It's really very simple...

British Olympian Mo Farah was detained by US customs under suspicion of being a terrorist. All it took for the Sun to offer its solidarity was him winning two gold medals. There's a lesson in that for all of us. If only all Somali refugees could win gold medals we'd all be set and the Sun would be the pillar of civil liberties and anti-racism.

Day 7 - the world's BIGGEST post

The Big Easy 

The Big Sleep 

The Big Lebowski 

The Big Three 

The Big Five

The other Big Five 

The Big Yin 

And we used him last time but he’s just soooo great, Biggie Smalls in House of Rock!

The world's BIGGEST blog - day 6

First of all a really BIG mountain.

But, then there's also reggae band Big Mountain, who weren't quite as big... Their Best Of... is a seven inch single I understand.

The world's BIGGEST blog - Day 5

Robertson in New South Wales

Actually existing news

Hard to come by at this time of year, and it's not really news. Peter Higgs, theoriser of the Higgs Boson (subject of the CERN Supercollider experiments), has weighed in to the collective pile on Richard Dawkins with the shrewd if dull point that Dawkins atheism borders on religious fundamentalism itself. Let's go one further, it is religious bigotry, universalised and mildly cleansed by contact with humanism.

But religion is a prime vector of Truthiness, which is the real enemy of reason in public life. The ability to believe something to true regardless of facts or logic is based on alienation, and alienation starts on Earth, not in heaven or the realm of ideas. Without this understanding even the best intentioned atheism leaves one vulnerable to bigotry of all kinds (prejudice tends to mingle these days, rather than remain discrete - Islamophobic tropes for example are often a reboot of Anti-Semitism).

The world's BIGGEST blog - Day 4

Has you ever seens Bigfeet?

World's BIGGEST blog - Day 3

John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China.

The World's BIGGEST Blog - day two

Biggedy-Biggedy BONG!

This week - for one week only

Through the Scary Door will, once again, be the world's BIGGEST BLOG. Day 1: The Big Bang.

Western Marxism

Western Marxism (both the train of thought called Western Marxism and Marxism in the West) is cultural. The eponymous founder of Marxism concentrated most of his effort on a critique of political economy. He showed that capitalism not only leads to cyclical crisis but that these cyclical crises over time lead to an existential one. In the Communist Manifesto this existential crises is described as having one of two results, either revolutionary reconstitution or common ruin. He showed that there is a class capable of positively resolving this crisis.

Despite many valiant attempts the question is why hasn’t the working class mission been completed? The answer is not economic, but cultural. Capital was written as a prognostication. In 1867 Marx was describing not capitalism as it was but as it could be expected to become. There was no according capitalist superstructure in 1867. There were no mass parties, nor universal suffrage. There was no mass education or popular culture. There were not even many of the countries that we recognise today.

The works of Antonio Gramsci are crucial. They are the beginnings of a theory of capitalist superstructure, capitalist culture, which organises, replicates and defends capitalist practice. The Prison Notebooks are an elaboration on the experiences both of the Biennio Rosso in Italy and the experience of the early Soviet Republic (which, in part, inspired the two-year rebellion in Italy). They are about Lenin. He referred to so many times.

In Britain today you’d could canvass opinion on an average high street and find numerous, perfectly adequate explanations as to the cause of the current economic depression. You would find precious few useful ideas as to how to extricate our society from it. If people understand their economic interests why don’t they act on them? Why do Spaniards or Greeks fight for their interests but the British remain quiescent? The argument is not over economics but culture. Culture is conservative, in the precise meaning of the term. It preserves ideas long after they have any basis in reality.

Grim stuff...

The obvious first thing to say is no one at this stage can say whether Ian Watkins, lead singer of the Lostprophets is guilty or innocent. It wouldn’t be right. Nevertheless given the current awareness of the extent of sexual abuse and exploitation in public life it is no surprise a rock musician has been caught up.

Long ago I used to work in significant regional live music venue. Part of the rota there meant there were nights working in the cloakroom, which in this particular venue adjoined the dressing rooms. Musicians would often come and go in the background. Sometimes people would hang round the front of the cloakroom to see if they could catch the musicians’ attention.

Though the phenomenon of the groupie has declined greatly it still exists. It’s based on the notion of simulated intimacy, which is the basis of a lot of popular culture in fact. Adolescents undergoing long term personal changes often find solace in music that seems to speak for them. It is a simulated sense of intimacy, seeming to know someone’s mind that provokes the desire in some to reciprocate that intimacy. Walter Benjamin said that it was the nature of a mass audience to want to “bring things closer, spatially and humanly”, to want to participate in art and public life up close and in depth. Some kids end up following their idols around.

Most of the conversation that went on between the fans and the musicians was brief and inconsequential: great gig, we love you, thanks etc. Some of it was highly alienated and disturbing. On one occasion I remember one occasion two young women asking a particular musician if they could “come back stage and say hi”, with a look that seemed to give the suggestion added meaning. There was almost certainly nothing untoward going on and the musician, to his credit, immediately said something along the lines of “you should go home, haven’t you got school in the morning?” But to me it showed how a darker aspect of the entertainment industry can and does develop. People offer themselves up constantly, either for fame or the chance to make contact with fame. Corrupt or corrupted people will take advantage of this unless stopped.

The sexual liberation of the 60s was in, one sense, about freedom to. In this case it was freedom to engage in sexuality that is more than just a means of procreation or at most a form of married intimacy. In this sense gay rights are most definitely human rights. This liberation was inverted however by the commodity structure. Whereas legitimate sexuality before was like a feudal privilege it was turned into an alienable commodity.

21^st century sexual liberation will be overwhelmingly a freedom from. In this case it will be freedom from exploitation. Young people have very little going for them in our society today. They have no power and little realistic future. The job market today for some is little more than a sublimated form of streetwalking. We must not allow older people, especially older men with power and influence, to exploit the young as a form of sexual capital.

Help for Lazy TV Executives

After the success of Sky TV's On the Couch with Peter Crouch, TV execs are doubtless looking for follow-up. Based on this winning formula, we've come up with a number of ideas, all as groundbreaking as the original. Ta for all contributions.

On the Toilet with Junior Hoilett
At the Sink with Jan Venegoor of Hesselink
In the Shed with Jonathan Stead
In the Bath with Steve and Garth - presented by the Spurs early 80's strike partnership of Archibald and Crooks
In the Bracken with Gordon Strachan - where the former Scotland international takes us on his favourite hillside walks
In the Shower with Lee Power
Under the Stairs with Stephen Pears
In the Cellar with Kasey Keller
On a Scooter with Batistuta
On a Ferry with Chris Perry
On the Telly with Stephen Kelly
On the Piss with Matt Le Tiss
On a Plough with Ken Monkou
On a Cycle with Peter Schmeichel
On a Bus with Steve Anthrobus
In the Car with Van der Sar
On the Train with James McLean
At the Door with Agbonlahor
Playing Jenga with Arsene Wenger
After Dark with Ji-Sung Park
By the Fire with Kieron Dyer
On the Floor with Darren Moore
On the Pier with Peter Fear
On the Stretcher with Gary Taylor-Fletcher
Out to Play with Emenike
In a Ditch with Mark Bosnich
Buying Knickers with Steve Vickers
Growing old with Steve Bould
On the Loo with Alan Pardew
Talking Crap with Harry Redknapp
On the Roof with El Hadji Diouf
Playing Sudoku with Efan Ekoku
Walking the Dales with Barry Hayles
At the Bar with Grobelaar
On a Ranch with Michael Branch
Down a Hole with Ashley Cole
In the Park with Ciaran Clark
Being Chucked off a Ferry with John Terry
Through the Void with Walter Boyd
At the Fridge with Wayne Bridge
Up the Chimney with Emmanuel Omoyimni
On the Stair with Frank Sinclair
At the Fair with Brian McClair'
At a party with Christian Abbiati
Swapping Paninis with Paolo Maldini
In the car with Niko Kranjcar (mispronunciation but whatever)
Having a Pee with AVB
Under the Sink with Nigel Spink
On the go with Tore Andre Flo
Listening to Geese Honk with Steed Malbranque
Getting Blotto with Assou-Ekotto
Home Alone with Huddlestone
Out the back with Rodney Jack
Building a fort with Carl Cort
In the Study with John Ruddy
In a Van with Sylvain Distin
In the Bin with Cliff Bastin
Talking Shite with Ian Wright
Acting crazy with Linda Buthelezi
Being a Pest with Taribo West
Art Nouveau with Celestine Babayaro
Ringing a Bell with John Obi Mikel
Down a shot with Joleon Lescott
Having a Piss with Filip Kiss
At the Deli with Balotelli
Having a Ramble with Frazer Campbell
Having a Wank with Hasselbaink
Fly Away with John O'Shea
Getting Hyper with Matt Piper
Lighting a Firecracker with Per Mertesacker
Riding a Pony with Benito Carbone
Smoking a Bong with Sebastien Bassong
Eating Linguine with Perpetuini
Sorting Files with Dean Shiels
Raking Leaves with Jimmy Greaves
Fitting a Bolt with Grant Holt
Having a Tinker with Regi Blinker
Moving on a Bosman with Leon Osman
Growing Barley with Hossam Ghaly
Playing Pool with Younes Kaboul
Drinking Cocoa with Ibrahima Bakayoko
Going loco with Tonton Zola Moukoko
Fleeing Sharks with John Harkes
In a Cab with Phil Babb
On the Hunt with Kenny Lunt
Playing Snooker with Corluka
On the Bed with Pavel Nedved
Wearing a Sou'wester with Iniesta
Doing the Haka with Kaka
Eating an Aero with Sergio Aguero
In the Sky with former Brazil captain Rai
Underwater with Gary Porter
Lighting a Fart with Joe Hart
By the sea with Robert Lee
On the Phone with Steven Stone
In the Yard with Steven Gerrard
Visit Kent with Darren Bent
The Valley of Rhondda with Pascal Chimbonda
In some Pain with Harry Kane
On the Dole with Andy Cole
Covered in Fluff with Damien Duff
Going to the Doctor with Michael Proctor
Learning to Sail with Gareth Bale
Meeting a Farmer with Carlton Palmer
Things that are Scary with Paul Stalteri
Wearing Bling with Ledley King
Using a Dagger with Daniel Agger
By the Side with Brian McBride
Telling Fibs with Kieron Gibbs
Looking at Venus with Jermaine Jenas
Eating a Bhaji with Gheorghe Hagi
Behind Bars with Overmars
Seaman's Seamen
In a Barrel with Andy Carroll
At the Bar with Stephen Carr
Over-eager with Christian Ziege
Threading a Needle with Brad Friedel
Up a Cliff with Peter Shirtliff
In a Lorry with Peter Storrie
Telling a Story with James McGrory
Using a Breville with Philip Neville
Rearing Pigs with Ryan Giggs
The Norman Conquest, with Norman Conquest
Picking up Sticks with Julian Dicks
Spinning Yarns with John Barnes
Talking Twaddle with Glenn Hoddle
On the Roster with Rui Costa
Make a Wish with Mark Fish
In a Box with Ruel Fox
In the Sewer with Iffy Onuoha
Using a Shaver with Lucas Leiva
Wearing a Bowler with Gianfranco Zola
Eating Mayo with di Matteo
In Rio with Dominic Matteo
Using a Welder with Glenn Helder
Justin Edinburgh's Justin Ed-inbred, where the former Spurs donkey meets families who are very inbred, but just in Edinburgh
Cooking Pork with John Wark
On the Bog with Ugo Ehiogu
Having a Feed with Andy Reid
Keeping a Turtle with Martin Skrtel
Cooking Mutton with Chris Sutton
Art Attack with Pogrebnyak

And finally... not a footballer, but another great idea:

In the Garage with Nigel Farage - note - will only be acceptable if said garage is filling with exhaust fumes

What you reading for?

201 libraries across Britain closed this year. The modern institution of the public library started with the 1850 Public Libraries Act. Similar to the act establishing the NHS, the libraries act took a patchwork of services and made them into a common feature of public life, free at the point of use. Generations of self-education have gone on in libraries up and down the land.

But this is nothing to the current local government minister, Eric Pickles. According to him concern over library closures is restricted to luvvies (clearly no one reads books in Brentwood and Ongar, at least no one who votes Tory).

This attitude is common across the mainstream political parties. The leader of Brent Council, a Labour borough, told residents of Kensnal Rise they had nothing to be concerned about with their local library because “people buy their books at Tesco” these days (so does Tesco have a reference section now?). Brent Council then sent in the goons overnight to strip the library, not only of the books but all the paintings, murals and even the plaque dedicated to Mark Twain (the Mark Twain) who took part in the opening ceremony in 1900.

£20 for a hardback book is nothing to the likes of the political class, it’s an awful lot lot a working family. Lets not forget libraries are internet hubs, free at the point of access. Remember, Austerity is about making life meaner, harder and narrower for working class people, it is also about driving them from public life. 

Ha!

The EDL is pro child murder

To round it off!

Yellow Submarine



The best Beatles film, the one true masterpiece, and they weren't in it. The Beatles were immortalised in cartoon in 1965 for American TV, the show took the band's public personas, established by the film A Hard Day's Night, and made them even broader. The film Yellow Submarine was somewhat of a correction. The new, pepper-fied personas were the Far-Out one (check out John's opening, chemical transformation), the Debonair One, the Mystical One (it's all in the mind) and the Downbeat One...

OK so Ringo didn't change that much. It's worth noting that John first rejected the Showbiz Beatles then he rejected the Psychedelic Beatles as equally potent fictions, before finally idea of The Beatles itself. They were variations of the bourgeois conventions of the entertainment industry. His first gesture was of course the nude cover of Two Virgins, literally stripping away everything. Whether he achieved sincere reality in art is another matter.

The song Yellow Submarine is a gem. Paul wrote it as a children's song and a feature for Ringo in 1966. By 1967 it was already being included in songbooks, alongside music hall, nursery rhyme and folk song classics. The lyric was written in a similar manner to Eleanor Rigby, starting with Paul and ending with a committee. Instead of achieving clarity it got cloudier as it went along: an early sign, perhaps, of the slackening that would later overtake The Beatles lyrics.

Z... Zed... Uh, Zebra Crossing



We made it, just... Don't applaud then, sheesh! There are no Beatles songs beginning with Z. Z of course marks the end of the alphabet. Abbey Road was the final album recorded by The Beatles, ending with a song called The End. It also featured a cover showing the zebra crossing outside Abbey Road. So, here, enjoy one of The Beatles finest achievements, the bittersweet end to their career. The Abbey Road medley.

Atheism, alliances and truthiness...

Irreligion is the fastest growing religion in Britain. Polly Toynbee, the outgoing head of the British Humanist Association is pleased. I don’t think it’s a bad thing either.

Consistently practiced atheism is a benefit to public life. Not that atheism is a key that unlocks great wisdom. If you are an atheist you can still be a fool, you’re just an atheist fool. Atheism subtracts belief in supernatural causes for natural events. It removes at least one barrier in public life to objective human experience being subjected to collective intellectual inquiry (in the broadest sense of the word): the unity of theory and practice which, amongst other things, is the basis of Marxism.

There’s one problem with this. Atheism in itself is no guarantee against superstition or bigotry. Supernatural forces find their way into all sorts of theories considered rational, for example the invisible hand that guides Adam Smith’s political economy. New Atheism, as some call it, is troubling, to say the least. What should be a theory of emancipation is often a cover for racism. Some people object to some religions more than others, usually predominantly brown-skinned religions.

But we also stand on the threshold of Truthiness in public life, the quality that allows someone to know something is true based on whether it feels right, regardless of evidence or logic. This is part of the general ideological move to shift public life from a rational basis. However atrophied we still have a political system that acknowledges class as the prime division in public life. If this basis is removed religion will be both a prime means of importing Truthiness into debate and of reconnecting the ruling class with the classes below.

Given our understanding of the united front over time we can expect to have all sorts of temporary allies. With what’s likely to come, strange as it may seem, we may have to ally with some of the New Atheists at some point. As atheism grows so the current government is trying, however hypocritically, to reinforce religion, particularly in education through Gove’s so called free schools. 

Many happy returns

Mo Beatles...

Within You and Without You

This is practically the same song as Tomorrow Never Knows. They have a similar lyrical subject, a similar musical foundation1, similar structure (verse/chorus followed by an apparently free section before returning to the verse/chorus) and they are almost in the same key. No surprise then that a mash-up (eww – hate that phrase) was eventually made from the two songs.

Within You… does not have raw excitement of Tomorrow Never Knows. It is emphatically not a rock song. Calling the lyric didactic would be like calling the Sun hot. The true beauty is in the middle section, the musical dialogue first between the sitar and the dilruba, then between the Indian and Western classical instruments together. It is beautiful music made for stereo, hi-fi sound.

Xmas records

Another tough crowbar, but it’s worth it. The Beatles management set up a fan club for the band. The club was soon overwhelmed by correspondence. The tradition of the Beatles Christmas Flexi-Disc was established in 1963 as a way to reach all the fans personally.

The records were quite informal affairs. To begin with they were a mixture of seasons greetings, carols and Christmas songs. As the years went by the band started introducing poems, short comedy songs and skits. 1967’s fan club record was a mock-radio play. It also featured a complete song, Christmas Time Is Here Again. Not a masterpiece, a deserved rarity.

An offshoot of the Christmas albums was a bootleg called A Laugh with The Beatles, which also featured outtakes from the Christmas records and other sessions that are inchoate, risqué but often hilarious.

1. The tambura, a stringed instrument, similar to a lute, used in Indian classical music. It is played with open strings and produces an overtone rich sound by intermittent contact with a wide, arched bridge.

You can prove anything with facts

The future of Reality-Lite politics in Britainis the issue of Multiculturalism/Immigration. The conservative demographic is declining in so many ways. Only the power structure in Britaintruly upholds the hegemony of bourgeois, white, Christian, heterosexual men any more. The ruling class is always searching for a popular connection. With the right issue, a touch of demagogy, a touch of mobilisation, soon the Sans Culottes will be marching to restore the monarchy; that's the theory of right-wing populism.

The Multiculturalism/Immigration is of course a means of smuggling racism into popular discourse. No one ever is racist, at least no one ever admits to it; but once the debate starts out comes the code words and the dog whistles. There is no practical way to win an argument as things presently stand because reality has been replaced by ‘legitimate concerns’. 

No doubt the Reality-Lite will grow in leaps and bounds with further published statistics from the 2011 census (notice how news stories now unquestioningly group statistics about religion with statistics about immigration). There was a net increase in the number of foreign-born residents in Englandand Walesbetween 2001 and 2011 of 2.9 million. Foreign born residents now make up almost one in eight of the population of Englandand Wales, around 7 million people by my reckoning. That’s probably enough to make the defensive white nationalists peal with anger, but is that really evidence of ‘uncontrolled immigration’ as it’s so often called?  

The number of people identifying themselves as Muslim has risen over the same period from around 3% to around 5%, compared to a fall of 4 million in the number of people identifying themselves as Christian. That’s a 2% increase relative to the overall population, 60% relative to the previous percentage. By my reckoning, if that trend continues, we’re looking at 8% by 2020, 12% by 2030, 18% by 2040. Even on their own deranged, racist terms, the anti-islamicisation crowd have nothing to worry about for at least fifty years. 

But that won’t stop them.  The basis for, what we will loosely call, progressive politics is growing. The working class is growing. That’s why the right, and the far right in particular, are so agitated right now. Britainis more and more becoming multiracial, multicultural and secular. At all times immigration is overwhelmingly linked to work. Immigrants are a crucial part of the working class. The demographic is changing in our favour.

To win the argument means returning it to reality, no pandering to ‘legitimate concerns’, calling out racism at all times and dealing in facts.

Let's start wrapping this shit up...

Sie Liebt Dich

Ooh, leftfield. While on tour in January 1964 The Beatles carried out the first of only two recording sessions abroad1. They recorded German language versions of I Want to Hold Your Hand and She Loves You, as well as the basic track for Can’t Buy Me Love. They were reluctant to do this, despite it being then music industry standard practice. There were no more lyric translations. In their own way The Beatles probably did as much to promote English around the world as Hollywood and the British empire.

Twist and Shout

This is another of The Beatles master-covers. The song was first made a hit by the Isley Brothers. On that occasion it was recorded with a loose, Latin swing. The Beatles transformed it into another hysterical blockbuster. They used it to close many shows. It was the last song recorded for the album Please, Please Me. John’s voice was on the point of giving out. The tension and energy is palpable throughout, and the sense of triumph at the end audible, Paul shouts “hey!”

USSR, Back in the

Could this have been Paul’s response to John’s Revolution? The John Birch Society thought so. It’s more generally considered to be a joke, albeit one at the expense of the Cold War itself3. Artists such as The Beach Boys and Chuck Berry lauded America, its localities, culture, traditions etc in song. Why wouldn’t a Soviet rock star do the same? Back in the USSR is an affectionate parody of California Girls. The point being a young man’s enthusiasms were the same either side of the Iron Curtain.

But there were no Soviet rock stars. The Beatles music was officially proscribed in Russia. But there was a thriving underground in Beatle (and other rock and roll) recordings, passed around on tape and, quite ingeniously, adapted x-ray plates.

Void, The AKA Tomorrow Never Knows2

The most spectacular piece of music they ever produced. The lead instrument on this occasion is the drums, lashing away over an insistent drone and lazy, lobbing melody. Nothing is spared in terms of aural trickery and for once the CGI serves to enhance the plot. The lyrics are an adaption of passages of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert’s The Psychedelic Experience, a book intended as a socio-spiritual guide to LSD, which the authors saw as a modern sacrament and a mode of revolution.

The theory of psychedelic revolution is based upon Freudian theory of the personality. Put simply the basis of each personality is inner desire, the id, outward repression, the superego and the point where these meet, the ego or outward personality4. LSD dissolves the subject’s ego, their sense of self. By releasing the id and countering the superego, psychedelics affect an inner revolution of liberty against repression.

Even before dealing with the internal logic of an argument that treats liberated desire as unconditionally good, there are difficulties with such a model. Psychedelics demand time and energy, they are very difficult to absorb into everyday life. The demand to Turn On, Tune In and Drop Out is in the end elitist, those who drop out are those who can afford to. Revolutions do indeed change the way people perceive the world and themselves, but they do this because they change the way people relate to the world and each other. They overturn social relations, objective social relations.

1. The second wasn’t quite a Beatles session. George Harrison recruited a group of Indian musicians to perform on his Wonderwall Music soundtrack. It was the first Beatles solo album. An off-cut instrumental became the basis of the song The Inner Light, the first George Harrison to make a single.
2. We give the working title along with the published title in order to fill out the letter V.
3. There is another story, relating to a whacky legend, that The Beatles played a secret gig (at some point, choose your own date) in Russia for the Nomenklatura and that the song is a reference to that occasion.
4. Of course, censorship is internalised as self-censorship, personal ethics and so on, desire is often manufactured, people made to want things they would otherwise not desire.

More derivative Beatles stuff

Quinn the Eskimo

When I said almost this is the proof. There is nothing out there remotely related to The Beatles in any way beginning with the letter Q. This is it, a fragment of a song from rehearsals in January 1969 for the abandoned concert.

The song was written by Bob Dylan, originally recorded with The Band in what became The Basement Tapes. The Tapes… are an odd collection. The album was released eight years after the songs were recorded. They were laid down in the informal setting of The Big Pink, a country house in upstate New York. The recording was primitive too. Sometimes just a single microphone was hung out to catch the music going on, the music which seemed reflect a return to roots.

Though he seemed to be abandoning the scene just as the counterculture was taking a beating on the streets, Dylan was ahead of the game in some respects in retiring to Woodstock. The fall out from the ruling class assault on the counterculture led some into cultism, some into terrorism, and some into a back-to-the-land rural communism, though these elements were often jumbled up. To American musicians a rootsy, laid-back sound suggested an attempt to connect with tradition as well as heartland culture. In Britain perhaps it suggested a less hectic, more soulful alternative to urban pop and psychedelia1.

The Basement Tapes were passed around the rock elite as a bootleg. George Harrison in particular was a fan, though The Basement Tapes clearly helped form the idea that the band should get back to some kind of simplicity after recording long and complex albums.

Despite being fairly well wrung out The Beatles recording and touring career still yields a fair few bootleg records. Of course there were hours of music recorded during the Get Back/Let It Be. Most of it like the music above, stray fragments. There are plenty of live recordings and new studio outtakes still occasionally appear, like Revolution (take 20), the missing link between the original Revolution and Revolution 9 (more of which next).

The glittering prize is a genuine version of Carnival of Light; an audio freak out The Beatles recorded and gave to an early hippie gathering, The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream April 1967 in Alexandra Palace. One copy exists with Paul McCartney, another was reckoned to be somewhere in the United States. There have been numerous fakes made, based on a written description by a writer who was allowed a listen to the master tape. They may well be superior (if you like audio collages) to the original.

Revolution (1, 9, 20 and unnumbered)

The worldwide youth counterculture, such as it existed, was already under attack in 1966. January of that year western governments began proscribing LSD. There were battles in numerous American cities, where the state tried to close young people’s clubs and drive them off the street. Britain experienced its own mini-counterculture clampdown in 1967, with a peppering of high-profile drug raids. The International Times, which had been set up as the paper of the UK underground was raided2 (The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream was a benefit to pay for IT’s legal costs). The Beatles were MBE inoculated. The raid on the Rolling Stones that saw Mick Jagger and Keith Richards jailed has to wait several hours for members of The Beatles to leave the premises.

This was going through John’s mind as he sat in Rishikesh writing songs. Despite the undoubted turn toward confrontation, John Lennon would have had to have been positively psychic to have written a commentary on 1968, the year of revolution, in January of that year.

To start with an obvious point, while it’s not the Internationale, Revolution is not an anti-revolutionary lyric. It is a dialogue with the left (as Lennon saw it) and it starts with a gesture of solidarity, “we all want to change the world”. The first two verses are understood to have been written in India, the final verse back in Britain.

The first verse is Lennon the hippy idealist. He wants peaceful change. The second verse is a mixture of Lennon the skeptic and Lennon the realist: “we all want to see the plan”. The last verse is the pay off. Lennon, the rich counterculture figure is being bugged by young Maoists pleading with him for support. Lennon acknowledges them but distrusts them at the same time.

The song may have been a “lamentable cry of petty-bourgeois fear” as the Black Dwarf described it, but we know being determines consciousness. John was temperamentally a socialist but an artistic intellectual. He was neither practically or politically capable, and therefore not cut out for political struggle. By 1968 he was a very rich man with almost incalculable mechanical royalties. As acute as he may have been Lennon could not have predicted how profound and potent the word “revolution” would become that year. He was proud of the song and wanted it to be an A-side. Having deferred to McCartney during Sgt Pepper Lennon had come awake in 68. By not backing down he painted himself in a corner. His commitment to peace and a series of clownish stunts to promote it began here.

None the less as the band was laying down the backing track on the night of May 30^th-31^stParis was still a cauldron3 and British students were beginning a wave of their own occupations. After one particular take The Beatles settled into a two chord groove and just kept playing, lashed on by orgasmic rasps from John. The track was now over ten minutes long.

Excited by the result John and his new partner Yoko Ono worked on the song, adding layers of effects and vocalisations, trying to create what he felt to be the sound of revolution. This version lay buried until Take 20 appeared on Youtube three years ago.

The luxury of second thoughts led John to excise the anarchic groove and rerecord the original portion of the song at a faster tempo, which became the single version.

The anarchic groove, as I’ve now called it, ended up as the basis of Revolution 9.

Revolution 9 is far from a chaotic mess or worthy but grim piece of art it is often taken for. It is not chaotic but built round a tonal axis of Bb/Eb. It has a number of repeated motifs, the most obvious being “number 9”. It even has published lyrics. The revolution it suggests is the Revolution in the Head, the countercultural/Freudian theory of emancipation, the potential lying dormant in each individual, a potent mixture of memory, sexuality and creativity, waiting to be unleashed. We can pass over whether this was a realistic model of revolution and, if so, whether Beatles records were an appropriate agency. The White Album has sold tens of millions of copies over the years. Even if they only listened to it once millions people were exposed to avant-guard symphonic music and the ideas associated with it they might otherwise never have come across.

Revolution 9 is perhaps the most significant cultural act ever carried out by The Beatles.

1. It was also just about this time rock stars started buying up country mansions, mobile studios and whatnot.
2. An interesting story (at least I find it interesting) there was a retaliation raid by the New Left paper, the Black Dwarf. Wikipedia describes how: “The paper… published a detailed floor-by-floor guide to Scotland Yard, complete with diagrams, descriptions of locks on particular doors and snippets of overheard conversation in the offices of Special Branch. The anonymous author, or "blue dwarf," as he styled himself, described how he perused police files, and even claimed to have sampled named brands of whisky in the Commissioner's office. A day or two later the Daily Telegraph announced that the "raid" had forced the police to withdraw and re-issue all security passes”. How cool is that? Anyone who genuinely knows more about this please get in touch.
3. Though the French right, which had been in hiding for two weeks during the general strike, had literally just got back on the streets. The revolution in France, such as it was, was on the wane, even if no one realised it at the time.

More derivative, unnecessary guff

Ob La Di Ob La Da



Paul's approximation of Blue Beat, Ob La Di Ob La Da was one of the first things to sour the White Album sessions. With Brian Epstein dead and George Martin withdrawing from his former role Paul stepped up as an all-purpose leader. The band were moving apart in terms of taste, lifestyle and personal priorities (and just plain growing up). Paul  was not the authority figure who could dragoon through the usual routine, he was just too close to the rest of the Beatles. No wonder the sessions rambled over seven months.

It's also an example of Paul's very different sexism to John. Of course to criticise The Beatles for being sexist is to criticise society for being sexist. Nonetheless John's muse was a woman and his attitude toward women was conflicted and often nasty, which made his art frequently compelling if sometimes queasy. When Paul wrote about women in general1 he was positively foursquare. This is the original song that says "if you like it then you should put a ring on it".

This of course changed with time.The Beatles went through the sixties and encountered the women's liberation movement. A shift perhaps in Paul's writing, Lady Madonna, a song that celebrates, perhaps even sentimentalises, but nonetheless acknowledges the relentless drudgery of working class motherhood, the genius of the mother who somehow makes ends meet.

Penny Lane



What would The Beatles projected album about Liverpool have sounded like or said? It's a fascinating prospect. Penny Lane is of course obliquely about James Penny, slave trader, anti-abolitionist and city father who had an area of the city named after him. Would a Beatles album about Liverpool touched on the source of the city's wealth?

But instead we have a prime piece of psychedelia. Penny Lane is every bit as far out as it's companion Strawberry Fields. As Revolution in the Head so clearly points out, in the lyric it's simultaneously summer and winter, rainy and shiny. The music is built on massed crotchet pianos, whose tone shifts relentlessly: listen next time.

1. His songs about Jane Asher were quite different and quite Lennonish, We Can Work It Out being a prime example.

Merry Christmas, you scum.

I found out yesterday apparently most of the proceeds from the ongoing public sector pay freeze (and pension contribution rise) have gone toward the £5 billion capital investment announced today. Public sector workers, doesn’t that make you feel better all that money going to good causes, like Michael Gove Novelty Schools ™ ? You’d have only spent it on things like food, clothing, rent and whatnot.

Surely now this year can be written off as the worst, most calamitous year in working class memory, living memory. A year of Olympics, Royals and no strikes, no big ones anyway. There was the Olympic bus strike, on balance a success, but after that things kept on rolling the ruling class’s way. Unite the resistance: what resistance? There has been a vital question posed of the public sector unions, to be or not to be, to fight austerity at the point it’s being applied, to fight and to lead the wider population in that struggle, or not. They chose not to fight. We need a drastic re-evaluation of British trade unionism (let alone what the fuck the alleged Party of Labour thinks it’s up to).

The latest statement from Gideon Osborne is yet another flip-off to the poor. There are further benefit cuts (the biggest benefit payout being working tax credit – in the end a subsidy for low wages and underemployment). We already have seen a 23% rise in homelessness , concentrated among the young. April will certainly be the cruellest month, when universal credit and the room tax kick in. On the other hand he has cut corporation tax (the optional tax, judging by Starbucks, Amazon and so on) by 1% and cancelled a planned 3% rise in fuel duty, so that’s Nigel from the golf club sorted. The rest of you can fuck off.

Merry Christmas, you scum.

Meanwhile in the actually existing world

Mo' Beatles

Love Me Do

Few words need wasting on a gloss interpretation of Love Me Do. The Beatles did not undergo a prolonged public apprenticeship like, say, David Bowie. This is the only genuinely artless song they put out as a single. Its stark baldness made it stand out then, as it does even 50 years later (that and the harmonica hook). From here on in The Beatles recording career is a stairway to heaven.

A small thing can said about sound and their associations. Love Me Do is a dry record, little or nothing in the way or reverb or signal distortion is applied. This was contrary to music industry practice at the time. As their recording career developed George Martin created a sparse and defined sound for The Beatles. The Beatles played on their own records. There were not massed ranks of session musicians to bolster the sound. On stereo mixes instruments were mixed clearly and widely separated. Any effect used was usually brief and for a definite purpose.

The sound of the Beat Combo evolved through the impact of certain drugs into psychedelic rock and eventually progressive rock. I can never find the quote but I remember hearing one of the Grateful Dead describe how they would be playing one of the Merry Pranksters acid tests. They’d drop acid, start playing a song like (I’m a) Roadrunner and 20 minutes later they’d still be playing, wondering where the time just went.

Sounds and arrangements have specific associations that are more than just changing fashion. Recreational drugs are of course crucial. Let’s not forget drug taking does not evolve in an abstract manner. Being illegal they are often subject to dramatic changes in the relation of supply and demand. They also suit certain times and places better than others. For example, who wants to get into consciousness expansion during an economic depression?

There will be changes in sound when there are changes in the use of music. Is the music you generally listen to about private contemplation, e.g. personal sound-tracking, or is it about public congregation, e.g. dance? Dance music, the kind of music The Beatles made early on, is sparse and simple.

Money

In his essay, The Disappearing Decade, Ian MacDonald contended that the Counterculture of the 60s, which overlapped in various ways with the New Left, was a reaction against the actual revolution (for want of a better word) going on in the decade; ordinary people desiring materially affluent and liberated lives. In other words the 60s gave birth to the 80s.

Despite many perceptive observations the essay misses the point. Firstly about the Counterculture/New Left connection, they were not nearly as closely bound as they appeared. Primarily though the problem is with the 80s. It may have seemed to Ian MacDonald, almost certainly a disappointed leftie, that the 80s were when everyone became a suburban scumbag. It seemed that way to a lot of people in the 90s, but that is the official narrative, and history is always written by the winners. Thatcher’s party never won a majority of the public to its agenda. One of Thatcher’s political strengths was realising the uses of active minorities. The Tories prevailed thanks to her official opposition, who spurned every chance to derail her government. The result of Thatcherism was to send Britain on a course of widening class division and growing poverty. The working class lost out thanks to her, if the majority understand that now, many people knew it even then.

This brings us on to one of the best Beatle covers on record: Money. The Beatles transformed the arrangement and thereby the meaning of this song, from a loose swing to an impatient shout. It can be taken as a paean to avarice, but in many ways it sums up what money and fame meant to four (broadly speaking) working class lads: “I wanna be free!” To begin with The Beatles worked on the assumption they would have a few years prime earning ahead of them. If they had not thought about it they were endlessly reminded by journalists, who seemed always anxious to ask “how long do you think it will last?” or “what will you do when it’s over?”

According to Paul, the first thing John did after finding himself truly rich for the first time was buy box after box of Jaffa Cakes and stuff himself silly. That was freedom for John.

Norwegian Wood

I learned only recently that the working title of this song was its subtitle, this bird has flown. It’s a well known exercise in Dylan-esque bluff, about an affair John had with a journalist, with a casually melodramatic ending. There is a theory about the lyric which, if true, makes the song even more acidic.

Shortly before writing the song John was given a present by his then wife, Cynthia, a mechanical bird singing from inside a cage. The bird seemed to sum up his predicament, as he saw it, stuck in his Fat Elvis period. “This bird has flown” in this context means “I’m leaving you”. He didn’t leave for another two and a half years, so mired was he in his life. All in all it’s a stunningly cruel song.

Yet more pretention

Know Her is to Love Her, To

I’ve chewed up the title of this song to crowbar it under K. It’s likely we’ll want another song entered under T.

It’s important to remember it’s not generally possible to disentangle what was unintentional, what as casual and what was deliberate in The Beatles phenomenon. The Beatles sang girl group songs. Sometimes the lyrics were gender altered, as is here. Sometimes they were not, and you’d have Ringo hollering away about boys. The Beatles sang girl group songs, especially ones with three part harmonies, because they liked them, and you could leave it at if you want to.

The Beatles of course had a profound effect on Western Womanhood, but what about Manhood. In his mini-biography The Summer of Love, George Martin took a few paragraphs to describe the effect of Beatlemania as it hit the United States. He described seeing male office-workers dressed in Beatle Wigs. Grown men pretending to be one of the band: who are you today?

The Beatles were something different, both in appearance and personality. There was an incredible fuss made in the mass media over the length of their hair, bizarre though it may seem now. Hair and headwear continue to be a source of social anxiety, a very closely policed aspect of culture, even today. We just take the rules and norms we are given so much for granted.

This public face was crafted largely by a gay man, Brian Epstein. He took a group of leather and denim clad rockers and put them in matching suits, page boy haircuts and had them bow after every gig. This did not so much tame them as make them enticingly strange and ambiguous1. The legend of The Beatles as family entertainers only arose after other bands came through, specifically the Rolling Stones.

So they were less pioneers than harbingers of something new. Allen Ginsberg described them as evincing a new form of manhood, combining “complete masculinity” with “complete tenderness”. Perhaps that’s not quite right, but something like that.

1. And not just gender/sexual ambiguous. Older people complained they could not tell the different band members apart. Bemused exaggeration, perhaps, but The Beatles contemporaries often described them, especially early on, as being like a “four-headed monster”, a single personality split between four people.

Further pretentiousness

Happiness is a Warm Gun

Is a textbook example of just what John Lennon’s genius was. For a great musician he wasn’t actually that great at music. Amongst other things he was a rhythm guitarist with a poor sense of rhythm. His talent, in terms of composition, was being able to capitalise on his lack of fluency leading him to original ideas that would not occur to more proficient musicians. The Times music journalists famously complimented Lennon on his use of Aeolian cadences, John hadn’t a clue what they were.

Working with Paul McCartney and to a lesser extent with George Martin this tendency was harnessed. As time passed Lennon and McCartney depended less each other1, John’s compositions were offered up metrically dishevelled. He began composing on piano to surprise himself. He started working from words rather than an initial musical phrase. Phrases spilled over bars, sections expanded and contracted when needed (e.g. Revolution – “we-e-ell you know”, an extra two beats latched onto a 12-bar blues). What is Happiness is a Warm Gun? Is it a suite? There’s certainly no verse-chorus structure to it. Try counting the beats at various points. It’s utterly mad and yet the song rings true.

I Want to Hold Your Hand

The blockbuster Beatles single, the vertiginous peak of a chain starting with Love Me Do. Much can be made of how early Lennon/McCartney songs were written to generate white-hot hysteria. There is a contrary undertow in several of their early lyrics.

Please, Please Me is of course about John’s passion for oral sex. Despite being palpably more manic, I Want to Hold Your Hand is lyrically chaste. Can’t By Me Love went one step further in having the singer address object of their affection as “my friend”. These are not necessarily disparate elements. There is of course a cool aspect to sexual liberation, specifically casual sex, disengaged passion. This was almost certainly not considered by John and Paul, whose lyrics at the time were place fillers.

Julia

It’s well established that Julia Lennon was her son’s muse. She was a physical embodiment of the concept of anima, Lennon’s personality reflected back in female form, a role later embodied by Yoko Ono. If you accept that theory you can see Julia cropping up time and again in John’s lyrics, as the former lover, possibly dead in Yes It Is, the symbol of bondage and suffering in Girl, the girl with kaleidoscope eyes in Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, possibly the source of rapture in Across the Universe. There are numerous Lennon-penned songs about betrayal and departure. Lennon’s grief mixed with anger at her loss. All his closest relationships were tinged with violence to some degree2.

This is John’s final song to Julia while in The Beatles. Despite being something of an exorcism, judging by the Plastic Ono Band album it clearly failed.

1. And on George Martin, who began withdrawing from production duties after Sergeant Pepper.

2. For instance it’s reasonable to speculate (while admitting there’s no definitive proof) there was at least a sexual element to John’s relationship with Stuart Sutcliffe and that John felt a degree of guilt over his death from a brain haemorrhage, having had a violent brawl with Sutcliffe years earlier.

Thought's for the Brain - why're you talking to me like that?

Have you ever had somebody walk up to you at work, grinning away manically, and you just think “what do you want from me?” I have been pondering some concurrent phenomena, modern management techniques and systemic infantilsation.

It is a shame, in a way, that there are so many socialists who become teachers or lecturers. Not because the teaching profession shouldn’t be organised or that socialist teachers can’t open minds or make a difference in young people’s lives. Unfortunately the primary product of the education system is not knowledge (if it is tell me all you remember of trigonometry or irregular French verbs – these are just examples). The primary product is habit and deference, and these things are instilled despite the best intentions of the best teachers. That’s why we have an education system.

Why do managers who want to coerce a single individual shut them away in a small room? Why do managers who want to railroad a self-conscious group of workers gather the workers together and present their plans in a faux-democratic manner, called consultation? These are techniques used on people from the age of five.

Hierarchical authority relies on dependence and passivity. It relies on the inner child. Even at the best of times it is very hard to shake your formative education. This is a key aspect in why during revolutions without even realising it people given back what they have won. They cannot imagine a world without managers, bureaucrats, elected politicians, police officers etc, who in normal times they rely on.

It’s is the commonly considered theory that human beings evolved because they were neotenic apes, they preserved juvenile features into maturity. If social management depends infantilisation there is now a worrying trend of preserving social aspects of childhood into adulthood; middle youth, helicopter parenting. They're impressionistic examples, not to cast aspersions on anybody. We are not seeing a moral breakdown so much as describing facts. Here is an article written on the eve of the great crash weighing up the work prospects of Generation Y, who according to this are needy, moralistic, tech-dependent and crave formal structure and personal affirmation. With declining workforce numbers the author advises managers to get with Generation Y’s programme. Of course with mass youth unemployment these days bosses don’t have worry anymore. Young people, especially those on the government’s work programme (3.5% overall ‘success’ rate  ), are even more dependent on the graces of the rich and powerful.