‘Where you once belonged’
Class, race and the Liverpool roots of Lennon and McCartney’s songs
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v9i1.27616Keywords:
avant-garde, The Beatles, left wing, Liverpool, race, working classAbstract
While Lennon and McCartney’s class affiliations are ambiguous to degrees that should remain debatable, the depth and the detail in which working-class life defines their work have been overlooked, thus misrepresenting The Beatles’ cultural significance. As Collins (2012) critiques, initial New Left criticisms of The Beatles – almost exclusively in response to one composition, ‘Revolution’ (1968) – have recently been adapted by commentators eager to portray The Beatles as a culturally and politically conservative force. I argue that early Left-wing and recent Right-wing criticisms of The Beatles’ legacy are misleading, because both overlook Lennon and McCartney’s different relationships to working-class culture. I also emphasize an importantly related, even more marginalized aspect of The Beatles’ history: the significance of black musical and cultural influences from Liverpool. The article seeks to offer new interpretations of songs including ‘Norwegian Wood’, ‘A Day in the Life’, ‘Revolution’, ‘Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da’ and ‘Working Class Hero’.
References
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Whiteley, Sheila. 1992. The Space between the Notes. London: Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203398364
Whitley, Ed. 2000. ‘The Postmodern White Album’. In The Beatles, Popular Music and Society, ed. Ian Inglis, 105–25. London: Macmillan.
Wiener, Jon. 1995 [1984]. Come Together. London: Faber.
Badman, Keith. 2000. The Beatles: Off the Record: Outrageous Opinions and Unrehearsed Interviews. London: Omnibus.
Baird, Julia. 2007. Imagine This. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Clayson, Alan, and Spencer Leigh. 2003. The Walrus was Ringo. New Malden: Chrome Dreams.
Cleave, Maureen. 1966. ‘Paul All Alone’. Evening Standard, 25 March: 8.
Collins, Marcus. 2012. ‘The Beatles’ Politics’. British Journal of Politics and International Relations: 1–19.
Daily Mail. 1967a. ‘Back-Room Beatle?’ 17 January: 4.
—1967b. ‘Beatles on TV Baffle Viewers’. 27 December: 1.
Daily Mirror. 1969. ‘Warning to the Premiers: No Extra Immigrants’. 9 January: 1.
—1995. ‘The Banned “Get Back” Revealed’. 28 November: 3.
Eagleton, Terry. 1964. ‘New Bearings: The Beatles’. Blackfriars 45: 175–78.
Elliott, Anthony. 1999. The Mourning of John Lennon. London: University of California Press.
Everett, Walter. 2001. The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fowler, David. 2008. Youth Culture in Modern Britain, c.1920–c.1970. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gilbert, Pat. 2013. ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’. Mojo (November): 68–82.
Goldstein, Richard. 1967. ‘We still need The Beatles, but…’. New York Times, 18 June: 24D.
Gunn, Simon, and Rachel Bell. 2002. Middle Classes. London: Orion.
Hansen, Randall. 1999. ‘The Kenyan Asians, British Politics, and the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 1968’. Historical Journal 42/3: 809–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X9900864X
Harker, Dave. 1980. One for the Money. London: Hutchinson.
Heilbronner, Oded. 2008. ‘The Peculiarities of The Beatles: A Cultural-Historical Interpretation’. Cultural and Social History 5/1: 99–116. http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/147800408X267274
—2011. ‘Helter-Skelter: The Beatles, the British New Left, and the Question of Hegemony’. Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 13/1-2: 87–107.
Henry, Tony. 1998. ‘The Man who Put the Beat in The Beatles’. The Observer, 2 August: 9.
Hoggart, Richard. 1992 [1957]. The Uses of Literacy. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Hoyland, John. 1969. ‘John Hoyland Replies’. Black Dwarf, 10 January: n.p.
Humphrey, Derek, and David Tindall. 1977. False Messiah: The Story of Michael X. London: Hart-Davis.
Huyssen, Andreas. 1986. After the Great Divide. London: Macmillan.
Laing, Dave. 2009. ‘Six Boys, Six Beatles: The Formative Years, 1950–1962’. In The Cambridge Companion to The Beatles, ed. Kenneth Womack, 9–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521869652.003
Lewisohn, Mark. 2013. The Beatles: All These Years. Extended Special Edition. Volume One: Tune In. London: Little, Brown.
Loder, Kurt. 1983. ‘Joan Baez: The Rolling Stone Interview’. Rolling Stone, 14 April: 14–23.
MacDonald, Ian. 2005 [1994]. Revolution in the Head. London: Pimlico.
Mann, William. 1963. ‘What Songs The Beatles Sang’. The Times, 27 December: 4.
McGrath, James. 2011. ‘John, Paul, George and Richard: The Beatles’ Uses of Literacy’. In Richard Hoggart: Culture and Critique, ed. Michael Bailey and Mary Eagleton, 181–96. Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press.
Marwick, Arthur. 1981. British Society Since 1945. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Merton, Richard. 1970. ‘Comment’. New Left Review 59: 88–96.
Miles, Barry. 1997. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now. London: Secker & Warburg.
—2007. ‘John Lennon/Yoko Ono Interview’, September 1969. http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.html?ArticleID=723
Muldoon, Roland. 1968. ‘Subculture: The Street-fighting Pop Group’. Black Dwarf 13/6: 8.
Murden, Jon. 2006. ‘City of Change and Challenge: Liverpool Since 1945’. In Liverpool 800: Culture, Character and History, ed. John Belchem, 393–485. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Newsfront. 1968. ‘Lennon and McCartney Interview’, 14 May 1968. http://www.beatlesinterviews.org/db1968.0514.beatles.html.
Norman, Philip. 2003. ‘The Bourgeois Beatle’. The Daily Mail, 29 March: 36–38.
—2008. John Lennon: The Life. London: HarperCollins.
Odell, Michael. 2008. ‘Percy Thrillington, Magritte and Me’. The Guardian, 29 November. http://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/nov/29/paul-mccartney-the-fireman-interview.
Reck, D. R. 1985. ‘Beatles Orientalis: Influences from Asia in a Popular Song Tradition’. Asian Music 16/1: 83–149. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/834014
Riley, Tim. 1988. Tell Me Why. New York: Vintage.
Roberts, George. 2001. ‘Managing the Bands’. http://www.triumphpc.com/mersey-beat/a-z/managingthebands.shtml.
Roessner, J. 2006. ‘We All Want to Change the World: Postmodern Politics and the Beatles’ White Album’. In Reading The Beatles, ed. Kenneth Womack and Todd Davis, 147–60. New York: SUNY Press.
Roszak, Theodor. 1969. The Makings of a Counter Culture. London: Faber.
Sheff, David. 2001 [1981]. Last Interview: All We are Saying. John Lennon and Yoko Ono. London: Pan.
Snow, Mat. 2008. ‘We weren’t Trying to Revive Rock ’n’ Roll, We were Rock ’n’ Roll’. Mojo (October): 57–59.
Spitz, Bob. 2005. The Beatles: The Biography. New York: Little, Brown.
Stratton, Jon. 2014. ‘Ob-la-di Ob-la-da: Paul McCartney, Diaspora and the Politics of Identity’. Journal for Cultural Research 18/1: 1–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2013.768473
Sullivan, Henry W. 1995. The Beatles with Lacan. New York: Peter Lang.
Wenner, Jann S. 2000 [1971]. Lennon Remembers. London: Verso.
Whiteley, Sheila. 1992. The Space between the Notes. London: Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203398364
Whitley, Ed. 2000. ‘The Postmodern White Album’. In The Beatles, Popular Music and Society, ed. Ian Inglis, 105–25. London: Macmillan.
Wiener, Jon. 1995 [1984]. Come Together. London: Faber.
Published
2015-09-02
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
McGrath, J. (2015). ‘Where you once belonged’: Class, race and the Liverpool roots of Lennon and McCartney’s songs. Popular Music History, 9(1), 11-31. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v9i1.27616
