lennon \u0026 mccartney, 1965-70: cultural revolt and the avant-garde (phd chapter, 2010)

$: Lennon \u0026 McCartney, 1965-70: Cultural Revolt and the Avant-garde (PhD chapter, 2010)$
James McGrath, Ideas of Belonging in the Work of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.Doctoral thesis, Leeds Metropolitan University, 2010.

Chapter 5:

Lennon and McCartney’s Uprooting of Popular Music, 1965-70:Cultural Revolt and the Avant-garde

Introduction

While Lennon and McCartney’s songs engage with working-class social

views, they also reflect influences of artistically rich but

culturally elite environs into which they were uprooted after 1963.

This chapter compares how their 1964-70 work demonstrates negative-

belonging to standardized mass art through their innovations as

recording artists. I illustrate how Lennon and McCartney seized

musical languages previously associated with other classes, helping

to redefine “popular music”. I discuss this as “cultural revolt”,

using the term in relation firstly to Marwick’s 1981 argument of

“cultural revolution” in England from 1956-65, and secondly, to

Huyssen’s 1986 discussion of cultural revolt as an historic avant-

garde principle. Thus, illustrating various influences on Lennon and

McCartney’s work, the chapter employs a broader frame of artistic

and theoretical reference. Discussing popular music as an evolving

cultural form, I utilise Adorno’s model of “natural” music and

Hoggart’s of working-class “baroque”.

Part I contextualises The Beatles in the emergence of uprooted

working-class authors in England in 1956-63. Key theoretical terms

are introduced to explore how Lennon and McCartney’s 1965 work

signified negative-belonging to popular music traditions. Part II

discusses their collaboration ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’

(1965), developing Hoggart’s model of working-class baroque, and

Rose’s 2001 critique of “bohemia”. Part III employs theoretical

arguments concerning avant-garde art from Adorno and Huyssen. This

157


discussion illustrates how McCartney led The Beatles’ experimental

direction in 1966-7, and how Lennon’s 1968-70 work furthered such

patterns. The main texts discussed are The Beatles’ McCartney-led

Magical Mystery Tour film (1967) and ‘Revolution 9’ (1968). After

considering the changing class belonging of popular music, the

chapter concludes that while The Beatles represented “mass art” in

The Uses of Literacy’s sense of compounding working- and middle-class

audiences, Lennon and McCartney’s work challenges Hoggart and

Adorno’s equations of commercial popular music with cultural

subordination.

I: Cultural revolt and The Beatles’ 1965 work

In 1957, Hoggart argued that while economic divisions remained,

England was becoming culturally classless. Forms once belonging to

the working- and lower middle-classes were being centralised for a

mass audience, compounding both groups. Hoggart’s concern was that

engagement with working-class life was being diluted. Yet, a

functionally oppositional pattern was emerging in England. Forms

supposedly belonging to other classes were effectively being seized

by uprooted authors, increasing the working-classes’ cultural

recognition. As the previous chapter discussed, Eagleton & Pierce

examine manifestations in the novel.1 The Uses of Literacy prefigured

academic counterparts to this shift, including Williams (1958), and

Hoggart’s co-founding of the CCCS (1962). Similarly, E. P.

Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) challenged this

group’s neglect in historical studies. Thompson termed this “history

from below”.2 In the arts, these patterns prompted interrelating,

1 Eagleton & Pierce (1979: 136-7).2 Thompson (1966: 279-80).

158


generalised labels from critics, creating imagined (or imaginary)

communities of authors. Such terms included Kitchen-Sink realism

(art and drama), the Angry Young Men (drama and fiction) and British

New Wave (cinema). These overlapped with what Russell (2004) calls

“northernisation”, in which, Northern writers and settings became

newly prominent.3 Gould and Heilbronner briefly contextualise The

Beatles within such developments.4 This chapter periodically cross-

references Lennon and McCartney’s work with other texts in this

cultural shift. I do this to illustrate how, unlike predecessors in

other genres, they continued to evolve the impulse that the late

1950s emergence of working-class authors first suggested. This is

the impulse of cultural revolt, affecting seizure of cultural forms

and artistic traditions. Although crucial to what Marwick calls

“cultural revolution” in Britain from 1956-65, I discuss this

emergence of working-class authors as a “revolt” because, while a

demonstration of power, it did not overturn the culture industry’s

own power structure.5 It did however help to redefine the working-

classes within the national imagined sovereign.

Chapter 2 summarised Anderson’s arguments that the seizure of

cultural forms as, effectively, languages in themselves assisted the

emergence of imagined national communities by spreading vernaculars

in defiance of imperialism.6 In mid-twentieth-century England,

working-class cultural revolt yielded imagined artistic and academic

communities, rather than class or nationalist formations. However,

adopting genres previously dominated by other classes, an oppressed

group reinforced its national prominence. The Uses of Literacy’s role was

important. Marwick summarises that Hoggart portrayed “the working

3 Russell (2004: 28).4 Gould (2007: 91-2); Heilbronner (2008: 108).5 Marwick (1981: Ch. 8).6 Anderson (1983: 73, 82).

159


class as it really was”, rather than “a figment of upper-class

intellectual imagination”.7 Representing a genre already associated

with the working-classes, Lennon and McCartney differed from other

uprooted English authors. Yet, their insistence on performing

original songs marked a seizure of form. While dramatists and

academics re-presented working-class life to largely middle-class

audiences, The Beatles endowed popular song with musical traditions

previously associated with more elite classes, assisting the form’s

own rise “from below”.

The title of Melly’s 1970 commentary Revolt Into Style refers to how

rebellious impulses in popular music become commodified and thus de-

radicalised:

The Establishment wants order. The entrepreneurs want money, andthe way to make the most money out of pop is to preserve atleast the semblance of order.8

Yet, to paraphrase Inglis’ 1996 comparison of The Beatles’ career

with Elvis Presley’s, evolving standards in Lennon and McCartney’s

work revolt against style, including their own.9 Gestures of

repersonalization on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band epitomise this.

Chapter 2 discussed popular music’s evolutionary capacity as

demonstrated by The Beatles’ ‘I Feel Fine’ and its introduction of

feedback into what Adorno calls “natural” music: the sum total of

styles with which “untrained” listeners are familiar.10 Most of The

Beatles’ experiments had precedents, but their work furthered

earlier innovations. ‘Yesterday’ (1965) features McCartney on guitar

and vocal with a string quartet, on the score for which, he worked

7 Marwick (1981: 128).8 Melly (1970: 38).9 Inglis (1996: 63).10 Adorno (1941: 444).

160


with Martin.11 Typifying earlier embellishments of popular songs,

Buddy Holly’s ‘True Love Ways’ (1958/1960) features thirteen string

parts, amidst saxophone and drums. String quartets, however, are

widely—if, Adorno (1962) argues, wrongly—regarded as “the highest

musical species” because of their self-sufficiency.12 Relating

quartets to chamber music, Adorno outlines their elitist

connotations as entertainment for bourgeois homes, but laments their

decline as radio replaced self-made music.13 The Uses of Literacy addresses

this in popular music. Club-singing, which illustrated the working-

classes’ capacity for assimilating new material, was being replaced

by radio music, made for, rather than adopted by, the working-

classes. Yet, popular music’s evolution also depends on audiences’

assimilation of innovations. The success of ‘Yesterday’ indicates

mass openness to more serious arrangements. A 1965 American single,

it sold 1.8 million copies.14

On American TV in 1965, conductor Leonard Bernstein used The

Beatles songs as, Gendron summarises, means of illustrating features

of classical music to youth.15 This gesture elicits questions

regarding classical music’s cultural displacement. Addressing this,

Adorno’s (1938) asserts that popular and “serious” musical spheres

do not correlate

in such a way that the lower could serve as […] introduction tothe higher, or that the higher could renew its lost collectivestrength by borrowing from the lower.16

11 Coleman (1995: 43-6).12 Adorno (1962: 95). 13 Adorno (1962: 86-102). 14 Time (1967a: 48).15 Gendron (2002: 172).16 Adorno (1938: 293).

161


Adorno’s contentions regarding serious music’s decline, advanced by

mechanically-reproduced popular music, parallel Anderson’s arguments

concerning Latin: as vernaculars spread via print, a classical

language declined.17 Adorno also argues that while historically,

popular song “attacked the cultural privilege of the ruling class”,

mechanical-reproduction enabled this form’s oppression of the masses

via distraction.18 Anderson, however, argues that book-publishing

vitally aided the emergence of national communities opposed to

imperialism, as Hungarian nationalism demonstrated.19 Imagined

Communities thus provides historic examples of capitalist means of

dissemination being used by oppressed groups, with radical effect.

Equating mass-produced popular songs with a “musical

underworld”, Adorno contends that these reinforce the inability of

“those excluded from culture” to find expression: this mass “lives

on what is handed down to it from above”.20 However, the uprooted,

writes Hoggart, are at “the friction-point of two cultures”.21 Much

of what The Beatles handed down to a mass audience, Lennon and

McCartney had taken from (to paraphrase Adorno) “higher” musical

spheres and indeed classes. In doing so, they gradually transformed

what Hoggart defines as working-class “baroque”: a tradition of

embracing elements of richer cultural existence, and furthermore, a

tradition of assimilation.22

In 1948, London’s Musical Times and Singing Class Circular commented

that “baroque”, signifying “whimsical style or ornamentation, was

“not a word of great renown in England”.23 Such connotations are

17 Anderson (1983: 78).18 Adorno (1938: 292). 19 Anderson (1983: Ch. 3).20 Adorno (1938: 292).21 Hoggart (1957: 292).22 Hoggart (1957: 140-9).23 Kenyon (1948: 105).

162


manifest in American critic Richard Goldstein’s 1967 dismissal of

Sgt Pepper as “the Beatles baroque—an elaboration without

improvement”.24 Hoggart’s outline of working-class baroque emphasises

elaboration, but while this parallels the term’s traditional

application to seventeenth-century art, Hoggart uses the phrase

without implying an historical link. His discussion of working-class

baroque is The Uses of Literacy’s most important illustration of how this

group creates its own traditions despite and within economic and

cultural subordination. In this way, working-class baroque is a

tradition of negative-belonging. What Hoggart outlines is

effectively a cultural language, expressing an attitude that the

working-classes bring to their recreations, insisting on “rococo

extravagance” in all that signifies a break from regulated routine,

including popular music.25 In The Uses of Literacy, “baroque living” is

exemplified by the one-day “chara” (coach) trip—a tradition taken up

by working-class people and made into one of their “characteristic”

kinds of pleasure occasion.26 Identifying the chara-trip’s internal

traditions, Hoggart illustrates how working-class baroque is defined

by this group. The nearest to a holiday that most can afford, the

chara-trip epitomises working-class baroque as “an elementary,

allegorical, and brief statement of a better, a fuller life”.27

Although Hoggart does not pursue such implications, working-

class baroque suggests mass openness to otherness. Adorno’s ‘On

Popular Music’ (1941) states that in popular song, extravagances are

tolerated only if they can be recast into styles with which

listeners are familiar.28 Hoggart discusses how, in mass art, new

materials are adapted to old demands, but while the “homely” 24 Goldstein (1967b: 174).25 Hoggart (1957: 143).26 Hoggart (1957: 146).27 Hoggart (1957: 148).28 Adorno 1941: 444).

163


underscores these, alongside it are demands for the “exotic”.29

Developing Hoggart’s model of baroque, McKibbin (1998) suggests how

its underlying attitude expanded mass literacy. Through convoluted

evocations of passion in popular fiction, the working-classes could

acquire ornate vocabularies.30 The Beatles offered comparable

expansion of musical literacy. Everett notes that “baroque”

arrangements of ‘In My Life’ (Martin’s harpsichord-like electronic-

piano) and ‘Penny Lane’ (the McCartney-directed piccolo-trumpet

solo) flatter themes of the past.31 Yet, the incorporation of such

details into popular song innovatively demonstrated its worthiness

of “higher” styles. Moreover, these songs celebrate the authors’

roots. Despite Goldstein’s summary of The Beatles’ “baroque” as

elaboration without improvement, their work shows emulation of their

own standards across successive albums. This enhanced the evolution

of working-class baroque itself, and in Lennon and McCartney’s work,

the tradition becomes synonymous with serious musical language, and

furthermore, alternative lifestyles.

II: ‘Norwegian Wood’, working-class baroque and bohemia

In October 1965, The Beatles recorded the Lennon-initiated

‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’ for Rubber Soul. Instructed by

Lennon, Harrison paralleled the former’s guitar refrain on an Indian

instrument previously unused in Western popular music: the sitar.32

MacDonald calls this “the first Beatles song in which the lyric is

29 Hoggart (1957: 31-2, 146).30 McKibbin (1998: 515).31 Everett (1999: 86).32 Wenner (1971: 85).

164


more important than the music”.33 Yet, the arrangement crucially

enhances the song’s evocation of exotic surroundings. Although

narrated as a single night’s events, the encounter reflects elite

environs that Lennon and (especially) McCartney now inhabited.

Baroque living and uprooting both transgress regular working-class

experience, but while the former is temporary, the latter is

irreversible. The song’s baroque narrative, highlighting the

otherness of the surroundings evoked, personalizes the singer as one

of Us. Yet, intimations of uprooting suffuse ‘Norwegian Wood’. The

uprooted waver “between scorn and longing” before middle-class

culture.34 These attitudes tensely coexist through Lennon and

McCartney’s contributions to this song. Discussing its implications

of cultural revolt, I will relate the imagery to the writers’

different affiliations with bohemian circles, and how these shaped

their work.

Lennon claimed in 1980: “‘Norwegian Wood’ is my song

completely. It was about an affair I was having”.35 Norman suggests

the partner as Lennon’s neighbour, Sonny Freeman.36 Hitherto

overlooked details suggest folk-singer Joan Baez. Gould notes that

Lennon’s opening, “I once had a girl”, parodies traditional

ballads.37 Baez released versions of ‘Once I Loved A Boy’ (1961) and

‘Once I Had A Sweetheart’ (1963); her description of an August 1964

night with Lennon closely resembles the unconsummated encounter in

‘Norwegian Wood’, which he began writing that month.38 Yet, Lennon

elsewhere stated that “Paul helped with the middle-eight” and “with

33 MacDonald (1994: 130).34 Hoggart (1957: 302).35 Sheff (1981: 178).36 Norman (2008: 418).37 Gould (2007: 297).38 Cf Loder (1983: 20); Harry (2000: 47); Everett (2001: 313).

165


the lyrics”.39 Although, as will be discussed, McCartney’s

relationship with actress Jane Asher also informs the song, more

important than who is what the girl invoked represents. In this

first Beatles song to place the singer in another’s home, details

convey that he does not belong there. The “good/ Norwegian wood”

suggests affluence. Two social histories cite the lyric to

illustrate English class division. Bicât (1970) contrasts its “poor

boy” and “sophisticated career girl”; Rose (2001) describes the

authors as “working-class poets”, uneasy in bohemian London.40

First, it is instructive to consider the song’s arrangement.

The sitar’s usage here is not without implications of postcolonial

exploitation. Historically, this instrument belonged to Hindustani

classical traditions, and for spiritual reasons, early twentieth-

century Indian musicians opposed mechanical-reproduction of their

work.41 Prior to Independence (1947), sitar music in North India, not

unlike Western chamber music, was usually performed for the rich in

their homes. However, a younger sitarist, Ravi Shankar (born

Benares, 1920), released his first recordings in 1956. American jazz

musicians and Beat circles embraced Shankar’s work. Frederick W.

Harrison’s cultural history of the sitar in the West (2001)

chronicles how in Britain, Davy Graham (1963) and The Kinks (1965)

imitated the instrument on guitar.42 ‘Norwegian Wood’ inverts this.

The sitar is used, Mellers writes, as “an exotic guitar”; Kozinn

notes that it simply adds “embellishments”.43 Citing Orientalism (1978),

Edward W. Said’s critique of Western caricatures of the East, Reck

(2008) acknowledges this pattern in Beatles songs, but argues that

these nonetheless helped to spread global interest in Eastern 39 Wenner (1971: 85); Hennessey (2000: 51). 40 Bicât (1970: 330); Rose (2001: 459).41 Shankar (1997: 287).42 Harrison (2001: 2-3). 43 Mellers (1973: 59). Kozinn (1995: 133). See also Farrell (1988: 193-4).

166


culture. Reck notes correlations between Indian music and Western

bohemia in ‘Norwegian Wood’, but overlooks the song’s intimations of

working-class cynicism, via the former, towards the latter.44

Said’s study confronts Orientalism as reinforced in Western

upper- and middle-class imaginings. The Uses of Literacy records working-

class variants. The baroque tradition frequently imitates “the

East”, imagined as “exotic and elaborate”; working-class baroque

embraces “splendour which may be Eastern or European”.45 The Indian

instrument and “Norwegian” wood invoke less the East or Europe than

an England divided by class and culture. The Lennon-requested sitar

typifies baroque excesses as “elaboration for elaboration’s sake”.46

This incurs musical sarcasm, undermining the girl’s sophistication.

Signifying otherness itself, the sitar’s wry function here aligns

less with Indian music than Orientalist British comedy: Peter

Sellers’ ‘Wouldn’t It Be Lovely’ (1959), and Ken Thorne’s soundtrack

to The Beatles’ August 1965 film Help! (Martin produced all three).

Yet, ‘Norwegian Wood’ also conveys fascination.

Studies usually discuss ‘Norwegian Wood’ as Lennon’s song, yet

McCartney describes the authorship as “60-40 to John”, stating:

I picked it up at the second verse […] I filled [the song] outlyrically and had the idea to set the place on fire […] And themiddle was mine, those middle eights.47

Lennon’s opening encapsulates the song’s essence. The vocal (in E)

descends an octave, from B to B. Each verse repeats this. Lennon

also establishes the ambiguous power structure. The singer asks if

44 Reck (2008: 63).45 Hoggart (1957: 143). 46 Hoggart (1957: 144).47 Mason (2004: 159); Reck (2008: 63). Cf MacDonald (1994: 131-2). Quote:Miles (1997: 270-1).

167


he “had” the girl, or vice versa. In the second verse, where

McCartney intervened, the focus shifts from personal reflection to

concrete detail, describing the room’s “Norwegian wood”. Moving into

E-minor, the middle-eight dramatically evokes entry into new

surroundings, tightening the descent between G and D:

She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhereSo I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair.

Physically evoking uprooting, the singer is made placeless. After

describing sitting on a rug, drinking wine while “We talked until

two”, he reveals that he slept in the bath. Yet, waking alone, he

had the home to himself:

So I lit a fireIsn’t it goodNorwegian wood?

Whether interpreted as the ethos of the hearth or, as Bicât and

Mellers infer, arson, this conclusion inverts the singer’s

passivity.48

‘Norwegian Wood’ resembles seminal texts by so-called Angry

Young Men. John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger (1956) and John Braine’s

Room At The Top (1957) both depict uprooted males overpowering middle-

class females.49 In terms of gender roles, these anti-heroes are

oppressive, and the predominance of male authors in 1956-65 renders

Marwick’s term “cultural revolution” questionable. However, it is

significant that Osborne’s play and Braine’s novel direct misogyny

at middle-class women: the uprooted males—ostensibly—refuse to be

48 Bicât (1970: 330); Mellers (1973: 60).49 I am grateful to historian Peter Mandler for mentioning the song’ssimilarity to Braine’s novel following a conference paper (McGrath, 2005).

168


subservient. In theatre and fiction, these texts foregrounded class

tension. ‘Norwegian Wood’ (months after The Rolling Stones’

similarly-themed ‘Play With Fire’, 1965) continues the pattern in

popular music. Yet, despite impulses of revolt, Osborne’s play and

Braine’s novel end by showing the uprooted as unbent springs. Their

working-class anti-heroes are absorbed into bourgeois domesticity.

The singer in ‘Norwegian Wood’ enters a very different bourgeois

home.

Rose provides a history from below of twentieth-century London

bohemia, citing memoirs by working-class writers who sought

belonging therein. These narratives show bohemian elitism fuelling

nostalgia for working-class domesticity. Rose asserts that

‘Norwegian Wood’ continues this “tradition in proletarian

literature”.50 He critiques how bohemia exploits liberal freedoms of

bourgeois society somewhat farther than the respectable bourgeoisie

is prepared to go, but emphasises its capitalist function as “a

laboratory for cultural research”.51 Rose contends that bohemia is

“subversive” only in seeking “to wean consumers away from older

cultural products”, and sell them new ones.52 He overlooks how, in

these terms, Lennon and McCartney were bohemians, not simply

working-class artists exploited by it. The song’s question of who

“had” who remains pertinent. The singer’s seizure of elite environs

parallels McCartney and Lennon’s mid-1960s entries into the cultural

“laboratory” itself, which, in Rose’s argument, is concerned with

selling new products not to the working-classes, but the bourgeois

intelligentsia. Before considering how McCartney and Lennon inverted

this, it is worth comparing their bohemian affiliations, and how

these reflect aspiration and cynicism. Useful here is Jack Kerouac’s

50 Rose (2001: 459).51 Rose (439).52 Rose (2001: 462).

169


looser 1958 definition of the bohemian as a “hanger-onner around the

arts”.53

‘Norwegian Wood’ suggests social environs that McCartney

entered via his relationship with Asher, and through his friendship

with her brother Peter. From 1963-6, McCartney lodged at the upper

middle-class Ashers’ family home in London. This seemingly

influenced the song. The Uses of Literacy suggests that despite other

classes’ changing furniture tastes, working-class people “make

nothing of Scandinavian simplicities”.54 McCartney explains: “Peter

Asher had his room done out in […] Norwegian wood. It was pine

really, cheap pine”.55 Peter introduced McCartney to what Miles calls

“avant-garde London”, wherein McCartney retrospectively outlines his

presence at elite bohemian gatherings.56 McCartney’s assertions of

having belonged to this mid-1960s scene of artists and writers serve

his challenges to perceptions that, in his words, he was “the cute

Beatle” and Lennon, “the intellectual”.57 Yet others concur that, to

quote Norman (1981), the former “Institute boy” became enamoured

with London’s “artistic bustle”.58 Poet, actor, and later Lennon’s

assistant, Dan Richter “first met Paul at a private home” circa

1965, and prompted by my questions, comments:

The ‘scene’ was an outgrowth of the Beat culture and we were notonly outside of the mainstream, but also rejected traditionalways of doing things. Marijuana [was an integral] part ofmeetings and get-togethers […]. We were exploring personalfreedom and consciousness expansion.59

53 Kerouac (1958: 12).54 Hoggart (1957: 149).55 Miles (1997: 270). 56 Miles (1997: Ch. 6, passim).57 Miles (1997: 220).58 Norman (1981: 266); see also Taylor (1987: 199-203); Flippo (1988: 212-5).59 Dan Richter, by email, 13 Jan 2007. See Appendix 2.

170


The English cultural revolt was typified by depictions of

dissatisfied passive-belonging in provincial working-class life. The

titles of Sheelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey (1958) and Bill

Naughton’s TV drama Honeymoon Postponed (1961) reflect how, in such

texts, intimations of a fuller life remained frustrated.

Contrastingly, American Beat literature, dominated by middle-class

men, celebrated negative-belonging to regulated routine through

travel, drugs and Eastern religion. Reflecting The Beatles’

divergence from the English cultural revolt, standard Beat imagery

suffuses the middle verses of ‘Norwegian Wood’, and also,

McCartney’s narratives of bohemian London.60 Although such resonances

can exemplify what Rose scorns as bohemia’s “alternative

conformity”, in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) and Kerouac’s The Dharma

Bums (1958), nights spent sitting on floors, talking and sharing

wine carry ritualistic significance for imagined communities of

negative-belonging.61 Such details connote the spread of ideas and

alternative ways of seeing. Through these implications, ‘Norwegian

Wood’ prefigures The Beatles’ subsequent work.

Studies have begun aligning the young Lennon with the Beats.62

In 1960, the flat where he was living with fellow art students on

Liverpool’s Gambier Terrace (where guests slept in the bath) was

subject of a tabloid article on “the beatnik horror”.63 Poet Royston

Ellis claims that while visiting in 1960, he convinced Lennon to

rename the then “Silver Beetles” as The Beatles, honouring the

Beats.64 Yet, implications that Lennon passively-belonged to this

60 Miles (1997: Ch. 6, passim).61 Rose (2001: 443); Ginsberg (1956: 9-20); Kerouac (1958: 18-25).62 Warner (2005: 48); Turner (2006: 67-70).63 Forbes (1960a: 2-3). 64 Norman (2008: 186).

171


tradition are misleading. Instructive here is a plaque in Rice

Street pub Ye Cracke, commemorating Lennon’s “other band”, which

“never played a note”. Formed in 1960, this collective comprised

Lennon and art students Bill Harry, Stuart Sutcliffe and Rod Murray.

Unveiled by Harry and Murray (2003), the plaque details how,

“unimpressed” with Middlesex-born Ellis’s poetry, which was “heavily

influenced by Allen Ginsberg and other Americans”, they named

themselves The Dissenters, vowing independence from such influences.

Evans’ social-biographical essay on Lennon’s college years details

his opposition to Beatnik fashions favoured by middle-class peers,

stressing how Lennon stylised himself as a working-class Teddy Boy.65

In 1971, Lennon suggested how college fostered his class-

consciousness:

I really despised art and artists, because they’re allhypocrites and they’re all phoney, and they’re all upper-class.There wasn’t any working-class artist, really.66

Conversely, McCartney, whose roots were less privileged, and who was

somewhat removed from Lennon’s college circle, says of his early

years in London:

I finally had time to allow myself to be exposed to some of thestuff that had intrigued me […] that kind of culture, aninquiring culture […] started to awaken in me the sense thatthis kind of bohemian thing, this artistic thing was possible.67

Lennon’s 1968-9 work suggests opposition less to “art” than its

“upper-class” domination. McCartney’s affiliations with bohemian

London reflect his less ideologically-charged, but more “inquiring” 65 Evans (1987: 16-9).66 McCabe & Schonfeld (1984: 59-60).67 Miles (1997: 221).

172


cultural view. In ‘Norwegian Wood’, Lennon’s cynicism and

McCartney’s aspiration fuse, incurring an image of revolt. The

Lennon-suggested sitar conveys scorn, and the McCartney-led

attention to detail, fascination. The fire marks seizure of environs

hitherto symbolising the uprooted singer’s exclusion.

Personalization strives to make each listener feel one with a

narrative. ‘Norwegian Wood’ exemplifies this in Lennon’s

confessionalism and McCartney’s descriptiveness. It also

demonstrates how personalization enabled them to expand cultural

views in their work without losing mass appeal. Indian arrangements

in The Beatles’ work would soon suggest further attitudes discussed

in The Uses of Literacy, viewing the East not merely as a motif of

otherness, but a source of wisdom.68 As in McKibbin’s discussion of

working-class baroque, ‘Norwegian Wood’ represents a mass-produced

form offering expansion of literacy: a Western audience’s musical

literacy. The sitar, played like a guitar, affirms the former’s

incorporation into “natural” Western music. Harrison was reportedly

embarrassed by ‘Norwegian Wood’, but Shankar applauds the song,

through which, The Beatles’ followers became “fascinated by the

instrument”.69 In spring 1966, The Rolling Stones used a sitar on

‘Paint It Black’. Contemporaneously, Harrison, at his own

suggestion, was incorporating another Indian instrument, the

tamboura, into Lennon’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ (Revolver). This showed

more serious interest in Eastern musical and spiritual traditions,

also assimilating experimental uses of tape. Yet, The Beatles’

exploration of new territory was inclusive. Reck quotes McCartney

(circa 1966): “We can make a bridge […] between us and Indian music,

or us and electronic music, and therefore we can take people with

68 Hoggart (1957: 123, 143).69 Shankar (1997: 189).

173


us”.70 ‘Norwegian Wood’ dramatically widens cultural resonances of

the Beatles’ work. I will now discuss how McCartney and Lennon’s

work furthered impulses of cultural revolt by assimilating more

radical artistic traditions.

III: Excursions into the avant-garde, and the class belonging of

popular music

Connoting movements challenging boundaries, the French term avant-

garde translates as “vanguard”: the “foremost part of an army […]

advancing or ready to advance” (OED). In discourse concerning Lennon

and McCartney, “avant-garde” signifies experiment, and,

paradoxically, experimental traditions.71 This is because practices

that both musicians followed, although not previously fused with

popular music, had been advanced elsewhere. The Beatles were not

alone in incorporating avant-garde language into popular music, but

were at the genre’s vanguard in both experimentalism and

prominence.72 First, I will consider cultural implications of avant-

garde language, using contentions from Adorno to outline its

aesthetic principles, and outlining Huyssen and Rose’s opposing

arguments concerning the avant-garde and mass art. I then compare

McCartney’s uses of avant-garde techniques in 1966-7 with Lennon’s

in 1968-70. These coincide with what various commentators outline as

a middle-class takeover of popular music. Yet, I will illustrate

how, in different ways, McCartney and Lennon’s work of this period

complicates such arguments.

70 Reck (1985: 103).71 Peel (2002, passim); Mäkelä (2004: 146-50).72 Their most notable contemporaries in this were The Mothers Of Invention.

174


Adorno’s ‘Why is the New Art so Hard to Understand’ (1931)

summarises that avant-garde art “goes beyond a reality that it does

not, after all, have the power to change”.73 Adorno relates “the

shock of its strangeness” to

[the] necessity of consumer consciousness to refer back to anintellectual and social situation in which everything that goesbeyond the given realities, every revelation of theircontradictions, amounts to a threat.74

Although he contrasts this effect of avant-garde art with that of

mass culture (distraction), it is worth recalling Adorno’s 1941

statement in ‘On Popular Music’ that extravagances in popular music

are tolerated only if they can be recast into conventions with which

untrained listeners are familiar.75 Alongside the 1931 quotation,

this indicates how, should popular music introduce sounds new to

“untrained” listeners, it could offer avant-garde effects. In 1966-

8, The Beatles did this through electronic music, using tape itself

as an instrument to create mechanically-manipulated sound. This had

precedents. In 1949, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry established a

centre for tape composition in Paris. Tape enabled reversal and

speed-manipulation of sound, distorting linear time, thus

exemplifying Adorno’s principle of avant-garde art transgressing

given realities. This was substantially demonstrated from 1952

onwards by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007). In

‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, McCartney led uses of mechanically-

manipulated sound as practiced by others for decades. Yet, writes

MacDonald, popular music “had heard nothing like this before”.76 73 Adorno (1931: 131-2). In the translation used, “new art” signifies“avant-garde art”: see Leppert (2002: 94).74 Adorno (1931: 127-8, 131). 75 Adorno (1931: 131).76 MacDonald (1994: 152).

175


Adorno is cautious of avant-garde art’s “separation” from

reality because

even if art remains secluded, off by itself, it threatens tobecome ideological—to be self-satisfied in a muffled, petitbourgeois way, to forget its supportive human function,ultimately to become petrified into bad guildsmanship.77

Huyssen (1986) examines how the avant-garde historically opposed

bourgeois culture, but concludes that, as Adorno anticipated, it

became co-opted by the bourgeoisie and thus de-radicalised. Huyssen

develops Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-garde (1980), central to which

is opposition to “the institutional status of art in bourgeois

society (apartness of the work of art from the praxis of life)”.78

Huyssen historicises the avant-garde as a “cultural revolt” which

aimed at developing an alternative relationship between “high” art

and mass culture.79 He contrasts avant-gardists with modernists, who

strove “to salvage the purity of high art” against mass culture,

categorising Adorno as a modernist theorist.80 In Huyssen’s argument,

Dadaism epitomised avant-garde cultural revolt, attacking “holy cows

of bourgeois art-religion”: he exemplifies this with Marcel

Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), which defaced a Mona Lisa print.81 This

also illustrates Huyssen’s assertion of the revolt’s failure.

Duchamp’s works were incorporated into museums, and thus, bourgeois

culture.

Rose, equating “avant-garde” with bohemia, critiques it as a

cultural laboratory whose concern is bourgeois consumption.82 The

77 Adorno (1931: 132, 187).78 Bürger (1980: 25).79 Huyssen (1986: vii, 8). 80 Huyssen (1986: 163).81 Huyssen (1986: 147).82 Rose (2001: Ch. 13).

176


secluded bourgeois status of the avant-garde as anticipated by

Adorno is implicit in Rose’s model. However, he highlights another

co-option of avant-garde language: its eventual absorption into mass

culture.83 Arguing that working-class culture consistently lags a

generation behind avant-garde culture, Rose states:

Teddy Boys were due to discover The Waste Land [1922] around 1952.They would not read the original of course. Rather, themodernist mood of disillusionment, disaffection, dissent anddissonance would gradually permeate popular culture andeventually trickle down the social scale.84

Rose surmises that this mood eventually reached the Angry Young

Men.85 He thus discusses the mid-1950s emergence of uprooted authors

not as cultural revolt, but the opposite: modernism spreading down

social scales.

This discussion of Lennon and McCartney’s uses of avant-garde

language aligns with Huyssen’s emphasis on revolt, not Rose’s

Adorno-esque implication of this being gradually handed down from a

culture industry. McCartney and Lennon’s post-1963 uprootings,

placing them at the friction-point of two cultures, are essential to

this. That they seized avant-garde language from below, and to an

extent, reclaimed it from bourgeois culture, is demonstrable in how

their work challenges the temporal scale of Rose’s model. ‘A Day In

The Life’ exemplifies modernist disillusionment permeating “down”

into mass art, a decade after the Angry Young Men: Goldstein (1967a)

and Kroll (1967) liken the song to Eliot’s The Waste Land.86 Yet, it

also exemplifies the narrowing of generation gaps between avant-

garde and mass art: the improvising orchestra, overdubbed onto 83 Rose (2001: 462).84 Rose (2001: 455-6).85 Ibid. 86 Goldstein (1967a: 24D); Kroll (1967: 42).

177


twenty-four piano bars, resembles arrangements used in American

composer John Cage’s semi-improvised Concert for Piano and Orchestra

(1958). The Beatles’ 1966-8 work accelerates such evolutionary

developments. Moreover, while others in England’s post-1956 cultural

revolt challenged upper-class imaginings of the working-classes,

Lennon and McCartney’s work challenged a mass audience’s perception

of its own cultural existence. In this way, their developments of

avant-garde language honoured avant-garde aims of engaging with the

praxis of life.

Foregrounding electronic music, Lennon’s 1968-9 work with Ono

elicits his alignment with the avant-garde by Wiener, Elliott, and

most discerningly, Mäkelä.87 Yet, Lennon’s infrequent uses of the

term “avant-garde” convey cynicism. Before and after his first works

with Ono, he would remark that “avant-garde is French for bullshit”;

in 1969, he expressed “reverse snobbery about avant-garde”.88 His

resentment appears directed less at avant-garde art than

(illustrating Adorno’s contention) its association with bourgeois

culture. Lennon challenged an interviewer’s description of Two Virgins

(1968) as “avant-garde”, responding that the label “defeats itself

[…] The very fact that avant-garde can have an exhibition defeats

the purpose”.89

McCartney’s uses of the term “avant-garde” are less specific.

Contrasting with Lennon’s cynicism, McCartney’s comments suggest

aspiration to belong to this imagined community. He retrospectively

qualifies his interest in “the avant-garde” by describing how, in

the 1960s, he attended Luciano Berio’s electronic concerts, showed

his experimental films to director Michelangelo Antonioni, and (most

87 Wiener (1984: 146); Elliott (1999: 103-7); Mäkelä (2004: 145-50). 88 Evans (1987: 19); Miles (1969/2007). 89 Peebles (1981: 12).

178


of all) listened to Stockhausen’s work.90 His narratives suggest the

“precarious tenancy in several near-intellectual worlds” of uprooted

individuals.91 Another feature of McCartney’s retrospective avant-

garde rhetoric is that he developed these interests before Lennon.

McCartney remarks that though he incorporated electronic music into

The Beatles’ “mainstream records” in 1966, Lennon is seen as “the

avant-garde guy” because, with Ono, he later issued whole LP’s of

electronic music.92 Although resentment of Lennon’s reputation as the

“intellectual” at the expense of his own recognition undermines

McCartney’s narratives, others support his claims of initiating The

Beatles’ avant-garde musical direction.93

McCartney’s 1965-7 work is avant-garde in Huyssen’s sense of

challenging the relationship between high art and mass culture.

Against his later narratives, it is noteworthy that McCartney

enthused over Berio and Stockhausen’s work to NME in 1966, and

remarked: “I, for one, am sick of doing sounds that people can claim

to have heard before”.94 In 1967, he commented:

With any kind of thing, my aim seems to be to distort it fromwhat we know it as, even with music and visual things, and tochange it from what it is to [what] it could be.95

If the concrete represents the known, and the conceptual,

alternatives, McCartney’s 1966-7 musical approach is more

conceptual. His repersonalization of The Beatles as Sgt Pepper’s

90 Salewicz (1986b: 34); Green (1988: 79); Simpson (2008).91 Hoggart (1957: 309).92 Du Noyer (1989: 50-1); Collins (1997: 119). 93 Martin & Pearson (1994: 79-80); Emerick (2006: 111-2). See also Everett(1999: 10). Lennon commented in 1966 that McCartney was responsible for thekey gesture here: incorporating tape-loops into ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. SeeThe Beatles (2000: 210).94 Smith (1966: 8). See also Time (1967a: 48).95 Miles (1967: 8).

179


Lonely Hearts Club Band marked another seizure of form, exploring

new possibilities of the LP, and eliciting recognition of the

“concept album”. Mäkelä acknowledges that McCartney embraced the

avant-garde before Lennon did, but comments that McCartney’s

experiments never appeared on Beatles’ records, reinforcing his

image as “less radical” than Lennon.96 More accurately, McCartney’s

uses of avant-garde language rarely suffused his own songs.

Two most confrontational details in McCartney’s lyrics—the

fire in ‘Norwegian Wood’ and turning on in ‘A Day In The Life’—occur

in Lennon-initiated songs. Similarly, McCartney introduced avant-

garde techniques to The Beatles’ work in Lennon-led compositions:

‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘A Day In

The Life’. Lennon said that his songs were musically “sabotage[d]”

by McCartney’s “experimental games”.97 Tony Davilio, Double Fantasy’s

arranger, reveals that in autumn 1980, Lennon planned to re-record

‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ with “a straight ahead rock feel”.98

Davilio kindly expands:

John told me he wasn't happy with the Sgt. Pepper [era] versionand that it was heavily influenced by Paul and George Martin. Igot the impression he felt that way about the whole album […] hewanted to keep the original band sound but that didn't happen.[…] What he said to me was “Tony, I want to redo Strawberryfields on the next album and this is how I want to do it.” […]He played a couple of verses for me which sounded great […] hesaid we'll keep it very straight […]. Bare bones, no frills[.]99

McCartney’s leading of what Lennon called “looseness” in ‘Strawberry

Fields Forever’ suggests, Everett notes, the coda.100 The improvised

96 Mäkelä (2004: 146, 256).97 Sheff (1981: 192).98 Davilio & Vicario (2004: 72).99 Tony Davilio, by email, 19 Jul 2008. See Appendix 2.100 Sheff (1981: 192); Everett (1999: 80-2).

180


content resembles that of The Beatles’ unreleased McCartney-led

‘Carnival Of Light’ (January 1967), and the abrasive trumpet

suggests the free-jazz of saxophonist Albert Ayler, another

influence on McCartney.101 Despite Lennon’s criticisms, the

“unstructured” coda, Moore comments, “most strongly captures the

strangeness” of Lennon’s lyrics in ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.102

Adorno dismisses improvisations because spontaneous individual

action occurs within standard schemes, but this coda transgresses

the song’s harmonic confines, and, honouring Lennon’s chorus,

invokes negative-belonging to given realities, both social and

musical.103

The Beatles’ 1966-7 uses of avant-garde techniques challenged

the bourgeois seclusion of such musical language, but this coincides

with changes in the perceived class belonging of popular music

itself. Du Noyer’s influential comments on how The Beatles’

psychedelic period suggested their cultural distance from their

Liverpool roots were discussed earlier. Roszak, an American

professor, rhetorically asked in 1969:

what can the Beatles’ latest surrealist LP mean to an unemployedminer or a migrant farm laborer? […] Surely they do not seethese strange phenomena as aprt of their culture, but as curious,somewhat crazy things the spoiled middle-class young amusethemselves with.104

Moore comments that Sgt Pepper “helped to spread British rock from its

working-class roots” to “college and university” audiences.105 It

101 Miles (1967: 9). For commentary on ‘Carnival Of Light’, see Lewisohn (1992: 240).102 Moore (1997: 41).103 Adorno (1941: 445).104 Roszak (1969: 70).105 Moore (1997: 79).

181


also marked a co-option of popular music into bourgeois culture in

terms of critical respectability. Gendron argues that “low-

middlebrow” American periodicals enhanced this album’s reputation by

applying aesthetic values of high culture.106 The Eliot comparisons

reflect this. Negus (1996) argues:

the “ideology of rock” was being codified by a new generation ofwriters […] legitimating “their” music in terms of an aesthetictradition into which they had been educated. Crucial to [SgtPepper’s] mediation […] were the opinions of […] young educatedmiddle-classes of Europe and North America [who] had discoveredand then claimed rock music in their own terms.107

Negus contends that key responses to Sgt Pepper privilege “specific

meanings” for young middle-class audiences, and argues that the

album also appeals to children and old people.108 He does not

consider its working-class audience—the basis of a mass audience, in

Hoggart’s argument. Typifying McCartney’s most ambitious works from

‘Penny Lane’ to the Liverpool Oratorio, Sgt Pepper foregrounds aspects of

working-class life. Goldstein’s summary of its “baroque” is apt in

Hoggart’s sense. The opening song and its reprise suggest an

evening’s entertainment, grounded in working-class traditions (brass

bands; “sing[ing] along”). McCartney’s work challenges Negus’

implication of popular music’s middle-class takeover by remaining

anchored to working-class cultural motifs.

Composer Ned Rorem wrote in 1968 that The Beatles’ so-called

“innovations” were merely “instrumental tricks, glossily surrounding

the composition”.109 This indirectly suggests the relationship in The

106 Gendron (2002: 193-4).107 Negus (1996: 154-5).108 Negus (1996: 159).109 Rorem (1968: 26). This parallels Adorno’s critique of “glamour” (1941: 448-50).

182


Beatles’ work between avant-garde language and working-class

baroque: between art that goes beyond a reality which it does not

have the power to change, and a cultural language expressing an

allegorical statement of a better, fuller life. The Beatles’ Magical

Mystery Tour film (1967) fuses these traditions. Conceived and overseen

by McCartney, it celebrates the epitome of working-class baroque:

the chara-trip.

The film illustrates Hoggart’s discussion of the chara-trip as

a tradition defined by working-class people through internal sub-

traditions. The Uses of Literacy notes beer-drinking and communal singing

on the journey110 These are the sole features of one lengthy

sequence. Magical Mystery Tour also utilises avant-garde language. Miles

summarises its “undigested” appreciation of French New Wave (Nouvelle

Vague) films, most obvious in erratic scene-shifts, defying linear

plot.111 Seminal British New Wave films adapted plays or novels,

including Look Back In Anger (Tony Richardson, 1958) and Room At The Top

(Jack Clayton, 1959). However, Nouvelle Vague directors, most notably

Jean-Luc Godard, wrote their own films, and allowed more

improvisation (for example, Breathless, 1960). This was McCartney’s

complacent approach to The Beatles’ film. Made for TV, it premiered

on BBC1 on Boxing Day evening, traditionally reserved for the most

populist television. Despite its flaws of, in Melly’s words,

“mismanaged […] imitative tricks”, the TV film reflects The Beatles

closing the gap between avant-garde and popular culture outlined by

Rose.112 It premiered days before Godard’s Weekend (1967), which also

evokes a countryside road-trip and, as the title conveys, break from

regulated routine and indeed human behaviour. McCartney’s film is

not comparable with Godard’s in complexity or political engagement.

110 Hoggart (1957: 148).111 Miles (1997: 360).112 Melly (1970: 197).

183


Yet, soon, these gaps between avant-garde and mass culture would

also be challenged by The Beatles’ work.

The Uses of Literacy emphasises journey and destination as equally

important parts of the chara-trip. While Magical Mystery Tour implies a

Northern setting on “the Dewsbury road”, destination remains a

mystery.113 Beyond frequent stopping-points (integral to Hoggart’s

commentary), the film foregrounds journey. Hoggart’s description of

singing day-trippers elicits his rare use the word “community”.114 In

journey and community, Magical Mystery Tour embodies key motifs in

Lennon’s 1967 songs. ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ begins “Let me take

you down”, and ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, “Picture yourself on

a boat on a river”. Whiteley illustrates how psychedelic “coding” in

these songs—depersonalization of sound textures, suggesting

hallucination—enhances connotations of LSD ingestion: the singer

acts as “experienced user”, leading the novice “into a changed

reality”.115 This indicates broader significations of avant-garde

language in The Beatles’ work, and how these journeys concern

perception. McCartney states that he and Lennon coyly implied

psychedelic experience in the film’s co-written title song (“roll up

for the mystery tour” suggesting a cannabis joint).116 Drug allusions

in The Beatles’ 1967 work—“may I inquire discreetly/ Whether you’re

free to take some tea [“pot”] with me?”—suggest, again, rituals for

imagined communities of negative-belonging.117 Whiteley discusses

late-1960s countercultural concerns with alternative modes of living

113 Curiously, there is a Dewsbury Road in Hunslet, and the song performedby The Bonzo Dog Band in a cameo in the film is ‘Death Cab For Cutie’—thetitle of one of Hoggart’s fictitious examples of “sex and violence novels”(1957: 259). 114 Hoggart (1957: 148).115 Whiteley (1992: 43-7, 66. Quote: p. 43).116 Miles (1997: 353).117 McCartney’s ‘Lovely Rita’. McCartney calls marijuana “tea” in Miles (1997: 241).

184


which involved the use of drugs as means of exploring imagination

and self-expression.118 “Discreetly” encoding songs with such

allusions, The Beatles began suggesting divisions in their audience.

Yet, Poirier (1967) argues of Sgt Pepper that “the listener can

‘picture’ a trip scene without taking such a ‘trip’ himself”.119

Magical Mystery Tour challenges consumer consciousness less by

instruction to “roll up” than by using avant-garde language to

provide a baroque excursion of the mind. Melly calls its attempt to

“turn on the square-eyed public” a “brave try but a failure”.120 The

Daily Mail called it “appalling”; the Express, “contemptuous of the

public”.121 McCartney responded: “We thought we would not

underestimate people” and “do something new”.122

The Beatles’ next release was McCartney’s ‘Lady Madonna’

(March 1968). Time magazine observed that “instead of pushing

farther out” into experimental realms, the single invoked “the

simple, hard-driving style they left behind in Liverpool.”123

Following his most experimental project’s critical failure, ‘Lady

Madonna’ begins a trajectory towards the less confrontational

content of McCartney’s solo work. This coincided with Lennon’s shift

in the opposite direction. His ambivalence to the avant-garde

conveys resentment not of its aesthetic language, but of the

bourgeois connotations of such art. This implies less its co-option

as historicised by Huyssen than its secluded status as anticipated

by Adorno. In 1970, Lennon said of art college: “They never taught

me about Marcel Duchamp, which I despise them for”.124 ‘Revolution 9’

118 Whiteley (1992: 3).119 Poirier (1967: 540).120 Melly (1970: 197).121 Daily Mail (1967f: 1); Thomas (1967: 4). 122 Badman (2001: 333). 123 Time (1968: 42).124 Wenner (1971: 140).

185


(The Beatles, 1968) affirms Lennon’s revolt against classical music, and

also, popular music styles. Constructed with Ono in June 1968, the

track began as a series of overdubs onto the otherwise unreleased

coda of Lennon’s contemporaneous ‘Revolution 1’. Yet, Everett

estimates that 154 entries from 45 tapes were used.125 ‘Revolution 9’

is essentially an electronic composition, also utilising musique

concrète (distorted everyday sound as music), pioneered in 1948 by

Schaeffer. In this track, stimuli provoking attention eclipse

natural music. Lennon described his intention of “painting in sound

a picture of revolution”.126 Oddly, MacDonald summarises that Lennon

made no attempt to reflect contemporary European unrest.127 Yet the

sounds notably resemble those in Godard’s Weekend, evoking blaring

car horns, fire, chanting crowds, and breaking glass. Nonetheless,

MacDonald applauds the track’s cultural revolt. He likens ‘Revolution

9’ to Stockhausen’s Hymnen (1967) and Cage’s musique concrète, but

asserts that while these “remained the preserve of the modernist

intelligentsia”, this track was “packaged for a mainstream audience

which had never heard of its progenitors”.128 It thus challenges the

meaning of popular music.

Michael Kurtz’s 1988 biography of Stockhausen quotes the

composer telling a reporter after Lennon’s death:

Lennon often used to phone me. He was particularly fond of myHymnen and Gesang der Jünglinge [1955-6], and got many things fromthem[.]129

125 Everett (1999: 175).126 Ali & Blackburn (1971: 7).127 MacDonald (1994: 231). Cf Kurlansky’s chronicle of May 1968’s Parisian riots (2004: Ch. 12). 128 MacDonald (1994: 230).129 See Kurtz (1988: 171, 244).

186


No Lennon biography mentions such communications.130 However, Shotton

recalls Lennon’s enthusiasm for Stockhausen’s work by 1968, and the

composer’s archives retain a 1969 Christmas card from Lennon and

Ono.131 The similarities to Hymnen reflect how The Beatles’ work

accelerated popular music’s evolution in ways challenging Rose’s

argument of mass culture remaining a generation behind the avant-

garde. Hymnen (two years before Hendrix at Woodstock) distorts

national anthems. Demonstrating Lennon’s cultural iconoclasm,

‘Revolution 9’ cuts up recordings of Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes,

Vaughan Williams’ ‘O Clap Your Hands’ and Sibelius’ ‘Symphony No.

7’. In a Duchamp-like gesture, mechanical reproductions of “high”

cultural signifiers are dismantled. However, in contrast with

Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q, now in a private collection, ‘Revolution 9’

defies the institutional status of “high” art and furthermore, the

seclusion of avant-garde art. This aptly-titled track climaxes The

Beatles’ sonic experiments that began with ‘I Feel Fine’. Lennon’s

1964 use of feedback began an evolutionary process in their work, in

which electronic stimuli that provoke attention increasingly

demonstrate negative-belonging to form. In 1966-7, McCartney

furthered this, but ‘Revolution 9’ emulates his innovations by

cleanly transgressing standard harmonic and metric structures. Thus,

another musical icon trashed is The Beatles’ sound.

Lennon and Ono’s Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With The Lions (1969)

exemplifies how avant-garde language assisted Lennon’s

depersonalization of his image as a Beatle.132 Utilising techniques

130 Jonathan Cott, who interviewed Lennon in 1968 and 1980 and is the authorand interviewer of the book Stockhausen: Conversation with the Composer (1973),confirms that the timing and extent of Lennon and Stockhausen’s contactremains unknown to him. Jonathan Cott, email, 5 Sep 2008.131 Shotton & Schaffner (1983: 167); http://www.stockhausen.org/beatles_khs.html (Accessed: 5 Jan 2009). 132 Mäkelä discusses “depersonalization” in a broader avant-garde sense inLennon and Ono’s work, considering the author’s removal from the text

187


proposed by Cage in 1937 and practiced by improvisational ensemble

AMM since 1965, the twelve-minute ‘Radio Play’ uses wireless static

as a musical sound.133 As a radio is rapidly switched on and off,

snatches of one song (2:20-5:28) persist for long enough to make it

recognisable: McCartney’s ‘Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da’ (The Beatles). The

group’s McCartney-led sound is destroyed, preceding Lennon’s

repersonalization as John Ono Lennon. After The Beatles’ official

1970 split, Lennon largely ceased exploring electronic music. This

marks not a regression in his work, but a further development.

Compared with Plastic Ono Band, ‘Revolution 9’ marks a revolution in

his career, in which, destruction of The Beatles’ sound precedes

liberation of his evolving creativity.

In 1980, Stockhausen applauded how Lennon’s lyrics “made young

people prick up their ears”.134 ‘Working Class Hero’, featuring

Lennon accompanied only by his acoustic guitar, opposes his earlier

electronic style. Yet lyrically, it honours avant-garde traditions

by questioning given realities, depersonalizing mass cultural life.

“They”

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TVAnd you think you’re so clever and classless and freeBut you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see

Illusions of being “classless” and “free” are central to The Uses of

Literacy’s concluding statement:

even if substantial inner freedom were lost, the great newclassless class would be unlikely to know it: its members would

(2004: 148-9). Yet, the overtly self-referential content of their UnfinishedMusic albums ultimately opposes this process.133 Cage (1961: 3).134 Kurtz (1988: 171).

188


still regard themselves as free and still be told that they werefree.135

Lennon tells a compound audience that it is not classless or free.

Before stating that this song was for people “processed” into the

middle-classes, he commented: “I hope it’s for workers”.136 Conveying

no sense of contradiction, this suggests Lennon’s awareness of his

audience—and effectively, the working- and middle-classes—as a

compound. Not unlike Adorno and Hoggart, he addresses how mass-

produced entertainments create a mass culture. ‘Working Class Hero’

reflects his recognition by 1970 that this effect of popular music

could be exploited in radical ways. Asked by Ali how he thought “we

can destroy the capitalist system” in Britain, Lennon replied:

[B]y making the workers aware of the really unhappy positionthey are in, breaking the dream they are surrounded by […]they’ve got cars and tellies and they don’t want to thinkthere’s anything more to life.137

Destroying capitalism was a concern only briefly expressed by

Lennon, and never by McCartney. Nonetheless, their collaborations in

‘Norwegian Wood’, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Magical Mystery

Tour’ suggest imagined communities of negative-belonging to

standardized cultural existence. I have sought to demonstrate how

these are less exclusive of working-class audiences than may appear.

Lennon and McCartney affected an uprooting of popular music, but

this did not render it an unbent spring of action. Anderson

demonstrates how, historically, the seizure of mechanically-

reproduced cultural forms has strengthened imagined communities of

135 Hoggart (1957: 346).136 Wenner (1971: 93).137 Ali & Blackburn (1971: 9).

189


negative-belonging. The imagined community reflected in Lennon and

McCartney’s work was ultimately not a working-class audience, but a

culturally classless audience. Before Chapter 6 relates this to

broader social and political impulses of negative-belonging in their

songs, I will summarise, in Lennon’s phrase, what “more to life”

their 1964-70 work offered to a mass audience.

Conclusion

The Beatles became successful in a period characterised by working-

class cultural revolt in England. Assimilations of “higher” musical

language in their songs reflect how international and avant-garde

influences distinguished their work from that of uprooted

predecessors in other cultural forms. Constantly evolving standards

in McCartney and Lennon’s recordings reflect how they continued the

impulse of revolt.

Adorno argued that popular music cannot serve as an

introduction to serious music. Yet, Shankar’s commendation of

‘Norwegian Wood’ demonstrates a practitioner of serious music

welcoming The Beatles’ popularization of such traditions. Also

pertinent is another comment from Adorno’s one-time student,

Stockhausen. His 1980 comment on Lennon ends:

In my eyes, John Lennon was the most important mediator betweenpopular and serious music of this century.138

This is ironic less because it is McCartney who mentions Stockhausen

in interviews than because it was predominantly he who assimilated

138 Kurtz (1988: 171).190


serious music into popular song. Contrastingly, Lennon’s 1968-9 work

dichotomises song standard song structures and electronic music.

Unlike McCartney, Lennon never advertised his interest in

Stockhausen, and seemingly did not aspire to belong to the avant-

garde as an imagined community. McCartney, however, appears to be

seeking to secure his reputation’s place within this sphere, which

Huyssen and Rose ultimately equate with the bourgeoisie. It is also

notable that while McCartney reserved more abrasive electronic

techniques for Lennon’s songs, he suffused his own (‘Yesterday’,

‘Penny Lane’) with classical arrangements. Northcutt calls such

arrangements in The Beatles’ work signifiers of “establishment

culture”.139 Nevertheless, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ exemplifies

how McCartney honoured Lennon’s lyrics through conceptual musical

approaches. While Lennon and McCartney’s comments on the avant-garde

respectively demonstrate cynicism and aspiration, and thus, how

their cultural roots reflect in their approaches to recording, these

traits of the uprooted within The Beatles were vitally

complementary. In 1966-8, McCartney and Lennon helped to seize

avant-garde language from bourgeois seclusion, and through ‘A Day In

The Life’ particularly, challenged its separation from the praxis of

life. In different ways, both musicians honour avant-garde

principles, repersonalizing the relationship between high art and

mass culture.

Lennon and McCartney’s uprootings in the 1960s did not yield

their abandonment of working-classes audiences. This cultural group,

Hoggart stresses, represents the majority of a mass audience. The

Beatles could ill-afford to lose such popularity. The strand in

McCartney and Lennon’s work that most incisively exemplifies

grounding in working-class traditions is the development of working-

139 Northcutt (2006: 144).191


class baroque, using elaboration to flatter (‘Yesterday’) and

complicate (‘Norwegian Wood’) lyrical content, and in Magical Mystery

Tour, to suggest other ways of seeing. The film failed to appeal to

newspaper critics, but in demonstrating that popular song was worthy

of higher musical expression, The Beatles displayed confidence in

and respect for the openness of a mass audience’s cultural views in

ways unanticipated by Adorno (1941) or Hoggart (1957). Their

continued commercial success suggests that the group did not

overestimate this. Lennon and McCartney’s work illustrates how

Hoggart’s amendment of his study’s title fortuitously prefigured

cultural revolt: from The Abuse of Literacy to The Uses Of Literacy.

192

lennon \u0026 mccartney, 1965-70: cultural revolt and the avant-garde (phd chapter, 2010)

Documents