Expand your horizons into electronic music — you’ll find the structure/style that Revolution #9 fits into was established 30 years before The White Album. Revolution #9 added nothing to the genre . . . the only novelty is that it appeared on a rock album. Look up Musique Concrete — it’s a fascinating exercise, but it exhausted itself almost immediately. Musique concrète - Wikipedia
Talk about humorless. You would know. :—) Anyway, Marcel found it all funny. Quite a comedian, he was.
My opinion? I don’t really understand the question. That’s like asking, what’s your opinion on Rock Music . . . That said, I’m sure Musique Asphalt rocks the house.
I’d call it genius. It sure blew my mind, and forever changed the very concept of what music is. I’ve said this before and I still feel the same - if you can’t appreciate Revolution 9, you must be dead inside.
John deconstructing Beatles myth in my opinion. How he does so also carries the torch for music revolution, cutting up tapes out of context, no longer knowing which way is up, integrating heaven & hell, both beautiful & horrific. Given our chaotic times, John’s impression of revolution may not be too far off the mark.
Since there is no metric to prove or disapprove Genius this type of thing my opinion if pretty much any other artist/band had done Rev #9 it would have been forgotten in 1967. Which I feel would have been a good thing.
1968 was also the same year as George Romero's landmark Night Of The Living Dead. Perhaps horror's equivalent of The White Album. The zombies were certainly dead inside. Or so it looked like. I got the enduring classic que'd up for this month by the way. But now I'm really going off tangent...
It's the centerpiece of the album, and it's a cornerstone of the 60s. Everyone and their grandma at least knows about Revolution 9 and gets the reference to Number 9, even if they haven't heard it all the way through. I really like it . . . it's an artifact of what John and Yoko and George were thinking at the time.
Well said. I once said that "Revolution 9 and Good Night" play as summaries of the album, to my ears. That to not "get" these two tracks is to essentially disregard the entire album. That's just my humble take of course. No one has to like either track, yet to my ears Revolution 9 is no more bizarre than the fragmented and peculiarly mixed emotions comprising the chaotic running order leading into it.
Cry, Baby, Cry ~> Revolution 9 ~> Good Night It’s been said before, such superb sequencing. Sometimes they can be picked apart individually, but it holds together so well!
The Beatles made few mistakes when sequencing an album. The White Album was well thought out. It's been said before but Side 1) Heavy Hitters 2) acoustic and animal farm 3) Harder Rock etc...
And here i thought Yoko just enjoyed having someone cut pieces of her clothing off while she sat quietly in front total strangers.
This is one o' those tunes I like to get out the ol' acoustic guitar by the campfire and have a singalong with.
I regard Revolution 9 as audacious. I don't think it's a work of genius but to put it out in the mainstream was a bold move. As others have said on this thread, it has been influential. I don't listen to it often but I'm always drawn into it when I do.
It's excellent. The only problem "Revolution No 9" has was caused by its inclusion on a Beatles album. If it had been slid onto "Life With The Lions", it would be regarded as a highpoint of the avant-garde JohnandYoko albums on Apple but would be of fringe interest only to a lot of Beatles fans. However, put it on a double LP crammed with songs and pop it on the same side as a 20's flapper girl song, a creepy lullaby, a song about a box of chocolates and a Hollywood leading man's closing number and you have a completely different set of expectations, preconceptions and potential critics. Side 4 of "The Beatles" is their most important side. Not their best, but in terms of our understanding of their trajectory, of why they had less than 12 months left as a group after they finished the album, completely essential and no consideration of the group's post-Pepper slow dissolve can be taken seriously without it.