Why Was Eleanor Rigby Picking Up Rice?

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Slokes, Jun 25, 2010.

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  1. munson66

    munson66 Forum Dilettante

    Location:
    Toronto, Ontario
    Why was their tambourine green, anyway? Did they use magic marker around the edges to make it sound better?
     
  2. Slokes

    Slokes Cruel But Fair Thread Starter

    Location:
    Greenwich, CT USA
    Really great responses, people, even if the truth may be more open-ended then I realized.

    It's a load off my mind now knowing birds don't die needlessly every time a couple gets hitched.
     
  3. Chip TRG

    Chip TRG Senior Member

    Or possibly the same jar that was in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.
     
  4. bumbletort

    bumbletort Senior Member

    Location:
    Baltimore, Md, USA
    To get to the other side.
     
    Figbert likes this.
  5. JLGB

    JLGB Senior Member

    Location:
    D.R.
    Yes. Thread should have ended right there (post #6).
     
    Figbert likes this.
  6. Lord_Gastwick

    Lord_Gastwick Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pasadena, CA, USA
    She's wistfully picking up a handful of rice (I think) rather than systematically cleaning the floor.
     
  7. OnTheRoad

    OnTheRoad Not of this world

    :laugh:

    Coincidentally the steps at the church were made of Norweigan Wood. And that's a whole 'nuther story !! :laugh:
     
  8. yogibear

    yogibear Active Member

    Location:
    Roy, Utah, USA
    she was collecting the rice and saving it for a meal.
     
  9. 905

    905 Senior Member

    Location:
    Midwest USA
    Why do people think she was picking it up to eat?
     
  10. Metralla

    Metralla Joined Jan 13, 2002

    Location:
    San Jose, CA
    Because they're hungry?
     
  11. numer9

    numer9 Beatles Apologist

    Location:
    Philly Burbs
    Because it would mean she was poor?
    That's how I took it.
     
  12. Henry the Horse

    Henry the Horse Active Member

    Really?
    "Ticket To Ride", "Day Tripper", "Nowhere Man", and "Paperback Writer" were too "teenybopper"?
     
  13. 905

    905 Senior Member

    Location:
    Midwest USA
    She cleans up the rice because cleaning the church is her job. She wouldn't have to eat wedding rice unless she wanted to.
    Eleanor was lonely, and what it makes it sad is that she was around all these social events, but was never a part of them besides cleaning up afterwards.
     
    nikh33 likes this.
  14. Gerbaby

    Gerbaby Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    It was common to throw rice at weddings prior to the advent of confetti. The Beatles were ahead of their years ( academically ) Placing pennies on the eyes of the dead was also a tradition in many parts of the world. ( who ever came up with that line in Taxman ? Brilliant )
    I am sure if you went through the Beatles canon you would find a lot of abstract references that most twenty somethings would not understand. Paul's lyrics while in the Beatles were as good as Johns,he just didn't look the academic/scholar like John. ( Must have been the glasses in later years )
     
  15. Anthology123

    Anthology123 Senior Member

    I think its open to many interpretations, but I agree with the idea that she is picking up the rice thrown after a wedding shows other people getting married at the church, but not her, and her closest participation to a wedding is picking up the rice after it is thrown, and not being in a wedding of her own.
     
  16. munson66

    munson66 Forum Dilettante

    Location:
    Toronto, Ontario
    I disagree. That post answered a question that wasn't asked.
     
  17. Sordel

    Sordel Forum Resident

    Location:
    Switzerland
    Just necro'ing this thread because of a BBC News report I saw today that irritated me.

    In the first place, yes, clearly Eleanor Rigby is picking up rice because she is cleaning up after a wedding. I doubt that this is her job: she is just volunteering at the church because this is an absolutely stereotypical activity for a parish spinster. Anyone who thinks that she is picking up the rice to eat just doesn't 'get' the cultural milieu in which the song takes place.

    Right, now the report:

    So this pretentious ***** managed to waste a million pounds on a sculpture without the first idea of what the song is about? There is absolutely no support in the song for the idea that Rigby is a bag lady. She waits at the window and keeps her face in a jar by the door: i.e. she is not sleeping rough. When she is buried along with a name, the point is not that her name was the only thing that she owned but that no one remembered it after her death.

    The sculpture is supposed to show that 'money isn't the only way to make you happy' but how? Whatever else Eleanor Rigby is, she is not happy, she is lonely, and Brown has decided to make her poor as well: he equates lack of money with unhappiness more strongly than The Beatles did, evidently. If he wanted to show that there were other ways to be happy, why didn't he do a sculpture of a bag lady dancing in the rain, or a millionaire hanging himself? How does the sculpture deliver its supposed message?

    On top of which, the statue itself is a 'darned' (see what I did there?) eyesore.

    So ... once again Liverpudlians invoke the name of The Beatles in the hope of ennobling some other chancer ... :realmad:
     
  18. nikh33

    nikh33 Senior Member

    Location:
    Liverpool, England
    Some Liverpudlians. It's not like all 800,000 of us voted (or 2 million if you count the entirety of the Liverpool/Merseyside districts). And who are the other chancers we, er, ennobled (?)?
     
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  19. Baba Oh Really

    Baba Oh Really Certified "Forum Favorite"

    Location:
    mid west, USA
    She's picking up the rice as a "keepsake" because she knows it is the closest she will ever become to actually getting married.
     
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  20. Kim Olesen

    Kim Olesen Gently weeping guitarist.

    Location:
    Odense Denmark.
    In Denmark it's always rice.
     
  21. Sordel

    Sordel Forum Resident

    Location:
    Switzerland
    No. Eleanor Rigby does not keep two sacks of keepsake rice in her home. She's lonely, not bonkers. As I said, parish work is completely in keeping with a spinster life; don't make it more complicated than it needs to be. We, the listeners, are of course conscious of the contrast between the happiness of the wedding and the loneliness of the woman cleaning up after it, but there is no need for Eleanor herself to be conscious of it. She may be, she may not be.
     
  22. Baba Oh Really

    Baba Oh Really Certified "Forum Favorite"

    Location:
    mid west, USA
    She's quite conscious of it. "Lives in a dream." A dream that one day she will be married, so she picks up the rice to keep as some sort of a "talisman" to that end. (or, even if it is the case that it is her job to sweep the church floor and she discards it, everything else I am saying here is 100% correct)

    But what's lost on her is that you have to put in effort (ah yeah all sorts of effort) to actually get what she wants. Eleanor Rigby was a "dreamer", not a "go-getter". She daydreamed but refused to get her hands "dirty".

    This sentiment has been played though over and over again in popular music over the years! Here is one of those such songs:

     
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  23. Sordel

    Sordel Forum Resident

    Location:
    Switzerland
    Isn't the whole point of living in a dream that one is not conscious? I say again, she might be conscious of her loneliness, but I don't think that's the point of the song. The point is that she is lonely whether or not she knows it.

    Barring evidence to contrary, it's fair to assume that she did not die young, and it is in keeping to think of her at the time of the song as (at least) middle-aged. Once you got to a certain age as a woman in England at the time of The Beatles, your likelihood of getting married was virtually nil, so it's not fair to assume that she wasn't making an effort. In fact, we know that when she goes home she puts on a face (her domestic face ... people think that somehow this is her outside face but it's the face she wears at the window): even at home on her own she is prepared to meet the person who will resolve her loneliness, and we are explicitly told that she is waiting at the window for that person.

    The question as to where all the lonely people come from is rhetorical: the answer is not 'well, they're lonely because they're too shiftless to go out to a dance and pair off'. The loneliness is not her fault, any more than Father McKenzie's loneliness is his fault.

    The lyric is rather impressionistic so it seems very literal to dot every i and cross every t, but I think it's a lot less confusing than people make out. On Wikipedia they seem to think that Father McKenzie is in some way Rigby's soulmate who she fails to meet, but I suspect that she meets him every day since she picks up rice in his church and actually dies there as well. Personally, I always assumed that he was a Catholic priest and ineligible to marry; hypothetically he is Protestant, but Anglican priests are more usually married and McCartney is dealing in pretty well-worn stereotypes here.
     
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  24. nikh33

    nikh33 Senior Member

    Location:
    Liverpool, England
    Remarkable.
    OK, now who wants to have a guess at why Father Mackenzie is 'darning his socks'?
    :-popcorn:
     
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  25. nikh33

    nikh33 Senior Member

    Location:
    Liverpool, England
    I'm going to have that printed on a T shirt
     
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