30 Day Song Challenge
Day 08: A Song That You Know All The Words To
It’s been a busy couple of weeks here at Audio Justice HQ, perhaps illustrated by the delay between these blog posts. I’m fitting them in where I can, but in addition to trying to finish the ‘House of Cards‘ album I’m also in the throes of moving house. In fact, we’re due to move into our new place this coming week, so I’ve been trying to manage a 50/50 split of recording/packing with not a lot of available time for anything else in between! Still, these 30 Day Song Challenge posts aren’t going to write themselves…
‘It’s been a hard days packing, and I’ve been working like a cat’. Willow, yesterday.
The challenge for Day 08 is a ‘a song you know all the words to’. As you might expect, the shortlist would be pages long, and as my mind started to wander I thought about which songs would be listed repeatedly if we were all asked to put together a shortlist of songs we knew the words to. It seemed pretty clear that The Beatles were going to feature somewhere near the top of that list.
Aside from their ability to produce killer melody after killer melody, much of the success of The Beatles’ music is down to how direct their lyrics were. Without patronising the listener, Lennon and McCartney (and occasionally Harrison) managed to communicate with us in such a way that even the most casual of listeners could grasp the message of each song without too much head scratching.
With it’s straightforward lyrical approach, A Hard Day’s Night was one of The Beatles most successful singles.
Songs like ‘Yesterday‘, ‘A Hard Day’s Night‘ and ‘Hello Goodbye‘ were immediate successes due in some part to their lyrical accessibility. This helped the fab four spread their wings into non-English speaking territories too, where even the most basic grasp of the English language would have enabled you to pick out keywords to relate to. In fact, I remember hearing many interviews over the years with foreigners who claim to have been able to learn English by listening to The Beatles over and over. Russia was one such non-English speaking country where the influence of Liverpool’s finest was being felt by an underground network of music lovers; while being a Beatles fan in the west was easy, it wasn’t so in the Eastern Bloc.
Access to Western culture in the former communist states of eastern and central Europe was very difficult indeed. As it was illegal in the USSR to bring an album by The Beatles into the country, smuggling was the only way of obtaining one. These illegal records would be sold for a fortune on the black market, and if you were successful in slipping one through the net then you would have to keep it close to your chest; if you were found to have a Beatles album it would be confiscated and destroyed (if only they would adopt the same approach to Keane records today). It must have been very emotional to have lived through this era in the Soviet Union and then witnessed Paul McCartney performing Beatles songs in Moscow’s Red Square some 40 years later, especially when he blasted out ‘Back In The USSR’!
Marxist-Leninism is defeated by McCartnist-Lennonism!
As well as language barriers, the simple lyrical structure to many Beatles songs has proved successful with differing age groups. I remember buying my five year old niece a copy of The Beatles ‘Number 1‘ album (hey, you’ve got to start them young!) and it didn’t take long for each song, particularly the early material, to become something that she could sing along to. She’ll be eight in a month, so she should be about ready for some Wings albums next hehe!
Anyway, for Day 08 of the Audio Justice 30 Day Song Challenge, ‘a song you know all the words to’, I’m going to list ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ by The Beatles.
Got a favourite Beatles song? Any thoughts on how much of The Beatles’ success was down to their lyrical simplicity? Join in the conversation below, I’d love to hear your thoughts. In the meantime, I’d better crack on with some more packing…
Dan
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