Post by gilfaethwy on Nov 25, 2015 13:45:56 GMT
Hi All
A half century on, one need only compare the dreck being rammed into people's ears today to recognize how truly great the Beatles were-- and are. Listening to their work, one is struck with the sheer tunefulness of their melodies, the scope of their subject matter, and the amazing variety of their instrumentation. In musicology there is actually a term: "Beatles Eclecticism"-- an indication (were any needed) of their immense influence and magnificent achievement. (To release a song like "Eleanor Rigby"-- where the entire instrumentation is a Classical double string quartet and nothing else, was amazingly brave for a rock band in the mid 1960s, or ever, for that matter... but then, "Yesterday"'s instrumentation, apart from an acoustic guitar, is also a only string quartet... something rarely remarked upon.)
I read recently the Wikipedia entry on the song "Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da"... and it was largely dismissed as a bit of fluff at best. But this is so untrue. It is a highly subversive song, right up there with "Lovely Rita", for example. In fact, many people just miss the subversive element. At the beginning of the song, "Desmond says to Molly, 'Girl, I like your face'"--- in itself a neat hint of the crux of the song's twist. The inversion of roles at the end is misunderstood by many listeners. Recall the original lyric:
Happy ever after in the marketplace, Desmond lets the children lend a hand;
Molly stays at home and does her pretty face, and in the evening she still sings it with the band...
This is flipped to:
Happy ever after in the marketplace, Molly lets the children lend a hand;
Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face, and in the evening she's a singer in the band.
This is sometimes taken to mean that Desmond is lazy and Molly does everything-- the "she" in the last phrase being taken to refer to Molly.
But not so. In fact, Desmond is a drag-queen! A straight, married father but still a drag-queen. The piano tinkling here-- absent in the first version of the stanza-- is a wry comment on this. The subversiveness is that otherwise, they have a perfect, bourgeois life: and seem perfectly happy as they are. A delightful song that in its sunny normalcy turns expectation on its back.
Any comments?
A half century on, one need only compare the dreck being rammed into people's ears today to recognize how truly great the Beatles were-- and are. Listening to their work, one is struck with the sheer tunefulness of their melodies, the scope of their subject matter, and the amazing variety of their instrumentation. In musicology there is actually a term: "Beatles Eclecticism"-- an indication (were any needed) of their immense influence and magnificent achievement. (To release a song like "Eleanor Rigby"-- where the entire instrumentation is a Classical double string quartet and nothing else, was amazingly brave for a rock band in the mid 1960s, or ever, for that matter... but then, "Yesterday"'s instrumentation, apart from an acoustic guitar, is also a only string quartet... something rarely remarked upon.)
I read recently the Wikipedia entry on the song "Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da"... and it was largely dismissed as a bit of fluff at best. But this is so untrue. It is a highly subversive song, right up there with "Lovely Rita", for example. In fact, many people just miss the subversive element. At the beginning of the song, "Desmond says to Molly, 'Girl, I like your face'"--- in itself a neat hint of the crux of the song's twist. The inversion of roles at the end is misunderstood by many listeners. Recall the original lyric:
Happy ever after in the marketplace, Desmond lets the children lend a hand;
Molly stays at home and does her pretty face, and in the evening she still sings it with the band...
This is flipped to:
Happy ever after in the marketplace, Molly lets the children lend a hand;
Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face, and in the evening she's a singer in the band.
This is sometimes taken to mean that Desmond is lazy and Molly does everything-- the "she" in the last phrase being taken to refer to Molly.
But not so. In fact, Desmond is a drag-queen! A straight, married father but still a drag-queen. The piano tinkling here-- absent in the first version of the stanza-- is a wry comment on this. The subversiveness is that otherwise, they have a perfect, bourgeois life: and seem perfectly happy as they are. A delightful song that in its sunny normalcy turns expectation on its back.
Any comments?