102. Within You, Without You
A deeply philosophical blend of East and West, in both form and content
This isn’t my personal favorite of George’s three Indian-influences songs. But it’s almost certainly the most objectively impressive.
It achieves an incredible balancing act between a classical western string score (composed by George Martin) and the classical eastern devotional music (composed by George). Each side contains an element of completeness in itself—it is wholly the thing that it is—while also taking on an additional layer of meaning, that arrives only in the complex dance with the other.
The synthetic whole is more than simply a blend of cultures (though it certainly is also that). The most impressive thing is that you can actually hear the two aspects of the song encountering one another. They don’t fully meld together, but instead dwell on the gentle friction between them. The slight disconnect in tenor and harmonic structure, as well as a more fundamental disagreement about how music should mark the passage of time.
It was apparently quite difficult for George Martin to write a score for the western players, and even harder for them to match the instructions provided. As Geoff Emerick writes quite beautifully:
The problem was that we all were trying to create a blend of East meets West – conventional orchestral instruments playing over nonconventional Indian instruments. There were no real bar lines in the Eastern music, just a bunch of sustained tones, most of which were playing in between the twelve notes used in Western music. That was a really hard session for George Martin – by the end of the night he was absolutely knackered. Thankfully he had the help of George Harrison, who acted as a bridge between the Indian tonalities and rhythms, which he understood quite well, and the Western sensibilities of George Martin and the classical musicians. I was never more impressed with both Georges than I was on that very special, almost spiritual night.1
The result is a sort of conversation happening right there within the song, with two distinct traditions running into one another, melding together in places, splintering apart in others. This sort of thing is tough to do. Execute it poorly, and you just get a confusing mishmash of sound and tone. But when delicately poised, like it is here, you learn something deep about both sides of the dialogue.
And this also feels like a wonderful performative illustration of the song itself—which is about coming to understand that truth lies ‘within you and without you.’ Another way of saying that is that truth is only ever found in transit and only ever perceived from one perspective at a time.
Grasping essential truths—beauty, meaning, life—requires a thinking subject to take on the challenge of knowing. But that subjectivity itself is necessarily a barrier to truth, because it locks us into a singular perspective. Many advocates of meditation and prayer argue that these provide the avenue to escaping from that sense of self, allowing yourself to become one with the universe. And this song is itself meditative in precisely that way. While also demonstrating the limits of that sort of self-abnegation.
Because the very fact that it succeeds so well at disassociating the listener also highlights to the authorly work that is done to help achieve that goal. As a composition, it will not let you simply dissolve into the water. It constantly pulls you up short, calls attention to the separation between our different senses of self. That’s partly because, to be frank, you can’t possibly listen to it without recognizing that it’s the product of the most famous band in the world on their most famous album.
Which may seem like a flaw in the song, but I regard as actually being the point of the song, though perhaps not a point that George himself initially intended. I do think that he genuinely saw the song as a way to diminish ‘the space between us all,’ to pierce the ‘wall of illusion.’ But the actual strength of it as a song is that it demonstrates how those things are actually indelible parts of the human condition. That to some extent, the space between us is what makes it possible for us to meaningfully share with one another, communicate with one another, and love one another. That the way we actually learn and grown and become a better version of ourselves is to encounter something genuinely other, and be forced to shift our own sense of self in response.
It’s a very difficult thing to stay open to that possibility, and this song is a wonderful invitation to try. That’s why I think people who criticize it for being preachy, or for being unrealistic, are missing the forest for the trees. It wouldn’t be able to achieve any of its greatness if it didn’t aim so high. Of course there’s an element of naïveté in the effort. But the most important thing in the world is that people be willing to make fools of themselves in the search for truth.
Indeed, that’s the sort of insight that you’re more likely to perceive if you arrive at this process as an outsider—as someone who both seeks to inhabit the ideal while also bringing a wealth of experiences that inevitably force you back into the material world. And who therefore has that extra bit of duality that makes them see truth as an ideal but also as an absurdity.
And, if that wasn’t already clear from the rest of the song, it closes with a round of laughter, which punctures any lingering sense of sanctimony, or pretension of transcendence.2 That laughter is a nice respite from the seriousness of the rest of the song, but is more than that. It also provides an entirely new angle for thinking about the previous five minutes.
Ultimately, the astonishing thing about the song is that it’s both a serious philosophical engagement with the concept of Oneness, as well as being a satire of the same.
I also couldn’t talk about Within You, Without You and not cover the incredible Sonic Youth cover, which is right up there among my all-time favorite covers of Beatles songs. It remains absolutely true to the original, while also sounding radically different. Which really just demonstrates how profoundly the song is able to straddle the divide between different aesthetic engagements with chaos and connection:
I know a lot of folks also swear by the Tomorrow Never Knows/Within You Without You mashup from Love, which I do think is interesting. But for my money, the Sonic Youth version achieves the same feeling of radical surprise in a more profound—and more sustainable—way.
Geoff Emerick, Here There and Everywhere, p. 186.
George: “Well, after all that long Indian stuff you want some light relief. It’s a release after five minutes of sad music. You haven’t got to take it all that seriously, you know. You were supposed to hear the audience anyway, as they listen to Sgt. Pepper’s Show. That was the style of the album.”