I was sitting at my desk this morning daydreaming about baseball and looking out at the brilliant blue sky and the church steeple that reaches to the clouds not too far from where I live, when Revolution 9 comes on. Normally I'd just skip to the next song, but for some reason, I wanted to listen to it.
It took me awhile to understand the significance of the Beatles. Growing up, when I heard a Beatles song on a watered down classic rock station, it was usually the bubble gum pop stuff from the early days, like Do You Want to Know a Secret? and P.S. I Love You. I later came to appreciate those songs, but it wasn't until I understood that the reason those songs sounded like pop songs is because the Beatles were the first ones to make songs sound like that.
As I was only three years old when John Lennon was killed, a sort of mystique had always enshrouded the band in my mind. Who was this guy John Lennon? Why was he worshiped as some sort of god? Why was his assassination considered to be on the same level of JFK, RFK, or MLK?
The evolution of my knowledge about music was pretty slow and really did not start to develop until U2 released Achtung Baby!, which was about the strangest music I had ever heard at the time. I was in 8th grade. I bought the cassette tape, but it took me about a year before something clicked and I began to understand the significance of rock music. I still didn't get the significance of the Beatles until I was out of college. Then again, I've always been sort of slow to understand how the world works. I don't know if that is a result of bad schooling or being sheltered from the real world while growing up in Southwest Ohio or simply my tendency to produce tangent thoughts instead of focusing on the task at hand, but it really wasn't until I went to Europe during my junior year of college that I woke up and began to notice that the Earth is rather wobbly on its axis and that a lot of people just plain suck. I've been trying to catch up on all that missed knowledge ever since.
With Revolution 9 playing, I did some googling of the song. I found a breakdown by minutes of each part and was amazed to discover the intricate structure of the song - the noise was actually organized! And yeah, it really is a good soundtrack for a violent revolution - it is what I imagine Iraq to sound like right now.
That being said, next time it comes up in the scramble, I'll probably skip it.
___
It took me awhile to understand the significance of the Beatles. Growing up, when I heard a Beatles song on a watered down classic rock station, it was usually the bubble gum pop stuff from the early days, like Do You Want to Know a Secret? and P.S. I Love You. I later came to appreciate those songs, but it wasn't until I understood that the reason those songs sounded like pop songs is because the Beatles were the first ones to make songs sound like that.
As I was only three years old when John Lennon was killed, a sort of mystique had always enshrouded the band in my mind. Who was this guy John Lennon? Why was he worshiped as some sort of god? Why was his assassination considered to be on the same level of JFK, RFK, or MLK?
The evolution of my knowledge about music was pretty slow and really did not start to develop until U2 released Achtung Baby!, which was about the strangest music I had ever heard at the time. I was in 8th grade. I bought the cassette tape, but it took me about a year before something clicked and I began to understand the significance of rock music. I still didn't get the significance of the Beatles until I was out of college. Then again, I've always been sort of slow to understand how the world works. I don't know if that is a result of bad schooling or being sheltered from the real world while growing up in Southwest Ohio or simply my tendency to produce tangent thoughts instead of focusing on the task at hand, but it really wasn't until I went to Europe during my junior year of college that I woke up and began to notice that the Earth is rather wobbly on its axis and that a lot of people just plain suck. I've been trying to catch up on all that missed knowledge ever since.
With Revolution 9 playing, I did some googling of the song. I found a breakdown by minutes of each part and was amazed to discover the intricate structure of the song - the noise was actually organized! And yeah, it really is a good soundtrack for a violent revolution - it is what I imagine Iraq to sound like right now.
That being said, next time it comes up in the scramble, I'll probably skip it.
___
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