What the Beatles’ ‘Revolution’ Means 50 Years Later

By Armond White

Wednesday, August 19, 2020

 

A week before the Democratic National Convention in 1968, the Beatles released “Revolution,” blindsiding the generation that trusted them. The hippest pop critics resented “Revolution” because it went against the student tantrum movement. Some felt betrayed, others inferred their own anxious need to dissent anyway. Time has proven the Beatles right in refusing to go along with violence, destruction, and self-aggrandizement. It was a moment of pop-culture wisdom, but the song’s title really should have had a question mark.

 

By contrast, this week’s virtual DNC convention has met no cultural opposition. “WAP,” Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B’s whore’s anthem, shows the degrading values that liberal pop musicians contribute to the DNC’s convention week. The DNC pop line-up, from John Legend to Billie Eilish, is banal. (Stephen Stills and Billy Porter’s drag-queen rendition of “For What It’s Worth” was worse than banal; it was ludicrous.) Stoking the ambiguous relation of rock music and pop culture to rebellion — minus the Beatles’ warning — makes celebrity support of protests, violence, and anarchy absolutely, well, revolting.

 

Broadway’s Phillipa Soo, the token Asian playing one of the Schuyler sisters trio in Hamilton, recently advocated revolution, just like the clueless hippies who misunderstood John Lennon’s reservations as a rallying cry. While promoting her latest commercial project, Soo boasted that she was first inspired by Hamilton’s “We’re in the greatest city in the world” lyric but recently favors a different trope: “Revolution is messy, but now is the time to stand up.” This misconstrued sense of American history is absolutely in synch with Hamilton. Even worse, Soo’s comment on revolution paralleled that of congressional “Squad” member Ayanna Pressley, who vowed to MSNBC, “We need unrest in the streets. There needs to be unrest in the streets as long as there’s unrest in our lives.”

 

Neither Soo nor Pressley seems to appreciate what “revolution” means. Indifferent to the destruction occurring in Democrat-led cities, they don’t appreciate the danger that the Beatles sang about: “But when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out.”

 

The Beatles’ “Revolution” complicates the received history of 1968 by standing in opposition to Sixties violent unrest as proposed by vain activists. “But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow” could well have been inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s anti-Maoist La Chinoise, which was released in the U.S. that same year. (Many film critics still refuse to acknowledge Godard’s skepticism.) John Lennon reiterated the point in 1980: “The lyrics stand today. . . . I want to see the plan. That is what I used to say to [activists] Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Count me out if it’s for violence. Don’t expect me on the barricades unless it’s with flowers.”

 

No doubt Lennon, Hoffman, Rubin knew more about the consequences of revolution than the superficial Soo and the seditious Pressley are willing to admit. Think about the specifics of the Hamilton lyrics that Soo (and every D.C. liberal) abides by: That “greatest city in the world” lyric expressed Lin-Manuel Miranda’s exalted view of Obama-era America, recently reduced to rubble. Now, Soo’s admiration for the “revolution is messy” lyric expresses post-Obama regret and Kalorama lust for power. Soo’s attitude belongs to the elite class of resisters — from Hollywood to Broadway to TV’s robotic newscasters — who support Antifa violence and excuse every riot as a “peaceful protest.”

 

Millennial showbiz, mostly in lockstep with the Democratic Party, twists the meaning of traditional showbiz humanism. Partisanship prevents artists from taking the Beatles’ principled stance when addressing the romance of revolution. There’s even a public-service TV commercial that misappropriates Chaplin’s The Great Dictator speech — “fight” meant something entirely different when there were actual Nazis (and Russian allies).

 

This delusion is neither personal nor a result of education. Despite being spoon-fed radicalism through media or at universities, most folks don’t know enough about communism or socialism to distinguish between Marx and Lenin. It’s just part of following media trends. One frequent concern of this column is the persistent unimaginative unoriginality of the culture world, particularly today’s one-track, simple-minded politicization and division.

 

The Beatles’ “Revolution” resounds for its challenge and enrichment of cultural consciousness, as opposed to today’s media-sponsored pro-violence consensus opinion. Millennial pop influencers such as Lin-Manuel Miranda lack moral commitment and no longer understand how to articulate feeling into art as the Beatles’ “Revolution” did.

 

Whining Taylor Swift, smug John Legend, ridiculous Billy Porter, and silly Philippa Soo represent the petulance of this cultural and political moment. When the Rolling Stones made “Street Fighting Man” to capitalize on the Sixties populism, they expressed their comfortable distance as well as their ambivalence; that’s why the Beatles quickly answered back with a definitive negation of street violence. Michael Jackson pulled together both political positions in his great 1991 “Black or White” (which begins with a “Street Fighting Man” riff and ends with a closing guitar note quoting “Revolution”).

 

This week’s pseudo (virtual) Democratic convention exploits the same social tensions that Jackson addressed in his personal manifesto, but anarchy is at play. In ’68, the Beatles’ “Revolution” anticipated turmoil, and the song remains a beacon to the conscientiousness that today’s liberal pop stars disgrace.