The Beatles (White Album)

The Beatles' ninth studio album, The Beatles (commonly known as the White Album) was released November 22, 1968, during a time in America of experimentation and rebellion.  Many people, particularly the youth, participated in protests regarding a variety of different social issues including the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, and the anti-war movement.  Many of these protestors were known as hippies, meaning they valued peace and love and celebrated individuality and acceptance.  That was part of what made this album so successful: it was out-of-the-box and unique.  The eclectic collection of songs on The Beatles comments on many of the 60's rebellions, as well as a wide variety of other popular subjects of the 60's culture including a good amount of connections to the popular hippie culture.  

The Beatles were known for their love of experimenting, not only with drugs but also with their musical decisions.  This is part of what made the band so popular in a time period with a culture so revolved around experimenting and change.  "Yer Blues" was Lennon's attempt at a blues song and the track "Rocky Raccoon" was McCartney's imitation of a folk song.  To reach the folk sound he was going for, McCartney began the song by talking blues, and instrumentally included a harmonica and an acoustic guitar.  These two tracks show that the band was unafraid to play around with different sounds and genres.  Similarly, the band created the song "Helter Skelter" because they wanted to experiment with making the loudest sounds possible.  With the use of loud drumming, electric and bass guitars, they created one of the first influential songs of heavy metal culture.  "Wild Honey Pie", one of the most unique experimental songs on the album, incorporates vibrato on guitar strings to make a harsh background noise behind the words "honey pie" sung over and over.  The other most unique song on the album, "Revolution 9" is a collage of countless different sounds.  These sounds include musical performances, different clips of speech, and other sound effects, all mashed up and manipulated.  Although the experimentation of The Beatles' music on this album had some not-so-great-sounding outcomes, their attempts to experiment and make out-of-the-box sound was accepted within culture of the time period. 

Many of the tracks on The Beatles address different aspects of 60's culture as well.  But, there's something special about this album that made it able to stay relevant all of these years- and that is that many of the songs talk about topics and issues that are still prevalent over 40 years later.  One huge part of the 60's culture seen on this album is love.  This is partly due to the increasing popularity of hippie culture throughout the decade and the Summer of Love that occurred in 1967.  The Beatles contains many songs about love, similar to the Beatles albums that came before it.  Much of these love songs are of varying genres.  For example, "Martha My Dear", written about McCartney's dog Martha, is of the music hall genre and includes a piano as well as both a brass and string section.  There's also "Why Don't We Do it On the Road", a twelve-bar blues song in which McCartney sings about having sex in the middle of the road like monkeys he observed in India.  Then there's "Back in the USSR", an exciting rock song in which McCartney sings about his love for Ukrainian, Russian, and Georgian girls.  "Why Don't We Do it On the Road" and "Back in the USSR" are two songs that brought up controversy in the 60's.  (birth control and gay marriage now with cultural love values)

The Beatles also includes songs that address the many movements of the 60's.  During this time, many young people were protesting a wide variety of issues including the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and the anti-Vietnam War movement.  Protesting and rebelling was a big part of the culture of the time.  Protests often turned into acts of violence, which led to the creation of the song "Revolution".  "Revolution" is directed towards the anti-Vietnam War protesters in the United States.  Lennon discusses the hypocrisy of these anti-war activists by arguing that protesting and being driven to change the world is not wrong, "but when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out", meaning if protesting leads to even more violence, then that's when a line should be drawn.  Many people of this time became so fed up with the United States government that they began to follow Chairman Mao and his ideas of communism. Lennon argues that anyone who claims to be fighting for peace and freedom but also admires chairman Mao is a hypocrite, because Mao is a totalitarian leader who uses murder and oppression on his people.  Lennon sings, "if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao, you ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow."  Many people of this time, roughly one-third of the country, were strongly opposed to the war.  Often times this was because they felt that the US had no cause being involved in t
The band also brings up the topic of the civil rights movement, as the album release was only months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior.  McCartney wrote "Blackbird" about the black woman in America struggling to face oppression.  The song is about keeping the faith and persevering, because the time will come when there is freedom for all.  He sings, "take these broken wings and learn to fly" and "all your life, you were only waiting for this moment to be free." 

Going back to "Helter Skelter", the song actually had a huge, unique influence on culture in the later 1960's, when a man named Charles Manson took the song, and many other songs on The Beatles, to be a confirmation of the coming of an apocalyptic race war he called Helter Skelter.  Manson and his followers committed eleven murders in order to initiate this race war.  Manson left the wallet of one of the victims in the street, hoping an African-American would find it, attempt to use it, and get pinned for the murders.  He believed that the African-Americans would win the race war, and then need his help due to an inability to run the planet.  Manson and his followers were put in jail for their crimes, no race war ever took place, and the song "Helter Skelter" was never listened to in the same way.

Yet another social issue addressed on the album is the disputes between the separate economic classes. In the track "Piggies", Harrison complains of the financial greediness of the upper class, something that many people in the lower economic classes were upset about.  He compares the "little piggies crawling in the dirt" whose "life is getting worse", to the "bigger piggies in their starched white shirts" that "don't care what goes on around".  Harrison even says that the bigger piggies are "clutching forks and knives to eat their bacon", a metaphor showing that he is saying the upper class shamelessly feeds on the lower class.

A big part of 60's culture was the increasing popularity of hippie culture.  Eastern influences were often seen in hippie music and in people's beliefs.  Much of The Beatles was actually written in Rishikesh, India at a transcendental meditation course.  One of the main beliefs was that everything happens for a reason and there is no chance.  This is Harrison's reasoning behind my favorite track on the album, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps".  Harrison decided to pick up a book at random and write about the first words he saw.  He landed on "gently weeps", and wrote this slow, brooding rock song.   Optimism and positivity were other important values of people that were part of the of hippie culture.  This is the idea behind "Ob-la-di ob-la-da".  The song title is actually a phrase taken from one of McCartney's friends,  Jimmy Scott-Emuakpor, a Nigerian conga player.  It is said to mean "life goes on".  The phrase adds a fun, happy chorus to the already up-beat song.

The use of psychedelic drugs was another big aspect of hippie culture and general 60's culture as well.  Although it was typical for The Beatles' music to reference use of LSD and cannabis, this album also contained mentions of heroin use. The first verse in the track "Happiness is a Warm Gun" is a series of ridiculous images, said to be from an acid trip of Lennon's.  It is also includes the line, "I need a fix 'cause I'm going down", which is a reference to Lennon's addiction to Heroin.  Similarly, in "Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey", he sings "the deeper you go the higher you fly".  Referencing psychedelic drugs was not something unique to The Beatles in this era; in fact most popular artists in the 60's wrote about drugs, including Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, and Jefferson Airplane. 

The many different references to popular social topics and aspects of 60's culture in The Beatles can cause the album to feel, as a whole, a little all over the place and at times random, especially with all of the sonically experimental tracks on the album.  But, experimenting was part of 60's culture as well as acceptance of what is different; and even though most of these tracks are about life in the 60's, they have lived on to still be beloved over 40 years later.