"I Am the Walrus" by The Beatles, Thursday, March 9, 2021

I didn't listen to much music today. Work is really busy on Tuesdays because I have a lot of classes on Wednesdays. My students will read two poems by Lewis Carrol from Through the Looking Glass. The second on is "The Walrus and the Carpenter," so of course, my favorite Beatles' song got stuck in my head. It's a daunting task to write about the Beatles. Every song they have released has its own field of research. The Beatles discography is like the bible of rock music, from which every sub-genre can be traced. And in the the Beatles discography, The Magical Mystery Tour album falls just after the beginning of what I would call their New Testament--the music after Sergeant Pepper Lonely Heart's Band, after which The Beatles showed both a maturity in songwriting and a fetish of experimentation in the studio.

GOO GOO G'JOOB. I may have first heard Bono's cover of this song in Across the Universe. The scene in the movie calls back to what Tom Wolfe wrote about in Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, talking about a time when hippie culture under the influence of hallucinogenics and Hare Krishna teaching from cult leaders was supposedly the solution to the American consumerism of the 1950s. And those Oxford-shirt-wearing academics couldn't deny the art coming out of American beat culture--Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs were the voice of a generation of counterculture. Then there were the folk songs of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. Rock music was a low art, and at first, was lyrically simple. That all changed with groups like the Beatles. With a new age of literary criticism and new lenses to analyze text academically, some academics were bringing in their rock album leafs to figure out the deeper truths contained in the vinyl. To that John Lennon wrote this to "Let the fuckers work this one out," claiming that it most mostly pure nonsense. But is it?

EXPERT, TEXTPERT, CHOKING SMOKERS, DON'T YOU KNOW THE JOKER LAUGHS AT YOU. What struck me today from reading "The Walrus and the Carpenter" is how Lewis Carrol uses nonsense to drive his point. He's writing for children, right? The poem is a kind of Pied-Piper, stranger-danger tale. The Walrus lures the young oysters onto the dry land so that he and The Carpenter can eat them. It's the classic stranger with candy driving a red van that parents work so hard to warn their kids against. This made me think about growing up being warned about the stranger in the van for adults: sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. When Lennon sings, "I am the walrus," does he mean that he's luring you into the van with his interesting words, much like The Walrus in the poem? That's what Dr. Robert did in Across the Universe. Or is it merely a red herring to lure the literature professors astray while taking a break from "kicking Edgar Allen Poe?"