I know, why the Beatles. They've had a lot of influence which should be examined. There are three songs which cause us to emote a certain way about life, but I think they're incomplete or just wrong:
Let it Be: Words of wisdom, really? Though I'm not completely sure what it's getting at, it seems to advocate a passive, apathetic, non -participatory existence.
All You Need Is Love: We certainly want and even need love, but that's not all there is. I think we can achieve fulfillment by giving and needing love, but there are other paths as well. For some, it may not even be available, but that doesn't mean their lives can have no meaning.
Imagine: "Imagine all the people living life in peace". Of all their songs, this is the most erroneous. We aren't here to float through life without contention. Evil people will always be here, putting their own importance above the rest of us and causing discord. Then in the next breath the song asks us to imagine no heaven, which seems to be a contradiction. Yes, live life for today as in not for some life to come, but that doesn't mean to live life only for the moment at hand either.
We're here to love, discover, create and when necessary, take a stand.
I'm not picking on the Beatles, just these particular songs. They had a lot of others. Two of my favorites are the whimsical
Rocky Raccoon, with whom I identity having learned early that Gideon has checked out; and
Because.
I like this version even better than the Beatles':
Because - Across the Universe - YouTube
First of all you're trying to read way too much into simple songwriting. There was a lot of that going around in the day.
Let it Be: simply an everyday reflection of current events within the band. Brian Epstein had died, the group felt directionless, Lennon wasn't particularly taking charge, and McCartney took it upon himself to sort of direct things, come up with ideas like doing Magical Mystery Tour and the live-no-overdubs idea (which eventually degraded into the
Let it Be album) -- anyway in the midst of this stress load McCartney, a notorious workaholic, dreams of his mother who died in his teens who tells him in the dream to not take on so much work and just "let it be", which he then makes into a song. That's what "mother Mary" means-- it's his mother's name.
Conceiving songs in dreams wasn't limited to this;
Yesterday channeled the same way, as did
In My Life for Lennon. Lennon and McCartney, who had a perpetual songwriting rivalry going on, were both trying to write a nostalgic song about Liverpool; McCartney came up with (IMHO his best work)
Penny Lane; Lennon tried one idea, then another, nothing was working, so he went to bed and in his REM sleep came
In My Life. True story.
All You Need is Love is simple sarcasm and should be read that way. Lennon was a master at sarcasm. It's a mockery of simplistic thinking that 'all you need is love", a sublime simplism in a time where anti-establishment sentiment was popular but forgot that some kind of establishment is always necessary; hence the sarcasm of "all you need".
Imagine has been dissected here by others, and there was a separate thread recently by PoliticalChic. It's simply a longing for a world without the conflicts that we create for ourselves. Keeping in mind of course that Lennon had a lot of time logged on LSD, the exposure to which strips away those silly façades and leaves such visions available to the mind, however temporarily.
Because has the distinction of being the very last song the Beatles recorded as a group of four. It involved painstaking scoring by George Martin for the three voices, which were multitracked into (I think) nine. Not much in the way of meaning -- the philosophy of "random" was rampant at the time -- but nice harmonies, which is a trademark of Lennon's writing, which tended to be "horizontal" as opposed to McCartney's more "vertical" lyrical style. The melody is inspired by Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
I can strongly recommend Ian McDonald's book
Revolution In the Head for these backstories and their meanings as applied both to the songwriters themselves and to the world they lived in.
Have a look at this guy multitracking himself a version of Because that gives an idea of the work that went into its arrangement -- he does each part singly:
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWONqXt1XZ8"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWONqXt1XZ8[/ame]
-- and then all the parts put together and tripled:
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pe5_dpJkCQ"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pe5_dpJkCQ[/ame]
Big credit to George Martin for this arrangement.
Bottom line throughout: it's easy to overthink Lennon and/or McCartney songs into far more than they meant to represent.
Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite for example is simply a 19th century circus poster set to music with inventive sound effects. Doesn't mean anything deeper than that. Occasionally there would be but the real deep-meaning stuff was the domain of George Harrison; Dajjal has posted more about that.
