The Experimental Motion That Created The Beatles’ Weirdest Tune, “Revolution 9”

As of this writ­ing, the Bea­t­les’ “Rev­o­lu­tion 9″ has greater than 13,800,000 performs on Spo­ti­fy. This has little doubt gen­er­at­ed first rate rev­enue, even giv­en the plat­for­m’s oft-lament­ed pay­out charges. However com­pare that num­ber to the greater than half-a-bil­lion streams of “Black­fowl,” additionally on the Bea­t­les’ self-titled 1968 “white album,” and also you get an thought of “Rev­o­lu­tion 9”’s place within the band’s oeu­vre. Sim­ply put, even ultra-hard-core Fab 4 followers are likely to skip it. Regard­much less, as Ian Mac­Don­ald writes in Rev­o­lu­tion within the Head: The Bea­t­les’ Information and the Six­ties, “this eight-minute exer­cise in aur­al free asso­ci­a­tion is the world’s most vast­ly dis­trib­uted avant-garde arti­reality.”

Mas­ter­thoughts­ed by John Lennon, “Rev­o­lu­tion 9” is just not actual­ly a track, however somewhat an elab­o­charge “sound col­lage,” assem­bled in broad adher­ence to an aes­thet­ic devel­oped by such avant-garde cre­ators as William S. Bur­roughs, The Bea­t­les’ graph­ic design­er Richard Hamil­ton, John Cage, and Karl­heinz Inventory­hausen. “Whereas the cut-up texts of Bur­roughs, the col­lages of Hamil­ton, and the musique con­crète exper­i­ments of Cage and Inventory­hausen have remained the pre­serve of the mod­ernist intel­li­gentsia,” writes Mac­Don­ald, “Lennon’s sor­tie into son­ic likelihood was pack­aged for a most important­stream audi­ence which had nev­er heard of its prog­en­i­tors, not to mention been con­entrance­ed by their work.”

In the brand new Poly­phon­ic video above, Noah Lefevre takes a dive into these prog­en­i­tors and their work, professional­vid­ing the con­textual content to beneath­stand how “the Bea­t­les’ bizarre­est track” got here togeth­er. Factors of inter­est on this cul­tur­al-his­tor­i­cal jour­ney embody com­pos­er Pierre Scha­ef­fer­’s resis­tance-head­quar­ters-turned-exper­i­males­tal-music-lab Stu­dio d’Es­sai; Nazi Ger­many, the place the ear­ly Magazine­ne­tophon tape recorder was devel­oped; the BBC Radio­phon­ic Work­store; avant-garde rock­er Frank Zap­pa’s Stu­dio Z; and the Mil­lion Volt Mild and Sound Rave, a 1967 hap­pen­ing that host­ed “Automobile­ni­val of Mild,” a Bea­t­les com­po­si­tion nev­er heard once more since.

What did Lennon, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with George Har­ri­son and Yoko Ono (with whom he’d solely simply obtained togeth­er), suppose he was doing with “Rev­o­lu­tion 9”? “To the extent that Lennon con­cep­tu­al­ized the piece in any respect, it’s like­ly to have been as a sen­so­ry assault on the citadel of the intel­lect,” writes Mac­Don­ald, “a rev­o­lu­tion within the head aimed, as he pressured on the time, at every indi­vid­ual lis­ten­er — and never a Maoist incite­ment to social con­fronta­tion, nonetheless much less a name for gen­er­al anar­chy.” Certainly, as Lefevre factors out, it expressed his ambiva­lence in regards to the very con­cept of 1968-style revolt as a lot because the com­par­a­tive­ly con­ven­tion­al “Rev­o­lu­tion 1,” which comes ear­li­er on the album. The six­ties could also be lengthy over, however Lennon’s atti­tude has­n’t misplaced its rel­e­vance: we nonetheless hear an finish­much less stream of promised solu­tions to soci­ety’s prob­lems, and we’d nonetheless all like to see the plan.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How the Bea­t­les Exper­i­ment­ed with Indi­an Music & Pio­neered a New Rock and Roll Sound

The Bea­t­les’ 8 Pio­neer­ing Inno­va­tions: A Video Essay Explor­ing How the Fab 4 Modified Pop Music

Hear Paul McCartney’s Exper­i­males­tal Christ­mas Combine­tape: A Uncommon & For­obtained­ten Document­ing from 1965

The ten-Minute, Nev­er-Launched, Exper­i­males­tal Demo of The Bea­t­les’ “Rev­o­lu­tion” (1968)

How George Mar­tin Outlined the Sound of the Bea­t­les: From String Quar­tets to Again­wards Gui­tar Solos

Primarily based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks embody the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the e book The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social internet­work for­mer­ly referred to as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.