To be honest, I’m not a massive Beatles fan. There it is, I said it, so fuck you. I get that it was groundbreaking, pioneering, but what do I care? It’s music for dead people, or at least, for the living dead. Obviously, from the perspective of musical history and twentieth century culture, I recognize that you can’t ignore the Fab Four, and the amazing thing about them is that their post-Help! albums still stand up to scrutiny, despite the fact that they were, arguably, the first of their kind. From the little that I understand, Rubber Soul signified a quantum leap in the quality of the Beatles albums, a departure from the poppy, pretty boy, bubblegum stuff of Beatlemania, and into something a bit, well, darker and more confessional – into rock music, you might say. Some say that this was the first real album in the history of rock music, in the sense that it was made as an album, as a cohesive piece of art, rather than as a knock-off collection of singles (which was apparently where the money had been at up until that point).
Either way, Rubber Soul is basically the template for rock music for the following – arguably – 70 years. I recently listened to the new albums by Sam Fender and Noel Gallagher and, in effect, they’re still in the same mold initially created by the Beatles in the 60s. That’s absolutely astonishing. As Rob Sheffield of the Rolling Stone put it, “we are all living in the future that this album invented.” And so this is why I begin my tentative exploration of the history of rock music with Rubber Soul.
With that said, will I come back and listen to it all that frequently? No. From the perspective of someone born in 1983 and who didn’t explore the Beatles for some thirty years, it’s nothing special. Some of it sounds kind of quaint and irritating in its 1960s chirpiness, to be honest. Again, I recognize that it’s pioneering, but that is not my basis for judging it. I’m asking if I want to sit and listen to it, given everything else that’s available to me. And the answer is, at best, maybe some of it, occasionally…
“Drive my Car”, for example. It’s a quirky and amusing opener about, I guess, a wannabe movie star who is happy to let the narrator ferry her around until she makes it big. Scathing, humorous lyrics, lots of energy – a very good opening gambit. Apparently, it was replaced with something folkier on the US mix, because bearded bores with acoustic guitars were all the rage on the Western side of the Atlantic at the time, but that’s ancient history. In fact, you can hear the influence of precisely that style of music on the second song, “Norwegian Wood”, which personally I find a bit unsettling. It’s ostensibly a light-hearted folk song, but the lyrics are strangely, disconcertingly plaintive and dream-like, while the chorus is oddly foreboding. Creepy as hell…
Speaking of which, this album is remarkably full of bad feeling. Weren’t the Beatles supposed to be the prophets (profits?) of love and understanding? Because a fairly high percentage of the songs on Rubber Soul seem to be about how much the Fab Three hate their callous, egotistical ex-girlfriends (no prizes for guessing which of the four does not count as fab – although when I was a kid, the narration of Thomas the Tank Engine made more impact on me than anything written by the Beatles). “You Won’t See Me” is about some femme fatale ghosting Paul. The Tennessean twang of “What Goes On”, coupled with the despairing and outraged lyrics, make it sound a bit unhinged, a bona fide nutjob in a straw hat whose view of women is as black-and-white as his checkered shirt. “Girl” is soppier, glummer, but the sentiment is equally resentful and seething, and this time John throws in some amateur psychoanalysis to complete the character assassination. Paul rounds off this rather poisonous triplet with “I’m Looking Through You”, in which some tart – maybe the one that ghosted him in “You Won’t See Me”– is discovered to be a superficial snake in the grass. George weighs in with “Think for Yourself”, in which he tells a (possibly) ex-girlfriend that she sucks, is surplus to requirements, and that she needs to get a brain.
Maybe “Michelle” also belongs in this category, though apparently it started as a bit of a joke song which was then rewritten into an amusing, memorable, stereotypically French sounding blues number. But perhaps the crowning glory – if you can call it that – of Rubber Soul’s hating-on-your-ex-girlfriend core is the closer, “Run for your Life”, a jaunty little number in which John, the icon of 1960s hippiedom, quite literally threatens to murder his main squeeze. Oh dear. In any case, it’s a dramatic departure from “I wanna hold your hand.”
There are obviously brighter moments on the album. “The Word” is about the importance of peace, love, and understanding, and it is, to be honest, a bit forgettable. “In My Life” is also a good-natured number, apparently declared the “best song of all time” by Mojo magazine in the year 2000. Overegging the pudding a bit, if you want my opinion, though it’s a good song, Lennon reflecting sentimentally on his past, the big softie. This is the same guy who would flirt with the idea of murder just two songs later, but then artists are complex, are they not? It’s got a great piano solo as well, reputedly recorded by George Martin. “If I Needed Someone” also leaves a pleasant taste in the mouth – is it about un-friend zoning a good friend? Anyway, it’s pretty neat.
These little rays of sunshine notwithstanding, the mean-spirited cherchez la femme songs arguably provide the, er, soul of Rubber Soul. But the album’s best song, “Nowhere Man”, belongs in neither category. It’s a ballad to pure nihilism and directionlessness. Maybe a diagnosis of the postmodern condition before the advent (or at least the spread) of Foucaultian ultra-relativism. Or an existentialist song, the inner voice of Albert Camus’ ghostly Meuersault in The Stranger. Or maybe just John waking up with a hangover and wanting to fuck the whole thing off.
Either way, in my opinion, “Nowhere Man” is the highlight of this remarkably bad-tempered and bad-natured album. If this is the record where the Beatles grew up, left juvenile love songs behind, and dived into burgeoning adulthood, then they certainly went in two-footed and included liberal dollops of angst, Weltschmerz, and in fact, venom. The core of Rubber Soul is about hating your (ex)girlfriend – maybe it should be called Rubber Sole, in reference to John’s boot stamping on Alma Cogan’s face.
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Highlights: “Nowhere Man”, “Norwegian Wood”, “In My Life”