Tomorrow Never Knows
Or: A long and boring song review I'm writing solely for my own amusement.
The Beatles. The most revolutionary and most popular band the world has ever known - yet how many songs does the common man aged thirty know of? As i was driving to get my Maccas meal on that fateful Monday night in late October, I heard for the first time a Beatles song on air. I turned the dial up in amazement. It was a humdinger of a song too, 1969's 'Come Together'. I admired John Lennon's bizarre lyrics and the rhythmic blues backing beat.
Now there was a cool band I thought.
If you know me - which you don't - you'll know I enjoy anything artistic which has a surreal edge or something artful that has deep engrained credibility. Something that ages well that can be admired from a certain perspective many years down the track. Modern pop music doesn't have any of that. Its as unmemorable as the McDonalds meal that I had that night. The Beatles were the first at everything. They were both Rock and Avant Garde, popular yet abstract. They were a hybrid of all the fantastic elements future great bands would demonstrate in their wake.
This past year has been dominated by one Beatles song in particular. Tomorrow Never Knows. It is everything I love about the surreal summed up in less than three minutes. To fully appreciate the song, a particular leap of faith must be taken. Because a song this old, generations removed from it's original release in 1966, sounds nothing like todays music. Is it dated then? Fuck no. It still sounds as strange now as it did back then.
With tape loops, orchestral samples, altered vocals, indian tambouras, non-standard relentless drum patterns and seagull sounds, the song is as dense and layered as it is beautiful. It's not for no reason it's my most played song of 2015.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag58k2elaYs
The clip above is the best music video I could find of the song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a3NcwfOBzQ
But it is this above video that Ill be using for all my music cues.
An in depth look at Tomorrow Never Knows
The 13th track on Revolver album 'Got To Get You Into My Life' draws to a close. It seems like a perfectly good way to close the album... that is until the George Harrisons droning Tamboura begins to swell and Ringo Stars crashing drums ignite a surreal trip into the ether. Just before John Lennon begins to sing, strange noises that resemble seagulls pierce the ears. 'Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream' Lennon begins, but as he reaches the second part of the verse, the 'it is not dying' part, he is pushed aside by an incredible, haunting orchestral chord played in B flat major at 0:19. As he repeats himself, the first appearance of the bizarre tape loops occur, while the orchestral chord drops down an octave and leaves you feeling all warm and tingly until it rears it's head again at 0:34.
The philosophical lyrics continue: 'Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void. It is shining, it is shining - Yet you may see the meaning of within. It is being, it is being.' Each verse delivered with a biting harmonistic orchestral chord. Then at 0:56 the song says a big fuck you to convention and throws all it's tape loops into one incredible montage of abstract beauty. Only the relentless drums and rhythm section give away clues that you're still listening to a structured song.
Then, as if beamed in from another dimension, enter Paul McCartney's backwards guitar solo at 1:08. Complemented by a rising orchestral note at 1:12 and 1:20 it appears and disappears as if its moving through all the higher dimensions before finishing on a satisfying finale note at 1:22.
Almost as if he's been quiet for too long, Lennon bursts back into song at 1:27 (with a weird beep intentionally put in at 1:28 to signify the halfway point of the song - reminiscent of the phone company or AM radio stations hourly time check) this time however, the orchestral chord that is suppose to start at 1:34 is absent. Oh no! They haven't decided to eliminate it for the songs second half have they? Fear not - at 1:50 this beautiful climbing harmony note creeps back into our conscious awareness before leaving you with goosebumps by the end of it's 7 second run.
The song begins to throw in everything, the seagull sounds return, the tape loops become ever more apparent and then the orchestral chord returns at full volume at 2:05 for the first time since before the backwards guitar solo.
'Or play the game existence to the end - of the beginning' sings Lennon on repeat as the song draws to a close. The trailing seconds of the track paint an image of the world winding down and pulling apart, as it were, by centrifugal force; or, if you will, like pinwheel slowing down sufficiently so that you can see beyond its blurred spinning image to the individual frames of which that image is made.
As the smoke clears, a number of musical elements emerge that you'd never guess had been there all along; most notably, a furiously flailing tack piano. I wonder, though — were these newly emerging elements really there all along, or is it a matter of a deftly handled aural illusion? And, by the way — to the extent that the illusion works so well, you might say it doesn't really matter if the piano was really there all along or not!
Tomorrow Never Knows remains one of The Beatles greatest achievements - it's just such a shame their own success (and the fact it's half a century old) kept it from being a better known song.
