Revolution in the Head Quotes

“The last song recorded for Abbey Road was Lennon’s BECAUSE - a three-part harmony in C sharp minor inspired by hearing Yoko Ono play the Adagio sostenuto of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14, Op. 27 No. 2 (Moonlight).”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“The root of contemporary intellectual scorn for narrative - apart from the enjoyment of despising precisely what ordinary people enjoy most: a good story - is post-religious egoism”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“The crucial thing that died with the rise of the instantaneous/simultaneous outlook was development: development of theme and idea, of feeling and thought, of story and character. Just as post-religious life has seen a rapid dwindling of interest in the process of growing older and wiser, so art has drifted up to the surface, forsaking progress for process, consequence for multifocal chaos, meaning for maximum impact”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“Pop music, too, has played a role in reinforcing the manifest relaxation of goals and standards since the Sixties. Aside from the inescapable fact that this relaxation was to various degrees willed by the majority, pop and its shatteringly sensationalistic cousins rock, disco, and ‘rave’ music have been as much colonised by technology as any other area of modern Life. Its once flexible human rhythms replaced by the mass-production regularity of the drum-machine, its structures corporatised by the factory ethic of the sequencer, its vitality digitised to death and buried in multi-layered syntheticism, pop is now little more than a soundtrack for physical jerks.1”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“It is, to put it mildly, curious to hear Thatcherites. condemn a decade in which ordinary folk for the first time aspired to individual self-determination and a life of material security within an economy of high employment and low inflation.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“Thus, by a devilish paradox, those who thought they were at the cutting edge of social development in the Sixties — the hippies, the New Left - soon found themselves adrift in the wake of the real social avant-garde of the period: ordinary people.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“In the Sixties, however, socially liberating post-war affluence conspired with a cocktail of scientific innovations too potent to resist: TV, satellite communications, affordable private transport, amplified music, chemical contraception, LSD, and the nuclear bomb.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“At its height, this tumult divided America against itself more violently than at any time since the Civil War and came within a whisker of sweeping the French government out of office; yet its actual achievements were meagre: a few curriculum changes and some minor additions to civil rights legislation.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“The attraction of 1966-vintage Maoist revolution in the age of instantaneity was that it eliminated the preparatory phases of Lenin’s model, positing a direct leap to the Communist millennium which would expunge all class distinctions at a stroke.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“As records - as distinct from songs - The Beatles’ works grew increasingly multi-focal, the conventionally dominant lead vocal vying for the listener’s ear with disconcerting harmonies, instrumental countermelodies, backwards tapes, and distracting sound-effects. Using the overdub facilities of multitrack recording, they evolved a new way of making records in which preplanned polyphony was replaced by an unpredictable layering of simultaneous sound-information, transformed by signal-distortion and further modified during the processes of mixing and editing.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“Briefly a buzz-word among Parisian poets and Cubists before 1914, simultaneity was revived in the early Sixties by Marshall McLuhan in texts hailing society’s liberation from the ‘tyranny’ of print by electronic media (of which the most dominant was, and is, television). Deploring linear thought and fixed points of view, which he saw as sources of conflict and tension in the Western mind, McLuhan welcomed the chaotic ‘flow’ of media simultaneity, communal exchange, and amplified sensory experience. Little”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“The Beatles introduced to the cultural lexicon several key Sixties motifs in one go: ‘mass’-ness, ‘working-class’ informality, cheery street scepticism, and -most challenging to the status quo - a simultaneity which subverted conventions of precedence in every way.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“Though framed in terms of sexual liberation and scaffolded by religious ideas imported from the Orient, the central shaft of the counterculture was drugs, and one drug above all: d-lysergic acid diethylamide 25, or LSD. Synthesised in 1938 by a Swiss chemist looking for a cure for migraine, LSD is a powerful hallucinogen whose function is temporarily to dismiss the brain’s neural concierge, leaving the mind to cope as it can with sensory information which meanwhile enters without prior arrangement - an uncensored experience of reality which profoundly alters one’s outlook on it. Recruited by Dr Timothy Leary to, the existing underground pharmacy of marijuana, mescalin, and magic mushrooms, LSD came to the attention of the mass media in early 1966 when, as state legislatures moved to ban it, Allen Ginsberg urged that all healthy Americans over the age of fourteen should take at least one ‘trip’ in order to perceive ‘the New Wilderness of machine America’ as it really was. ‘If there be necessary revolution in America,’ declared the poet, ‘it will come this way.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“The sexual repression of the past all but vanished from the world of the newly classless metropolitan young, but it took another decade to begin to disappear elsewhere; and while censorship was rolled back, homosexuality legalised, and women given the benefit of the pill and abortion on demand, the loosening of over-restrictive divorce laws inevitably created the conditions for the replacement of marriage by ‘relationships’ in the Seventies and a widespread collapse of the nuclear family during the Eighties. Immediate sexual gratification became the ideal of a society in which church-going was falling in inverse relationship to the rise in television ownership.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“Much of this flows from the literary cast of mind of such critics, many of whom originate in, or identify with, the campus/coffee-house folk-blues ethos which, mutated by electricity in 1965, continues to ensoul the US rock idiom. These writers expect lyrics to make a certain sense and, if not to carry significance or responsibility, then at least to have the decency to be authentically rooted in their appropriate sub-cultural contexts. The”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“In this way, England differs fundamentally from America. Though English audiences do appreciate soulful realism (particularly in the North, where sensibilities are down-to-earth), they are also more open than American audiences to artifice and aesthetic adventure, as well as to irony and bleakness.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“Outside the realm of public gossip, English popular culture invariably prefers an imaginative contrivance to almost any kind of truth.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“The anarchic-individualistic art school ethos has brought unusual invention and articulacy to British pop, ensuring that even when its forms cease evolving it can still ring changes in presentation and interpretation which provide the appearance of something new.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“The influence of the mid-to-late-Sixties English counterculture is clearer in The Beatles’ music than in that of any of their rivals. This arose from a conflux of links, beginning with their introduction by Brian Epstein to the film director Richard Lester, continuing with McCartney’s friendships with Miles and John Dunbar, and culminating in the meeting of Lennon and Yoko Ono. Through Lester and his associates - who included The Beatles’ comedy heroes Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers - the group’s consciousness around the time of Sgt. Pepper was permeated by the anarchic English fringe theatre, with its penchant for Empire burlesque (e.g., The Alberts, Ivor Cutler, Milligan and Antrobus’s The Bed Sitting Room). This atmosphere mingled with contemporary strains from English Pop Art and Beat poetry; the ‘happenings’ and experimental drama of The People Show, Peter Brook’s company, and Julian Beck’s Living Theatre; the improvised performances of AMM and what later became the Scratch Orchestra; the avant-garde Euro-cinema of Fellini and Antonioni; and the satire at Peter Cook’s Establishment club and in his TV show with Dudley Moore, Not Only . . . But Also (in which Lennon twice appeared). From the cultural watershed of 1965-6 onwards, The Beatles’ American heroes of the rock-and-roll Fifties gave way to a kaleidoscopic mélange of local influences from the English fringe arts and the Anglo-European counterculture as well as from English folk music and music-hall.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“As fundamental as they are for anyone seeking to understand the Lennon-McCartney partnership, McCartney’s assertions don’t discredit Lennon’s claim that ‘one on one, eyeball to eyeball’ collaborations (or start-to-finish fifty-fifty co-compositions) effectively ceased after the first year or so of their Parlophone contract.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“For the fact is that The Beatles’ way of doing things changed the way things were done and, in so doing, changed the way we expect things to be done. That the future is partly a consequence of the existence of The Beatles is a measure of their importance.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“Those raised on more traditional standards will listen to late-period Beatle songs and quite legitimately ask ‘but what do they mean?’ To reply that they mean something more general than traditional lyrics, that they were conceived as records not songs, may or may not explain much.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“The rest came from the sum of the parts of the record as a whole.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“They were, in short, instinctive, rather than rational, as artists - a trait which might be ascribed to their youth and social origin, but which owes most to the fact that they were working musicians rather than composers. All the great songwriting teams to have preceded them were, in that sense, composers rather than performers.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“Rather than tell a story in traditional Tin Pan Alley style, Lennon and McCartney wrote their lyrics to create a mood or a tone, so as not to get in the way of the effect created by the music and the sound.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

“If we were to ask average listeners what The Beatles’ lyrics mean, they would likely say very little. If, on the other hand, we asked the same listeners what The Beatles mean to them, we would get a very different response.”
― Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties