99. Piggies

George's baroque nursery rhyme spin on Animal Farm is delightful, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise

One thing I’ve learned from many years of reading and listening to people talk about the Beatles is that a lot of people hate hate hate HATE this song.

I get the complaints. I like the song, but it’s nevertheless one that’s fallen quite a bit for me over the years. I think I had it in my top 40 in the first version I did of this last some two decades ago. Now it barely sneaks into the top 100. And that’s mostly because I have found the smarmy attitude behind the song a bit offputting.

Still, ‘barely sneaking into the top 100’ still means it’s in the top 100. That’s a real accomplishment.

So, what are the reasons for my appreciation?

First, it’s a beautiful recording and a nice tune. The central guitar line is bright and whimsical and lovely. The chord change into the bridge is beautifully Beatlesy: a genuinely quite surprising inversion which manages to still sound natural. And the baroque instrumentation is tastefully done, bringing a sense of nihilistic grandeur which perfectly matches the theme. The whole thing sparkles in precisely the way that you’d imagine the pigs in the final verse would imagine themselves. Which is all topped off by the wonderful final swell of strings and snorts.

Second, and I’ll admit that this is a minor thing, it helps to sustain the ‘animals’ theme on the White Album. I suspect I’d still enjoy it the same if it had been a random detour on Abbey Road or something, but I definitely think it gains from its context.

Third, and probably most important: it’s fun. Yes, it’s pretty on the nose,¹ but still there are some genuinely funny bits. The snorting pigs are funny. The rich pigs sitting around the table eating the poor pigs. Macabre and a bit heavy-handed as a metaphor, but also funny.

I also think the criticisms of the song are a bit overdone. It’s not the most sophisticated piece of political commentary out there, but I also don’t think it’s wholly puerile. And while it is a little bit mean-spirited, I wouldn’t say it’s unreasonably so. And that’s particularly true if you think about George’s unique life experiences.

He grew up quite poor, but with a very supportive and loving family. Then, almost out of nowhere, he went from poor to rich to fabulously, impossibly wealthy. And critically, he achieved that status entirely because of his own creative abilities (and those of his mates, of course).

Each of the Beatles basically got tossed into social circles occupied by folks with generational family wealth. That is: people who acquired their riches through sheer happenstance of birth, and who seemed to think themselves as deserving of it in a way that someone who had to earn it might not be. You can imagine that rubbing anyone’s nose, and it would have been particularly infuriating to someone like George—who was already naturally pretty disinclined to value social mores and ingrained codes of conduct.

So if it sometimes seems like George was rather sour about money, that’s because he was in fact pretty sour. But he actually had some pretty good reasons for feeling that way, since he had been given a front-row seat into some of the worst behavior of the piggy class.

1. On this point, it might be relevant that I personally heard this song several years before I had even heard of—much less read Animal Farm. So I don’t think I had any previous reference point, and the idea of pigs eating pigs felt fresh.