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KEY Various
METER Sundry
FORM Beginning -> Middle -> End (w/fadeout)
- Friends and lovers have, for years, been preparing for this eventuality; "Ha, ha! what you gonna do when you get up to 'Revolution 9,' wise guy?"
- To date, we've examined more than 150 Beatles songs using an essentially unvarying analytical apparatus. The normalizing filter through which we've run these songs has yielded a nice set of apples-to-apples images which allow us to reasonably trace the patterns and techniques used from one song to the next.
- But now, along comes this exceptional track which would seem to "prove" (in the archaic sense of "challenge") all the rules and be opaquely immune to our accustomed method of analysis. You run it through the program anyway just to see what happens and the results are analogous to the output you get from running a binary file through your Dos2Unix text filter. From the perspective of your filter's expectations, it's a simple case of Garbage in, Garbage out; no negative connotation intended.
- So here we are. No possible escape and no easy answers. I think we have to settle in this case for bigger picture ruminations than we're used to and let the measure-by-measure stuff ride. Can we handle the challenge? No reply.
- It's not a "song," you say; not a "brief composition written or adapted for singing," as defined in the American Heritage Dictionary. Yes, it does contain some bits of singing, but that's not of primary focus. There's nothing here in the way of the alternating formal sections, chord progressions, articulated phrases or characterizing tunes you've learned to expect. And brief it surely is not.
- Therefore, it doesn't fit in on a Beatles album, you say. "Within You Without You" tested your patience but this one is just more than you can stand.
- But let me turn it around on you: in spite of what you may think about its belonging there, you cannot deny that it IS on a Beatles album; so there! You're trapped against your will by the experiential nature of the record album medium into encountering this track where it is to be found. And that indelibly influences your evaluation of, and reaction to both the track itself as well as the album which contains it.
- John's relevant axiom reads, "there's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be." You can derive, as if by corollary, the notion that the White album would NOT be improved by R9's omission but rather would be somehow lacking something essential in that case; similarly, you would hear this track very differently if it was completely by someone other than the Beatles, or had been released by them as an independent single.
- Another John, Cage that is, wrily asked in one of his lectures on the compositional process: Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
- It's the radical, progressive elements that demand your undivided attention while you immediately encounter the piece.
- What you react to, especially in context of a "rock album" is the absence of the large number of traditional musical values you rightly expect. So strong are your conditioned expectations that the very first time you ever listen to this track you subconciously strain your patience hoping that it's all going to turn out to be some kind of prankish, nightmare, surprise intro to a real song. I'd love to poll a statistically significant number of listeners re: how many seconds they lasted into a first listen of R9 before getting the point and giving up the wait.
- Even though the track apparently provides no coherent narrative threads, your mind has a way of imposing or projecting a continuity onto it, especially after repeated listenings. Thiis phenomenon bears some analogy to the way in which your subconcious tries to account within the plotline of your current dream for random sounds that otherwise might rouse you from your slumber.
- As one of the more infamous achievements of the mid 20th century avant garde, this form of musical composition challenges the listener on both psychological and philosophical grounds. The extent to which the pervasive ambiguity of content teases the listener into projecting a personalized vision of continuity onto the music opens up a radical new dimension to the experience we call "listening." Similarly, the extent to which the background "noise" of real life provides the same kind of narrative ambiguity if we bother to attend to it as thoughtfully as we do to so-called music, then the line between what we call a "composition" and what is merely "random noise" is significantly blurred if not erradicated.
- My gut suspicion is that in this piece John was using a process driven more by stream of consciousness than by the literally random, "Aleatoric" techniques much favored by the more serious members of the Chance musical movement. Their argument is that the more rigorously random the composition, the more level a playing field is offered the listener on which to do his thing. Whereas, if the composition, no matter how superficially ambiguous, is based on a plotline provided by the composer (no matter how subconcious), the playing field is no longer level; or at the least, the game is somewhat rigged. It's a distinction worth making though in context of R9 and a Beatles album it's largely academic.
- There are several counterbalancing conservative factors here as well. You can more easily discern these by stepping back from the track and reflecting on it in afterthought.
- The raw materials of the track, for example, are virtually all from pre-recorded musical and spoken sources, as well as some real life noises. Nothing here is "synthesized" from scratch. As a collage, all its elements were found objects in nature. Curiously enough, the choice of musical clips is heavily weighted toward the classical. Don't underestimate the impact all of this has on the finished product. Alright, granted: John was putting his thumb on the scale in recording some of the recitation pieces specifically for the purpose of using them here, but this is another nit, a real one maybe, but of academic significance in this context.
- The random anti-narrative effect of the track notwithstanding, some of the sound sources recur furtively as motifs. None of them continues to reappear over the entire duration of the piece, but like familiar faces in a crowd scene, you pick out of the mix the title phrase, the slow, soft piano piece in the style of Chopin, the several classical snippets for orchestra or chorus, and the recitations by John, George, and Yoko.
- The post processing of the various tape sources is gently limited to modifications of speed, running some of the tapes backwards, and a great deal of crosscutting between sources. Stockhausen's "Gesang der Junglinge" which has been acknowledged by Paul and others as an influence on the Beatles, is quite adventurous and technically arcane in the way it electronically manipulates its raw vocal sources; especially considering it's origins back in '55/'56. I dare say that the semi-amateur low-tech approach to which R9 clings is the root of much of its charm; it also is the saving grace that girds the piece against accusations of effete fatuousness.
- Just like Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire," a particularly tough-totake but undeniably seminal piece of atonal, Vienese hot house expressionism from 1921, "Revolution 9" has the dubious distinction of being more notorious and more talked about than enjoyably listened to.
- It's a piece of music that inspires passionate reactions on both sides, even if the conventional wisdom does, right or wrong give rate it a big fat Turkey.
- I prefer to take a measured view -- it's neither anathema nor Lennon's supreme offering. If R9 were a film you might render its capsule entry in Halliwell's film "Guide" as follows:
Synopsis: Dream-like collage of musical and spoken tape sources conjures up a mysteriously apocalyptic mood.
Assessment: Moderately ambitious media experiment. Not bad at all, but historically much more important because it appeared on a pop music album with the Beatles imprimatur no less, than because of anything specifically ground breaking or outrageous in its production values.
Regards,
Alan ([email protected])
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"Oh, it's a laugh a line with Lennon. Anyroad up ... It's all your
fault." 091398#155
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Copyright (c) 1998 by Alan W. Pollack
All Rights Reserved
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