Song Analysis #1 - Revolution

Revolution is a B-side single (opposite Hey Jude) credited to John Lennon and Paul McCartney and released by The Beatles in 1968. The Beatles started off as a skiffle band founded in 1957 by John Lennon and a school friend; the band’s original name was The Quarry Men. The band went through many members in its early years as part of John Lennon’s somewhat ruthless quest to find evermore talented musicians and become famous. For roughly five years the band mostly did covers, with a few Lennon/McCartney originals including Love Me Do. Two tenures at clubs in Hamburg provided a jumping off point for the band to get signed. In the early 60s, The Beatles focused mainly on love songs, but as the decade progressed and the counter-culture movement took center stage, the focus of the band’s music shifted toward revolution. The aptly named Revolution was used to illustrate John Lennon’s personal views of the movement, both positive and negative.

The song is a dialogue between an extremist and one of the band mates, most likely Lennon. Though the extremist never speaks, their identity can be deduced from the lines “But when you talk about destruction/Don’t you know that you can count me out”. In the song, Lennon counters a series of arguments made by the extremist in a moderate easy-going tone; until the extremist talks of violent change, at which point Lennon becomes a bit more aggressive in his rebuttals. The song utilizes second person point of view for an interesting effect. Lennon refers to the extremist as “you” throughout the song, giving it more depth and suggesting that anyone can become the extremist.

The song deftly incorporates rhyme only in the lines that state the extremists’ arguments, in order to introduce the idea that they’re all talk. The lines “You say you want a revolution/You tell me that it’s evolution” start off the rhyme in a more mellow way, but as the song progresses the rhymed lines get more aggressive. The rhyme suggests that the extremist has a language used to gather weak-minded followers, and tries to subtly warn the masses of the dangers of letting your thoughts slowly pick up the extremist’s diction.

For a song of such simplistic lyricism, Revolution has a surprisingly deep and poignant message hidden beneath its beats. This message will carry through time, reminding future generations in the midst of their own revolutions that all is lost when the individual loses his independent thought. The instrumentals in the song are fantastic, though the first couple of listens may feel a bit anti-climatic (I know there’s a nice long guitar solo in there somewhere!) The repetitive nature of the music eventually comes around to back up the “dead-end extremism” ideas expressed in the song.