168. Revolution 9
What if you put an eight-minute musique concrete composition into the hands of tens of millions of listeners
The whole enterprise of ‘ranking’ the Beatles songs is a bit silly in concept, but feels truly absurd today. It’s hard enough to compare This Boy and Helter Skelter. It feels utterly absurd to say that Revolution 9 is a ‘better’ or ‘worse’ song than Savoy Truffle. Still, it has to go somewhere on the list, and so here is where I have placed it.
It could easily go right at the bottom. It’s certainly possible that is the Beatles track that I enjoy listening to the least. And that seems like an important factor. But it also would be a copout. Because this track succeeds in its mission far better than many other songs I have already discussed. That doesn’t mean everyone has to like it. But it would be churlish (and somewhat ridiculous) to pretend that Revolution 9 isn’t a great achievement. It really is one.
At times in my life—specifically, when I was 18, and trying to convince myself that I was into the avant-garde—I declared Revolution 9 a work of genius. Not just an interesting piece of Beatles history, but as a triumphant moment in art history.
Now that I’m a bit older and wiser, I wouldn’t go so far as that. But there really is something here. This is a genuinely very impressive work of sonic imagination, one which plays against every concept of what can reasonably count as ‘music’ and which nevertheless has quite a bit of that special Beatles tunefulness. As it unwinds over the course of eight minutes, it gains an impressive momentum. You are invited to build pictures in your mind as you track its movements.
As I listen, I often feel myself losing track of the noumenal world—the realm of pure ideas which can be expressed through rational thought. I grasp for meaning and find that it slips through my fingers, leaving traces of knowledge, but only traces. Everything that feels secure is ripped away, and I feel a deep sense of disquiet.
Essentially, it really does sound like…a revolution.
It is particularly apposite for this song to have been released in 1968—the closest we came to a ‘year of revolution’ in the mid-20th century. Following close on the heels of 1967’s ‘summer of love,’ the world was handed a slate of violence, repression, and horror. From the Tet Offensive to a wave of assassinations to student uprisings across the world. From Prague Spring in January to Soviet tanks in August. From the assassination of Martin Luther King to the election of Nixon.
If you had to pinpoint a year when the dreams and promises of the 60s faltered, when hope faltered, and the tide began to recede, 1968 is probably the answer.
It’s good and right that it is commemorated by a living document of the chaos and the confusion and the pain.
Here’s a thought experiment: you’re at a museum, where you discover a small white room with blank walls. When you enter, Revolution 9 begins to play. Would you stick around to listen? For a bit, sure! Would you stay for the full length? Maaaybe? But would you then go back, again and again? No. Would you seek out a recording so you could listen at home? Dozens and dozens, even hundreds of times? Of course not. It’s interesting but it’s not that interesting. At least not intrinsically.
But of course, this isn’t a piece recorded for an exhibit at a modern art museum. It’s a track on a Beatles record. Which is an entirely different world.
I once read someone who said that of all the avant-garde music ever created, this is (by leaps and bounds) the most widely-heard. It’s pretty wild when you think about it that way.
This sort of music is normally consumed by tiny subsets of tiny subsets of the population. And then, suddenly, out of nowhere, literally tens of millions of people have an album with an extended piece of musique concrete sitting on their shelves. That is really interesting! The fact that this was The Beatles who made this track, who included it on their follow-up to Sgt. Pepper, means that this very strange, rather disconcerting object was suddenly in the hands of people who might never have otherwise even known that things like this could exist.
There’s a hubris in that choice, and a pretentiousness that can’t be fully excused. But I engage with it in much the same way that I read the extensive appendices to The Lord of the Rings. As objects that might inspire mild ridicule from people who have become all-too-familiar with the excesses of the genre (the rock stars who now believe themselves to be Great Artists, the epic fantasy author who believes that the worldbuilding is equally as important as the story itself). Except that these were the guys who invented the trope in the first place. So judge the choice as you like, but don’t make the mistake of assuming it’s just a cliché.
It’s not a ‘song’ of course, but even in a sound collage like this, John couldn’t help himself but continue to incorporate some beautiful melodies. The whole project originated in a chaotic, extremely extended take of Revolution (the actual song), from which John and Yoko extracted many of the underlying pieces that form the backbone for Revolution 9:
And I think that’s a big part of what makes this work (to the extent that it does), that it’s genuinely musical in its composition.
I had always understood Revolution 9 to be primarily a Lennon-Ono project with only minimal influence from anyone else (sort of an extension of the Two Virgins album), but once I dug into some of the accounts, it sounds like George was far more involved than I ever realized. Which I suppose makes sense, given that he’d done some pretty weird stuff on Wonderwall Music already by this point.
Paul was famously quite hurt that John went and did this without him (he was out of the country), and you can understand why, since Paul was the one with far more actual interest in this kind of work.
On any other Beatles album, Revolution 9 would be a thoroughly unreasonable extravagance, and would therefore have never made the cut. But the White Album is its own thing, and their willingness to devote fully half of side four to the Revolutions 1 and 9 is part of what makes the composite the beautiful, messy, chaotic thing that it is.
And it’s worth thinking about precisely what it does with its album position.
I’ve noted before that the Beatles liked to puncture their own balloon a bit, anytime they got too self-serious or too precious. I think the end to the White Album is a perfect example of this. Revolution 9 asks a lot of the listener, and it would be quite pretentious to use it as the album-closer. On the other hand, Good Night is pure schmaltz. Putting them together cuts each one down a bit, and encourages you to just let things be what they are, and not impart too much of your own assumptions onto them. It’s great sequencing—in all of the ways that the end of Help! was not.
I loved Revolution 9 from the first moment I heard it because (at age 12? 13?) I had absolutely no context for it. It was completely unmoored from anything I had ever heard before, and I love(d) it for that.