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An ode to joy and sorrow...
 There will never be a true consensus as to the most “popular” song produced by the Beatles, and although “A Day In The Life” ranks very high in the various polls of the greatest rock songs of all time, it is consistently ranked below other perennial McCartney favorites like “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be.” However, as a compelling example of the Lennon-McCartney collaboration at the height of their powers, it arguably has no equal.
One of Lennon and McCartney’s great gifts was to effortlessly explode false myths, in
songs like “Revolution,” where changing the world is laudable but “carrying pictures of Chairman Mao” is a disarming slant at false idolatry. “A Day In The Life” equally and effortlessly disarms us of the false idolatry of celebrity and trivia when it leads to a monstrous lack of empathy, or standing around wondering if a car crash victim “is a member of the House of Lords…”.
The recent choice by music critics of “A Day In The Life” as the Best British Song is equally apt in that it speaks to Lennon and McCartney’s – often overlooked – wonderful and uniquely British sense of humor. They were both masters at “taking the piss,” or humorously deflating some serious or self-important person or situation, in songs like “Her Majesty” (the Queen) and “Back in the U.S.S.R.” (the Beach Boys’ sound). In fact, humorously deflating false myths was a leitmotif of their collaboration, never taking themselves too seriously, but in John Lennon the contrapuntal tendency was a disarming capacity to state the bare truism without irony or cliché, as in “Give Peace a Chance” or “All You Need Is Love.”
In “A Day In The Life” that propensity reaches a poetic fullness, where in three short stanzas he disarms us of the scaffolding of what is “newsworthy,” of what matters, of how a focus on the trivial can obstruct us from true empathy, now that “we know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall…”. These lines are undeniably funny, but here they are tempered with a deep sense of social commitment to a shared humanity beneath our myths, which is very much a Lennon and McCartney keystone.
Another great theme of their collaboration is a tremendous capacity to evoke melancholy or loss, a sense of what once was possible but is now pressingly absent from our life. In songs like “Yesterday” or “Eleanor Rigby” this tendency is so strong as to feel almost heavy-handed, as we are drawn into a maudlin, bottomless sense of loss. In contrast, in “A Day In The Life” the palpable aura of sorrow and loss remains a powerful but ill-defined undercurrent to his words, evident most fully in his haunting delivery, “…though the news was rather sad/ I just had to laugh/ I saw the photograph…”.
These two great lyric tendencies – a light-hearted humor and joy which dismantles myths and revels at what we truly have, and a simultaneous sorrow at the unbearable thought of what we no longer have – are arguably intertwined at the thematic core running through the tremendous musical accomplishment that is Lennon and McCartney, and as counterpoints are perfectly pitched in balance in this great song more so than in any other. The beginning...
Star Lots
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