Abstract
Although better known for their role in the pacifist movement, The Beatles have been often active in issues of environmental concern, as musicians but also as private citizens. It is probably fair to state that their ecological conscience developed during their mediation period in India, in 1968: the album released after that journey (known as The White Album) had more than one reference to nature, environmental conservation and even animal rights. More hints of environmentalism popped up in The Beatles ’ songs until the end of their career, but after their split, more definite attention to certain topics became more central in the repertoire and lifestyle of Paul McCartney (who also became a spokesman for the animal rights movement) and, in a milder way, George Harrison . In the present case study I intend to analyze the environmentalist repertoire of The Beatles , as a band, and as solo performers, having in mind the double goal to (a) analyze a portion of the band’s music that tends to be somewhat overlooked (at least as a category), and (b) bring to attention the value of environmentalism and animal advocacy within the realm of SSPs, that, too, are underestimated by existing literature (where, basically, only The Smiths’ “Meat Is Murder” and very few others get the privilege to be labelled “protest songs”).
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Notes
- 1.
With the sole, ironic, exception of John Lennon , the “working class hero” , who instead lived in an owned house in the middle-class district of Woolton.
- 2.
The exception, here, should be again Lennon, at least for his “political period” between 1969 and 1973.
- 3.
Similarly to that artistic movement (of which he is a declared fan), McCartney’s imagery may look verisimilar in almost everything, except that, here and there, queer or dreamy elements may appear, exactly like a melting clock or a disquieting muse in a fairly ordinary context. In “Rocky Raccoon” (1968), for instance, we get a very linear narration of a cowboy seeking for revenge towards a rival in love, getting wounded in the duel, being checked by a drunken doctor and lying in a hotel room where a copy of the Gideon’s bible stands by the bed. Everything looks like a typical country and western story, except that, out of the blue, we hear “And now Rocky Raccoon he fell back in his room/Only to find Gideon’s bible/Gideon checked out and he left it no doubt/To help with good Rocky’s revival”. The Gideon’s bible ceases to be the typical hotel bible published by Gideons International, and becomes a book delivered by the actual Gideon, the bible character, who apparently was occupying the room right before Rocky.
- 4.
While Lennon and George Harrison started using LSD from 1965 and in repeated instances, McCartney reportedly surrendered to the “peer pressure” (as he stated in an interview for The Beatles Anthology documentary) only in late 1966, and assumed the drug only few times. Starr, too, was only an occasional user.
- 5.
I discuss this question more thoroughly in Martinelli (2015).
- 6.
According to some interpretations, including Lennon’s (Miles 1997: 147) , Epstein’s death marked the beginning of a slow disintegration of the quartet, famously finalized in 1970.
- 7.
It is a pity this song remains unreleased, because it was a nice mockery of meditation: everything is going fine in the protagonist’s process of meditation, then at some point he has the feeling that something is missing, so the refrain concludes “Could it be you need a woman?”.
- 8.
I say “reportedly” because, judging from the majority of the songs written in India (which often address topics like tiredness, confusion, depression and even suicide), The Beatles were all but relaxed.
- 9.
“Norwegian Wood” was mainly Lennon’s song, but the idea for the dark, revengeful finale was apparently suggested by McCartney (McCartney, in Miles 1997: 270) .
- 10.
McCartney himself once jokingly called the song like that, during his MTV Unplugged concert, in 1991.
- 11.
Lennon used the Strawberry Fields park as a metaphor for his state of mind, but he could have easily sung “Let me take you down ’cause I’m going to the tower of steel, nothing is real…” without losing the power of the association physical place-mental condition.
- 12.
Biologists use also the terms “den” or “fortress”, as indeed gardens are mostly hiding places.
- 13.
Very famous is of course the plagiarism lawsuit over “My Sweet Lord” , which inspired him to write the sarcastic “This Song” (“This song has nothing tricky about it, This song ain’t black or white and as far as I know, Don’t infringe on anyone’s copyright”).
- 14.
Harrison was a huge fan of the Monty Python, and famously became their sponsor and producer for the move Life of Brian.
- 15.
It helped, of course, in using this image, that the lamb was given the name of a flying insect.
- 16.
The exact date of this decision was never disclosed. However, the reasons for the choice, and the events surrounding it, were already made public by McCartney in a 1971 interview for Life (Meryman 1971: 58).
- 17.
Such a quota is arguably the second highest one of each Beatle’s career, after Lennon’s conceptual protest album Sometime in New York City .
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Martinelli, D. (2017). Case Study 3: Environmentalism and Animal Advocacy in the Beatles. In: Give Peace a Chant. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50538-1_7
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