Why Isn't ' Rubber Soul ' Our Favourite Beatles Album ?

Nobody expects a black person to like an old racist song lyric because it was "normal back then".

 

I like "Run For Your Life. " It's up-tempo, and the lyrics are soap opera. If he really intended to kill her, why would he tell her to hide her head in the sand (since that would not help if he really meant it)? He also says he means everything he says, but it's a sermon. What is sincere about a sermon (especially given John's views on religion)? Did John really "nearly die" in the song "No Reply"? It's adolescent melodrama.

 

The mono version of this album is literally Rubber Soul. The bass guitar throughout just sounds like rubber soul man or plastic soul. I think the bass sounds just so thick and rich and the song writing is amazing. Nowhere Man, Norwegian Wood, In My Life and If I Needed Someone are just amazing. Some of my favorite Beatle songs.
It is my favorite Beatles album by far. I even love What Goes On with that amazing guitar from Harrison.

 

People just seem to have the have trouble having empathy these days. It's unfortunate. Instead of trying to see the other persons point of view, it's all "cancel culture" this, "political correctness" that. Also, there seems to be a mixture of people who just miss the days of being able to be sexist, racist, etc. without consequences and those who genuinely care about the art.

There's nothing wrong with shining a light on things in the past that were offensive, it's not "cancel culture", it's just being honest with our history as a people.

 

Of course not. Nobody "has to like" what they don't like, especially something that they find offensive.

The point is -- do we have to agree with everything that is being said in a song to like it or tolerate it? It's up to each person to decide that. That's not how I approach music or movies, for instance. But if other people feel that way, so be it. I think, ultimately, it will be their loss.

"It was normal back then" does not mean that things were great back then. Surely a song like "Run for your Life" could be played on the radio back then. It was not a controversial or subversive song. So the artist was not making a special statement with it. They probably recorded "Run for your Life" just to the fill the record.

It speaks more about the time than about the artist, of course, IMO.

 

best way to start the ratrace at the office, reading this, thanks!!

 

I understood it never got much airplay, and there were many people who didn't like it at the time.

 

This is my favourite album. It might not be the ‘best collection of songs’ by The Beatles, but it their best album flow wise, both in the UK and US version.

 

I like the song and the voice of Lennon but the lyrics are pretty bad.

 

My big wrap-up:
I like Rubber Soul a lot, except I skip the last song. I have enjoyed learning about the U.S. edition of it. I like the cover image, the lettering is cool, I admire the quality and variety of music The Beatles recorded highly.

My final indulgence on a minor track on one edition, skip the rest if you prefer:
So long as I'm not told I'm wrong I think we're fine. How wrong can it be for a woman to dislike song lyrics about nothing but a guy with a "jealous mind" threatening a "little" woman with her becoming "dead"? Sometimes she's just vaguely warned of "the end" which could mean something else despite the advice to run for her life, but this is if she doesn't "toe the line"? I'm pretty sure many women listening today, or in the '80s as the case may've been, understood that it was considered normal or acceptable by some, to tell others in song to "run for their life if they can" from a "wicked" man who is "determined" when they were disobedient if he could suspect them of contact "with another man". People today know about such things that went on for a thousand years which used to be kept quiet or shut up about, or not believed. And the song tells us that back then a "little girl" would understand, or else the man will "make you". That seems pretty clear.

So, the woman/girl is the problem, the man/men are simply offering to "end" the problem, giving helpful advice to "hide" as an alternative if "caught" having any contact with "another man". Hopefully not for being caught thinking, or listening to song words. To paraphase another Beatles song , I don't want to have to hide my mind away. Are songs having words a problem? No wait, the word "sand" is in there, and apparently that word must mean something... no, it must mean a lot; "sand" means more than the words "dead", "little", "catch" and "run", so much much more than those words. I have to understand that.

Closing arugument:
"I mean everything I've said". The author of Run For Your Life and I totally agree on that part, I know I do, and he said he did right there in the end of the song. He grew to criticize and discount his own song, views and actions... and why not allow his opinion of his own words effect your of... his own words?. If there's one thing we know about John Lennon it's how he did not want people to think?

Music and art are definitely about people; author people, listener people, women people, men people... but people cause... a problem? We don't want no problems, no sir! "I love that song about the girl that's warned!" Now something that simple I'm still not too sure how to read, and we'll leave it there.

Thanks for the thoughtful posts about an album I like a lot and one song I don't!

 

It was never released as a single, that is the reason it did not get airplay.

 

Not really -- my point is that it didn't fit the persona he presented as part of the Beatles, but that it's a much closer fit for the worst parts of his behavior as a private citizen (which isn't a "persona"). John had a violent past, but through 1965, he didn't make that part of his public persona; only later did he integrate it, rather bravely too.

Let's be really careful here: he didn't almost beat up a guy, he did beat the crap out of him, period. (Perhaps you meant "almost killing a guy", which is indeed what Lennon said -- right?) And Lennon's own words make it clear that he hit women on multiple occasions. JL didn't downplay his own actions, so we have no reason to do so on his behalf.

----

Anyway, I listened to Help! last night and was surprised by how much more I enjoyed it than Rubber Soul. I grew up with the albums from Revolver through the White Album, plus Red/Blue, so I didn't hear Rubber Soul or Help! as a kid. Maybe that's why I have no attachment to Rubber Soul as an album: I like plenty of songs on it, but I have no attachment to the album experience. (I have no attachment to Help! either but I enjoyed every song and the flow of the album as a whole.)

I wonder if some of the spirited defense of Run For Your Life is because people feel like their childhood is being taken away from them -- like they're being told they were wrong to enjoy the album, and all those happy memories are being threatened.

Or, conversely, maybe people want this to be a community where everyone agrees on the untarnished greatness of the Beatles, and any dissent threatens that? Yet some of the same people defending Run For Your Life also think Revolution 9 is trash, so it can't be that exactly. (Some of the comments on this board about people who like Revolution 9 have been far nastier than anything said in this thread -- calling fans of the song "snowflakes", "sheep", "pretentious", "you must be lying, faking it or there must be something wrong with you", etc.)

Bottom line: for me, Rubber Soul isn't my favorite because (drumroll) I don't like it that much! Lots of great songs on it, including a couple of the band's best -- just not an "album experience" that I find especially rewarding.

 

I'm trying to remember how many album tracks I heard in the day on AM radio. Not many that's for sure. But...maybe Michelle? It wasn't completely unheard of for an album track to get airplay, but I'm confident it was the exception and not the norm.

 

BTW I've read a claim that Paul McCartney thought Run For Your Life was autobiographical -- but with John as the cheating girl! Now that would be an interesting twist.

 

Interesting. Reminds me of my parents and a friend of mine's parents. They were religious fundamentalists. They could not differentiate between the concrete and the superficial.

I remember some time in the early '70s I was at my friend's house and his parents were listening to Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Waters album and his mom had to get up and and skip the tune Cecilia and I even though I knew they were sort of zealots, I wondered what on earth could be wrong with Simon & Garfunkel then I remembered: the line about getting up out of bed and someone else has taken my place. Never mind the song had nothing to do with the reality of their own lives, the suggestion of something they didn't like made them pop up off the couch to switch. It's a shame CDs hadn't been invented yet.

Whoever said it was wrong to dislike anything? You can dislike a lyric, a sound, a person. It is preference. It's allowed. It's also allowed to parse your narrative.

It is normal and acceptable when it is understood that it's a rock 'n roll record, that is, a two-minute slice of auditory entertainment, and not a manual for living or a statement of justification for the lines being sung. Are you honestly suggesting that anyone, in 1965 or at any time later, thought of the tune as anything more than...wait for it...a tune? Do you believe male Beatles listeners were out there hearing Lennon and saying, "yer damn right, put that wumahn iner place, thas right!" ? I rather doubt it. I've known hundreds of Beatles fans in my life. None to my knowledge were abusers. Certainly not one would take Run For Your Life as anything more than an album track haven't listened to in a long time and never thought of anything more than a fantasy ditty about jealousy.

I mean, my gawd, have you not been exposed to what is "considered normal or acceptable" in, say, the last 35 years?

I don't know. I guess I can say I find Run For Your Life, mean or not, far, far more acceptable than, say:

Riskay – Smell Yo Dick Lyrics | Genius Lyrics

which, at first, hearing it in a movie, thought it had to be a put on, not a real release, kind of an updated Weird Al Yankovic or something. I was wrong. Smell Yo Dick. Nice around the breakfast table. Still, while I may find it incredibly stupid and disgusting, it's not up to me to sermonize strangers about their liking for it, because, it's a record. It may be an example of extraordinarily poor taste, but I find it hard to believe there is anyone out there smelling your...you get the picture. I believe it's an entertainment, not a picture of reality or a suggestion of what to do. I could be wrong.

Hmm. Track 14 on Rubber Soul encapsulates a thousand years of male abusive history and lends it justification? I feel a grad thesis coming on.

You'd have loved the early '70s, when high school and middle school English teachers began bringing in Beatles lyrics into the classroom as poetry and intoning how meaningful the songs were. I thought it was so cool. Now I think it was kind of ridiculous, but people change. Then, I thought my records were momentous statements and deeply meaningful. Lotta pot fueled window gazing with The Beatles as the soundtrack in those days. Now, I think of those things as records.

To be fair, I understand why the English teachers did it, why they started bringing in The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Dylan... they wanted, desperately, to generate some tiny spark of interest on the part of the thoroughly lazy and disinterested students and thought some rock lyrics might help, in addition to the hoped for coolness factor. Didn't work.

Kind of irrelevant, to me anyway. I never took Run For Your Life seriously, as a lyric anyway, or as a map for behavior, or as a totem for millennia of gender oppression and abuse, even if Lennon felt so enamored of himself and the importance of his oeuvre that he felt the need to disavow it. Harrison disavowed Don't Bother Me, said he wrote it while he had the flu. I love it. In the end it means nothing.

Good, because this is an utterly specious argument IMO. There are communities, and I have religious communities in mind, where speech is about as highly managed and regulated as you appear to support in your comments, and are filled with unbelievable loads of hypocrisy, abuse, oppression, outright lying, sporadic violence, mass violence, etc., all covered with the verbiage of love, respect, honor, etc. Clearly, managing language, "skipping" the offense, fails at doing anything other than diverting attention and focus to the superficial and not the significant.

Yes, people cause problems. Too many people IMO have been seduced into believing the word begets the problem and that if you eliminate the printed or recorded offense you solve the problem. For sure, in a weak mind, a set of words can influence, even prompt someone to act. It may be self-aggrandizement, but as a Beatles fan I rather think the majority of fans weren't quite that stupid, Manson excepted. Wait...it wasn't the lyric, it was his own crazy-ass interpretation of it. Bad example. Never mind. But...see how that works?

Let's say a song extols the fun you can have soaking a rag in gasoline, covering your mouth and nose with the rag and deeply inhaling the fumes. What can you say about the individual who hears that and acts on it? About their relative level of intelligence, I mean.

For all that explication I find myself wanting to hear a female cover of the tune. I have a feeling it would work because the focal point of the song isn't male oppression IMO it's jealousy and all the nastiness that particular useless human emotion can engender in the unbalanced, hormonal driven men and women.

People have completely lost sight here that women feel jealousy, too, and have felt it strongly. Hell, even my two kitties feel jealousy. Some unhinged women, just as their unhinged counterparts, have been driven to some incredibly violent acts because of it. Jealousy is not gender specific. One spectacular example I recall had the jilted and insanely jealous woman cut off her boyfriend/husband's genitals, carry his member off in the car and tossing it out the rolled down window onto the road. In fact, that particular act of mutilation - using shears - is less uncommon than one might assume in East Asia. I tend to think managing ones emotions is perhaps more important than managing lyrical expression or other kinds of thought expression people these days feel desperate to manage, censor, disappear from popular consciousness, etc.

Reading into Run For Your Life as the proximal definition of all that's wrong with men exclusively, or Lennon's psyche specifically, society at large, or the entirety of the milieu of sexual repression through the ages is about as sensible as laying blame for the downfall of Western society at Jazz music, or "race music" as they used to call it, or at The Beatles feet IMO. I remember -- there were sermons (take note of that word -- sermon) about that very topic -- The Beatles as a key facet of the decline of the West -- in 1968 and 1969. I find it not without irony that a Beatles song is considered emblematic of what's wrong with society again. Different era, different foci, same level of analysis, same sorts of zealotry.

Sorry, I have resurrect Keith Richards once again:

Keith Richards: The Rolling Stone Interview

"I mean, people, you can’t take a ****ing record like other people take a bible. It’s only a ****ing record, man. Goddamn it, you know, you might love it one day, you might hate it the next. Or you might love it forever, but it doesn’t mean to say that whatever it says in there you’ve got to go out and do, you’ve got to go out and say."

I could be wrong. Maybe Back In The USSR really meant The Beatles were in awe of the Soviet Union and that its people were unaware of how lucky they were and Western teens should stage a real revolution or at least try to emulate the Soviets.

Any takers?

For my part, I don't love Run For Your Life. I don't dislike it either. It smacks as filler, but I like the sound and at one time I liked the quirky "enda" pronunciation/affectation. Now I find it gimmicky. Still like the guitars and the lead break, though.

I have to say, though, that I find this focus on Run For You Life kind of amazing when there are tons of far more visible, far better known, and far more vicious examples of deeply and sincerely held misogyny, sexual violence, racial and gender stereotyping, etc., that have emerged in decades since and that impress as far more serious and sincerely felt, rather than something knocked off to fill out an album more than half a century ago, and that for some reason get a pass, while track 14 on a record released in November 56 years ago gets some fascinating focus and opprobrium. I could be wrong. Maybe it did go largely unnoticed as the modern bedrock manifesto to justify a thousand years of gender oppression and silent suffering. Who knew.

It's perfectly allowed to not like it and skip it, for whatever reason. It's not allowed to attribute liking the song with some kind of armchair psychological analysis to suggest people who like it support the narrative.

I love Art Garfunkel's rendition of the traditional Down In The Willow Garden. I doubt he'd go along with anyone who suggests the tune about murdering a rich girl for her money is somehow a good model of behavior or that his doing it is really emblematic of his own diseased psyche or of societies at large. If my analysis were that superficial, I'd skip it.

 

'Run For Your Life' - banned... in Quebec, 1992.

From the Gazette, Montreal, Dec. 10, 1992:

 

When it wasn't part of an all-star medley...

Times Herald, Port Huron, Michigan - July 23, 1966:

 

Rock Island Argus - Rock Island, IL - January 8, 1966
'Run For Your Life' called 'special':

 

There are quite a few contemporary reviews (1966-1969) calling the US Rubber Soul and its contents 'Folk, Folk-Rock, Rock-Folk, and Folksy'. It was in the air, and the album and/or songs were described as such.

Here are a few.

Los Angeles Times - January 6, 1966.
'Why Teens Switched to Folk Rock':



Oakland Tribune, January 29, 1966.
Review says Folk-like/Folk-Rock:

 

Miami Herald Sun, March 27, 1966
4-Track Reel review: 'blend of C&W, folk, blues, French music hall, rock'...

 

The News (Paterson, New Jersey) - March 16, 1967
Raga Rock - Pre-Pepper article - they think Rubber Soul is 'folksy'.

 

Charlotte Observer - March 10, 1968
'A Square’s Rock Library':

 

San Franciso Examiner - Ralph J. Gleason - February 6, 1966
Just his Review:

 

I think there would've been people who heard the Run For Your Life lyrics in 1966 and thought them clumsy or oddly unfunny, sticking out on a Beatles record, but many even now pay no attention to actual words much. I'm sure most published reviews of a Beatles song were going to keep to the usual lighter angle of the day which it's sound with harmony and bounce did. People defend it here as in the blues tradition, but the reviews at the times heralded Rubber Soul's folk-rock influence and that wouldn't have fit with what they were selling. Reviews then were part of selling a product, only later with Ralph Gleason in the San Francisco Chronicle did there start to be more depth in appraisals of rock music. Before then you might even see exact phrases from the press release that came with the review copy verbatim in a number of reviews.

The author's ultimate assessment has no weight for some but for me it is vital.

"Sort of a throwaway”

“I didn’t think it was that important”

“I never liked it”

“I always hated that one”

- John Lennon

 

Personal judgements and exaggerated claims for my being a religious censor are out of line. A woman doesn't like a song and some respond by attacking her? I think that says a lot more about them than about myself or John Lennon.