Court Poll #3 Response: “A Day in the Life”

Woohoo! 10,000 views. I must say that I never thought we would reach this mark but I am so glad that I was wrong. Thank you visitors for your continued visits to this blog. Josh, Anthony and I are eternally grateful. That may have been over the top, but, it does not matter. I can only hope that we can reach the 100,000 view mark sometime before I graduate college, or… at the end of this year. Hey, a person can dream can’t they.

I would also like to apologize for not notifying you guys of 2/3 writers of this blog’s escapade to Oswego this weekend to visit brothers of Delta Sigma Phi. We had an awesome time and, even though Sunday is usually an off posting day, I thought I would put up my response to the court poll, even though, as I am sure everybody realized, picking the best Beatles song is just hard.

I thoroughly enjoy The Beatles music. Yeah, that may be the best way to put it. I don’t know if I could put it any other way without sounding obsessive and, well, weird. As the initial post said, The Beatles can be split up into three different hair stages. When the hair was well-kept, short, and conservative, The Beatles were putting out pop songs that, while certainly corny, were still the best and most catchy of the time. The hair began to grow and the albums Rubber Soul and Revolver came along and The Beatles were not the innocent fab four any longer. When the hair became unkempt, The Beatles had succumbed to drugs and psychedelia and, like with their pop masterpieces of a few years prior, their psychedelia was the best. Yes, one thing with The Beatles was, no matter what type of music, they were arguably playing in the top tier.

In the poll I attempted to sample from all types of Beatles music and, trust me, it was so tough to get it down to five songs. That was painful, imagine how hard it was to pick one. Yet, as I have been saying for many years, there is one particular Beatles song that sticks out because of its lyric, musicality, originality, and plain awesomeness. Yes, while I can sing the “na, na, na” from “Hey Jude” forever and while the sounds of “Elanore Rigby” send shivers down my spine and while the lyrics of “Let it Be” get to me every time and while “Yesterday” is just beautiful, there is one song that does it for me completely and that is “A Day in the Life” off of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Here’s why.

There is just something striking about this masterpiece that is symbolic of The Beatles, incredibly well-written and thought provoking, and is just good music. The song has three parts, similar to the Beatles progression into the band they became in the late 60’s. The song begins in the late middle stages of the Beatles with the first verse which focuses on a dreamy melody and an interesting lyric which is highlighted in the most eye-opening line, “He blew his mind out in a car, He didn’t notice that the lights had changed” which just breaks you out of the airy state the song puts you in. The harmony is quintessential Beatles which is perfect. But, after the verses something odd happens. The voices drop out, the music becomes a little louder and starts building up to a climax, the Beatles middle stage is done and taking over is a weird psychedelic mix of the contradiction of cacophonous and oddly harmonious music. A thousand pianos hit a disjointed note and all of a sudden it seems the song will certainly fall off a cliff and fly away into nothingness, but, no, Stop! We have traveled back in time to early Beatles. The alarm clock rings and the day begins. He gets out of bed, finds his way downstairs and has a cup, grabs his coat and his hat, makes the bus two seconds flat. The song bounces up and down like a happy tune, like the Beatles singing about seeing a face they can’t forget. But then he finds his way upstairs and his a smoke and somebody spoke and I (he) went into a dream and, just like that, we are back into middle-late Beatles strung out harmony, back to the verses of the Beatles that continue to transcend time, back to the build up of the end of the song, the early-middle-late Beatles all mixing together to form that moment of pure bliss and after it is all done the song stops and left echoing around the track is the perfect chord, the defining E, that every instrument plays. The Beatles end their best work and the record needle slides  to the endless inner core’s rotation, which is the least the Beatles could do, to allow your spinning mind a chance to recover.