the absolute rectitude of their puny opinions will never attain my state of enlightenment."

Well, there it is; I've finally done it. Pompous, right? Sorry, I'm just not John Lennon. But like everyone else, I feel compelled to make Our Boys My Boys…. Now, after several false starts that had me convinced for a while I think I've got it. It is not surprising that their ideas are so much like my own. That's what they're saying, isn't it?

For, just like [their fans], I have my own Beatles. As far as I'm concerned, "Fixing a Hole" is not like other songs by stupid groups that say I am alienated and junk like that. And I have other prejudices. I can't believe The Beatles indulge in the simplistic kind of symbolism that turns a yellow submarine into a Nembutal, or a banana—it is just a yellow submarine, damn it, an obvious elaboration of John's submarine fixation, first revealed in A Hard Day's Night. I think they want their meanings to be absorbed on an instinctual level, just as their new, complex music can be absorbed on a sensual level. I don't think they much care whether Sgt. Pepper is that classic moldy fig, Great Art. I think they are inordinately fond (in a rather recondite way) of what I call the real world. They want to turn us on, all right—to everything in that world and in ourselves. (pp. 45-7)

Robert Christgau, "Secular Music" (originally published in a slightly different version in Esquire Magazine, December, 1967), in his Any Old Way You Choose It: Rock and Other Pop Music, 1967–1973 (copyright © Robert Christgau, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1973; reprinted by permission of Penguin Books and the author), Penguin, 1973, pp. 12-85.

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