Ask Greil: July 22, 2024

I miss physical record guides. I find searching databases makes it harder to discover gems than it does flipping through pages. Are there record guides you've worn out in your time, and, if so, could you share your thoughts about them? —PHILLIP OVEREEM

If you're talking about guides to records you should know/listen to before you die/etc., but also fun, without the deadly earnestness of so many, I love Dave Marsh's Book of Rock Lists and his The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Best Singles. If you're talking about reference works, I consult Joel Whitburn's Top Pop Albums and Top Pop Singles and especially his Pop Memories, a heroic reconstruction from all sorts of sources of the popularity and ubiquity of pre-chart records from 1890 to 1954, all the time. The other day, while revising the Notes sections of Mystery Train for a 50th anniversary edition next year, I had to look up the chart position of Pat Boone's "Don't Forbid Me," and as usually happens was pulled into looking at his whole chart history, and reminded of how ever present he was in 1956-58 as a sort of one man backlash to Elvis (remembering also how my mother bought me the "Hound Dog" single because she heard me listening to it on the radio all the time, and my father getting me a Pat Boone album for Christmas that same year because "he seemed to be more of a solid citizen.").  The many deeply researched blues guides—Leadbetter & Dixon Blues Records 1949-1970 and Dixon & Goodrich Blues and Gospel Records 1909-1943 and more are essential but also a well to dive into, if only to see all the people you've never heard of and will probably never hear. Fred Bronson's The Billboard Book of Number One Hits is useful, fascinating, and superbly written—a page on each number one, 1955-1992 in the latest edition I have. Shocking to see what songs you think had to make #1 never did. You wonder about the legitimacy of the placement. You follow arcane stories. B. George and Martha DeFoe's International Discography of the New Wave is a mind-boggling achievement but laid out in a way I find almost impossible to focus on. But other than keeping up with updated editions of the Whitburn books I haven't bought a new reference work or guide for a long time, so there may be a lot out there that I don't know.

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Greil - Obvious question: what are your thoughts on Biden, specifically whether you think he should continue or if he should step aside? And if the latter, which is the better course of action: an open convention, or they go with Kamala Harris as the nominee?

I'm a little too young to remember anything about LBJ in '68—far from a perfect analogy anyway—but I've never experienced anything like the past 48 hours [June 29]. Obama and Jeremiah Wright, to an extent, but again, very different. My own preference is that Biden steps aside for Harris. I know she's polling a point or two behind him, but I remember her sharp performance against Biden in the debates, and I think—even after a slow start as VP, followed by four years of Republican bile about her—she'd win. —ALAN VINT

In the first couple of minutes, Biden seemed so barely there, confused, and unable to finish a thought—there never was a coherent argument—I couldn’t see how he could recover. He didn’t. When he said “We beat Medicare” I knew the hole was deeper than I’d ever imagined. Sure, he meant “We solved the Medicare funding problem, opened it up to negotiating drug prices, lowered the insulin premium,” but he threw it right into Trump’s wheelhouse and he predictably hit it out of the park. 

I think the story is now set in stone. Trump’s support is a mile wide and a mile deep. The ‘Save Democracy’ banner is meaningless on his side. As I’ve argued before, I don’t think support for democratic government or democratic political culture has amounted to more than 65 percent of the country in our history, often it’s been far less, and it’s far less now. Many people don’t want the burden of democratic choice, they don’t want more people included in the polity rather than fewer, they don’t want the far more free America we have now than before, they want someone to tell them what to do, what to think, how it’s going to be, and get out of the way. Biden’s support was, I believe, somewhat wider and far more shallow. I don’t believe he can continue as a credible candidate. Harris can’t be thrown overboard. It would confirm that she was never more than window dressing. It’s Biden’s fault that she was buried in the administration when she should have been built up.

Biden could withdraw on the simple basis that “I care more about the country than myself,” endorse Harris as ‘my personal choice,’ and call for an open convention. Other than Harris no possible nominee is well known or fixed in the minds of most of the electorate. Which allows for self-definition and a new story. A well handled convention—dream on, with the pro-Hamas demonstrations guaranteed to disrupt it from inside and out—with an interesting, dynamic, well-why-not nominee—Whitmer, Shapiro, Warnock, Pritzker, Tester, Klobuchar—could come out of the convention with a flood of enthusiasm that could possibly be sustained or even built upon. And a strong candidate, even if they lose, could help protect the Senate, which will be the only check remaining if Trump reclaims power.

I don’t, at this moment, think any of this will happen. The best hope is probably a heart attack. 

—I wrote this soon after the June debate. Biden just dropped out, which I didn’t think he would. Though Dean Phillips’s he’s-too-old-he-can’t-win campaign looked silly by the end, he couldn’t have been more predictive: and since he never considered himself a serious alternative, but was trying to open the field, brave. At the moment it looks as if party names are rallying around Harris. It’s too late to gin up a Draft Whitmer-Shapiro-Pritzger-Kelly-Beshear movement; someone would have to step out and say they have a better chance of beating Trump and here’s why. As I said above, a candidate who is undefined can define themselves, and Harris is defined. Although a friend came up with a campaign slogan today: PROSECUTOR VERSUS FELON. Which Amy Klobuchar could run with too.

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These two questions are about Sly and the Family Stone:
1. Stephen Thomas Erlewine described the 2013 box set Higher! as a set that tells an actual story which is a description that fits what you seem to look for in box sets you appreciate. However, past the fact that it doesn’t include a couple early tracks you value, you’ve barely mentioned that particular box set. What do you think of Higher! and do you agree or disagree with Erlewine?
2. In Mystery Train you identified “Sex Machine” as one of the tracks from the album Stand! that defined what the band was about. This IS interesting given that it’s an instrumental jam that to me doesn’t quite manage to justify its 13-minute length (although similar length jams from James Brown’s bands did). What is it about “Sex Machine” that makes it an important track from the band in your view? —BEN MERLISS

I don’t have the Higher! Box so can’t comment. As for “Sex Machine”: the title.

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Has the world finally caught up with Firesign Theater? I seem to remember that you mentioned them in passing a few months ago (unless I was dreaming, which is not a bad way to process the work of Bergman and Procter). Alternative Facts, Virtual Reality, and Artificial Intelligence—the new Horsemen of the Apocalypse—make some kind of sense when viewed through the prism of the Firesign Theater, especially their apocalyptically funny 1975 release, Everything You Know is Wrong. It's been decades since I last listened but as I remember, the album is a real cracked hall of mirrors; splintered reflections of conspiracy theories, alien invasions, media manipulation and nudists—it's as if someone fed the events of the last eight years into an AI platform and, voilà, Everything You Know is Wrong. I often wonder what Norman Mailer would make of current events and the specter of AI would surely excite and repulse Mailer the Technophobe. In an effort to watch the snake devour itself, I asked ChatGPT a question: "What would Norman Mailer say about Artificial Intelligence?" What came back was hilarious and disappointing, instead of wigging out like a robot forced to answer an unanswerable question, it came up with something that sounded more like Peggy Noonan than Norman Mailer: "Artificial Intelligence, a phrase that carries both promise and peril, is a testament to humanity's relentless pursuit of understanding and control. It's a reflection of our innate desire to transcend our limitations, to create something that mirrors, and perhaps even surpasses, our own intellect. Yet, in this pursuit, we tread a perilous path, one fraught with ethical, existential, and philosophical implications." I'm sending this on the eve of the presidential debate. I wonder if the earth will tip off its axis and send us all to Firesign land. —CHARLIE LARGENT

They said they lost their edge, the inflaming passion behind their coolest and broadest gestures, with the end of the Vietnam war. But when Peter Bergman died in 2012 I was crestfallen. Not because I liked him personally, or because he was so generous with me, defending Lipstick Traces on the radio in LA just after an eviscerating review in the LA Weekly, in a way I never could or would have. But because he had so much more to do. The world was going to need the Firesign Theatre. Not for AI. Not for Trump. They’d already been there. But for what people will swallow. What they want. Dramatizing how the country, or the world, ends, so maybe it won’t.  

For real patriots, for people who put something new into the world and then walk on by, there’s never any last word. When they made Everything You Know Is Wrong they knew they had no idea how much we thought we knew that we didn’t. We think we know the earth goes around the sun. But people didn’t always think that, and isn’t saying the Earth is, you know, secondary to the Sun a kind of woke, anti-Earth, anti-white-men-built-America thing to believe? There’ll be a bill on that in the Florida legislature soon enough. The group could have worked with that.

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What's your opinion of AI in music or movies? The idea of bringing back talented singers and actors voices is appealing in some sense, scary in others. We've long had bands singing to pre-recorded tracks onstage or actors standing in front of CGI screens, so it's kind of another evolution. I had hoped to find the post-Jim Morrison Doors albums re-dubbed with Morrison-esque sounding vocals, but what appears for now on Other Voices is unconvincing and frankly, those songs don't cut it. But hearing 'Richard Burton' put down Lucille Ball in his private journals is a hoot! Here's a YouTube clip all about when Dick and Liz appeared on Here's Lucy in 1970. It's like Lucy attended George and Martha's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf late night bacchanal and was given the 'get the guest(s) treatment'! —JAMES R STACHO

I have no doubt AI is one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse, along with Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Marie La Pen. Not that I bristle when I call a facility and the voice answering says, ‘Hello, Greil’—pronouncing it correctly—‘this is your AI assistant,’ which is usually direct and helpful. What it means for music may be that there will remain pockets of random inspiration that will reach other pockets of the population, just as happens now. They will appear and disappear. Yorgos Lanthimos will remake Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and replicas of deceased cast members from the 1956 and 1978 versions. There will be a lot of porn videos with the heads of movie stars and possibly your friends or even yourself on the bodies. Some will be given as birthday cards by people who think they are funny. Then you can decide if they have remained people or not.

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I have a couple of questions about your idea of the pop explosion, which the last time I remember you talking about it (in your Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock ‘n’ Roll Beatles essay) was limited to two: Elvis and the Beatles. First, don’t you think there were some earlier explosions with, say, the “blues craze” launched by Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues”? Or the birth of the jazz age with (unfortunately, since there’s as much of the circus band as the jazz band about them) the Original Dixieland Jazz Band? And do you think there have been any pop explosions since the Beatles? Michael Jackson? Hip hop? Taylor Swift has certainly reached a level of pop stardom that in someways is unprecedented. I kind of feel like it’s mostly glitter—even though I like a lot of her music. But then I think maybe I’m just old; I’m sure her teenage fans feel every bit as deeply about her as we did about the Beatles. —CHUCK

To me a pop explosion occurs when as embodied by a single figure or a single group—the atom that will be split—a new language, in musical form, is made, created, found, discovered, there are so many ways it can happen and be described, and that new language will feel as if it has never been heard before and yet is immediately understood and countless people of all sorts begin speaking it: they want to speak it. In a way nothing else makes sense. That speech can take musical form. It can occur in conversation. It will affect all art forms even as it generates new ones. It will inculcate in people who are drawn to and into it with values and standards, and a way of measuring the true from the false, the valuable from the worthless, the promise and the betrayal, that will stay with people for years or for their whole lives. 

As I heard it and experienced it, this happened with Elvis and the constellations of voices that were heard in and around his, even if they came before. He was, in a way, through everything he did, the translator. Suddenly, everyone—including those who denied it to themselves, and I include his strongest, most racist, most homophobic enemies—wanted to sound like him, look like him, speak like him, be him, and it turned out there were infinite ways of doing that, and in the process people discovered their own voices. Because I had seen this happen with Elvis and had some nascent sense of what was going on, I was able to recognize it in the Beatles and in punk—people all over the world of all sorts of different ages reversing course or finding new road and speaking the new language as if their own native tongue could not say what had to be said. Though it didn't draw me in directly, it was clear this happened with hip-hop. 

I don't know enough about what really happened with jazz and the twenties to say if what happened then was kin. I did write in my Gatsby book that with official, constitutional government leaving the field in that decade, the real governments in the US were organized crime, the Ku Klux Klan, stock market, and jazz. That might be true.

Michael Jackson, Taylor Swift—they are magnets, and they work tirelessly and with inspiration to see how deep the pull can be, but they inspire not imitators, who so often go on to throw off the borrowed clothes or discover what they themselves truly want to say and the form in which to say it, but dress-ups and impersonators. There is enormous pop dominance there, but not a new language. In a sense it's all a wildly thrilling form of gossip. And being in the presence of Michael Jackson or Taylor Swift can be unforgettable, the highlight of a life, but it is, I think, or suspect, or think even if at the same time I think I'm wrong, a light so strong it casts everyone else into darkness.  A voice so distinct it silences others rather than inspiring them to speak for themselves.

Something that happens, a voice that announces itself, that leads or sparks or demands that others speak for themselves: that can happen in other fields, too. In microcosm you could say this is what happened with Abstract Expressionism. On a larger terrain, with the few Beat writers who mythologized each other and left people trying to walk in their footsteps, to see what they saw by doing what they said they did, to tell the world about it as they did so. It happened with Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. What happened with the Tea Party and the Trump rallies and God-worship that followed was in a way the opposite, the reversal, the contradiction.  These were explosions, but those in which people said what they were supposed to say and did what they were told to do. And instead of being open to anyone, they were and are exclusionary. I belong, you don't. I'm true, you're false. I have the right to life, and you don't.

That smile on John Lennon's face in the last frame of A Hard Day's Night—that is the welcome, the invitation, the beckoning. What does it say? What does a pop explosion say to people on the verge of hearing, then speaking, that new language: You can be in my dream, if I can be in yours. Think about it: no dominance, but modesty. Asking for permission to change your life. The statement that the figure at the center of the storm needs whoever gathers it in as much as they need that figure. That only by hearing the voices or others can anyone learn to speak—which, is you know, in your first year, how it works. 

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You have mentioned more than once, the words of two participants in a seminar that included Time Out Of Mind as a text, basically boiled down to "it's a breakup album" with the reply "sure but he's breaking up with God." Perhaps you can't get that out of your head. I know I can't. When Raquel Welch died, some media reports referred to a relationship Bob Dylan and Welch shared in the mid 1990s and its end being an inspiration for some of the Time songs. And there certainly are songs on the album that are "thinking about that girl who won't be back no more" but I cannot shake the feeling that participant B got it right as two major songs—"Not Dark Yet" and "Highlands"—make up a third of the album and articulate the "breaking up with God" idea. Is my understanding of this debate on the right path or is there something I am missing? Regardless, your anecdote just stuck with me. —RICHARD DENNIS

I do recall that for that Grammy awards night where Dylan won album of the year for Time Out of Mind it was reported that Dylan had asked Raquel Welch to come as his date—and that she refused. “I can see the headlines,” she supposedly said. “‘BOB DYLAN AND RAQUEL WELCH AT GRAMMYS—COMBINED AGE OVER 100!’” In any case, he did invite his mother—who had earlier appeared onstage as part of the Rolling Thunder Revue. I met her once in Minneapolis, out to dinner with my mother in law, who had known her since she married her second husband after Abe Zimmerman died. She was ebullient and  funny and knew who wrote what about her son.

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Hi Greil — Your assertion that John Huston should have cast Robert Ryan as Ahab in his adaptation of Moby Dick is stunningly correct; I've been picturing Ryan in those scenes in my mind ever since. This brings me to ask what your own relationship to Melville is, whether Moby Dick or other works were/are meaningful to you. —GREGORY CROSBY

Herm and I go way back. Probably to about 1955, when I first read Moby Dick at my father’s urging. But I didn’t really begin to read it until encountering the edition edited and annotated by Charles Fiedelson Jr. in an American Studies seminar at Cal in 1964. That opened up the many worlds of the book. I then read and fell in love with The Confidence Man which greatly inspired Mystery Train, where Elvis was both Ahab, and the whale, and many books since, especially The Shape of Things to Come.

I struggled through Pierre, or the Ambiguities.  I was caught up in by Redburn and Israel Potter.  Bartleby became a touchstone, as did John Marr. But I was more drawn in, was more in the action, with Pauline Kael’s piece on the movie of Billy Budd than by the story or the movie themselves. It’s interesting that movie adaptations have been so few or so poor. The Moby Dick’s. The relatively recent Bartleby. For me the only one that sticks is Leos Carax’s 1999 POLA X, which transposes fragments of Pierre into contemporary Paris and is even more dank and mysterious than the novel.

In 1972 I was going to write the dissertation I never did write on affinities between Melville and Lincoln. In 2008, when Werner Sollors and I had the ms. of what appeared in 2009 as A New Literary History of America in hand, we realized we had no chapters on The Sound and the Fury or Moby Dick. Werner took Faulkner, I took Melville, and found I could pretty much say what I had to say in 2500 thrill-packed (for me) words.

One sentence from one biography that has always stayed with me. Melville has given up writing. He has a steady income as a customs inspector. The family is peaceful. Nothing happens. Then a cloud seems to drop over the house. “Herman was thinking again,” the biographer wrote.

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Hey Greil - Hope you’re cool with talking a bit about Dylan.

A Three Pair with the Jack of Hearts…

I went down a rabbit hole and was dazzled by the varied versions of “Chimes of Freedom (which works wicked as a torch-ballad as Barbara Jungr and Lynne Arrialle demonstrate). All of this led to an album that had been unknown to me—
Brothers and Sisters’ Dylan’s Gospel from 1969. If you dig and delve beneath the polished production sheen, you’ll find there are some transcendental vocals. The “Mr. Tambourine Man” & “Chimes of Freedom” verses, along with “All Along the Watchtower” and “Quinn the Eskimo” (both with Merry Clayton) get a lot of replays.

Another Self-Portrait—I don’t think I could love a collection more. I came to Self-Portrait 10 years after its release so it was a curio to play for afternoon porch music. But Another Self-Portrait… this is the chef’s kiss. It plays as well at 3am as it does 3pm.

“The Isle of Wight” is a gem when heard in its entirety. Never could abide by those tracks on the 1970 Self-Portrait (it feels odd to breathe these two titles in the same breath).

I prefer these vocals to the later, almost violent Before the Flood & Hard Rain singing, which comes across as “boorish” (and let’s leave it at that). Did Robbie Robertson have much to say about the 1969 concert?

Also, will your liner notes for Another Self-Portrait ever be published in a collection? Or am I better off getting a hard copy at the library? Streaming music like a utility has its drawbacks.

Last, I want to sing the praises of Barbara Dane and the Chambers Brothers from 1966. I can’t imagine anyone’s life not being a bit better for having heard this.

Thanks for a great column—BILLY INNES, San Francisco

I do remember this album—an early tribute album and a conceptual one at that. Barbara Jungr always brings something new and interesting to a song. But it’s a tragedy that Merry Clayton, who stands at the center of what might be the supreme accomplishment of rock ‘n’ roll as idea, form, and fact can’t sustain a song on her own. But wait, wait—if this is a tribute album, and a Bob Dylan tribute album especially, where’s Lucinda Williams?

Liner notes for ‘Another Self-Portrait’ collected? After ‘Folk Music’ I swore I’d never do another Dylan book. But I’ve been thinking about all I’ve written since the ‘BD x GM’ collection. If there’s enough there I just might do it.

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Good morning, Greil. I’d appreciate learning what place Terry Allen & The Panhandle Mystery Band occupy in your constellations.
Warmest handshake, CRAIG

Terry Allen is an ambitious songwriter with, to me, an uninteresting voice that can’t rise to the themes of his songs and bring them to life. You could imagine Randy Newman writing something on the idea of “Houdini Didn’t Like the Spiritualists” on Allen’s recent album Just Like Moby Dick (though I think if he did, there’d be a twist in the title, which here is both bland and soft: Houdini hated spiritualism on moral, philosophical, scientific, and personal grounds and devoted his life to discrediting it). But Newman would have brought out characters, tied them to ideas, and taken you into a drama. Allen can’t do that.

There’s no question that Allen’s 1979 “The Beautiful Waitress” is a template, or a spur, to Bob Dylan’s “Highlands” almost 20 years later, just as Robert Burns’s “My Heart’s in the Highlands” is. Dylan simply rides Burns like a horse. But with whatever he’s taking from Allen he, again, creates a brittle, bitter little play that makes the listener as uncomfortable as it does the people in the song, taking it far from Allen’s sentimental romantic fantasy where in the end no one gets hurt. Allen’s song remains a lovely curio. As an epic about the founding of the nation and the loss of its reason for being, Dylan’s song could play in a loop in a room in a museum displaying the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address.  

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Couldn't find a review by you of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, so thought I'd ask your thoughts on that one. Shot a few years before Streets of Fire, Diane Lane the carryover of course—but what a different Diane Lane. For The Fabulous Stains she's cigarette-poverty thin. Streets found, as you wrote "[Walter] Hill [pulling] action out of endless layers of fraud"; Stains director Lou Adler (mangling a script from Nancy Dowd and Caroline Coon) lets stabs at action wither and die on the vine. The Stains aren't anybody's idea of convenient dramatic magic: They truthfully painfully can't sing, can't play, and can't write in the sense of "writing," (on top of which, no drummer to slam home rock's heartbeat backbeat)—so their only option is to tell the truth. Which, truthfully, withers and dies before a crowd craving action and noise.

I showed this recently to friends, found nobody laughing at nominal comedy; but that suits the mood. These are empty lives; struggles to plant meaning like an Iwo Jima flag, get sucked into the vortex of suckage. No one escapes. Fee Waybill's been-there done-nothing rocker shouts out he was wearing leather before anyone—"back in '64, man!"—and nobody cares, least of all his own comatose (and real-life) band partner Vince Welnick. Half the Sex Pistols and one-fourth of the Clash convene to back Ray Winstone—the greatest punk band you never heard (of), but they're stuck playing nowhere stages. Which, in the end, seems very much like the actual Sex Pistols.

I compared early Stains to early Raincoats. "Much more like the ca. 1977 Slits, actually," counters Tom Kipp. —ANDREW HAMLIN

I have to say I’ve never watched this to the end. It always sounds so interesting and for me it peters out before I find anything to hang on to. And I love Diane Lane, so that should have been enough. But even that didn’t help.

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[Raymond Chandler] paid his tribute to Dashiell Hammett, ‘his master,’ sort of like old rock and roll singers always paid lip service to Elvis; but while Elvis could sing, Hammett couldn’t write worth a damn. His plots and his characters were flat, and his books sustain interest only when they depend on the weird and the fantastic, on cults and ritual murder (The Dain Curse) or on the old buried-treasure angle (The Maltese Falcon). If you like that sort of thing read Seven Footprints to Satan by A. Merritt (Avon), but don’t be fooled by the movies. Hammett needed Bogie far more than Bogie needed him.

You wrote that in “A Long Goodbye to ‘The Big Sleep,’” printed in the San Francisco Express Times on January 7, 1969. In 1975, in your first “Undercover” column, you’re calling Hammett’s Red Harvest “the finest detective novel ever written in America,” and appreciating “the genius of his prose.”

This truly isn’t meant as a gotcha question (“You wrote this here, but you wrote that there—explain!"). We’ve all radically reappraised past likes and dislikes. But the contrast here is stark and begs for an ask. Did you have a come-to-Jesus moment with Hammett in that six-year period? Did a light suddenly shine, a window open? Were you replaced by a Hammett-loving pod person? —DEVIN MCKINNEY

When I wrote that first piece on Chandler and Hammett, I was just starting. I didn't know what I was doing. I was trying to trumpet my enthusiasms to the world—and maybe, without knowing it, trying to construct a kind of autobiography out of them, to announce myself to the world—so juvenile—or to myself—maybe not juvenile. So I overwrote, I overpraised, I denigrated one thing to build up another, because that was primitive math, and I wasn't confident enough to try anything more complex. I learned, at Rolling Stone. It didn't take long.

I don't think Hammett could write nearly as well as Chandler, but who could? Fitzgerald at his best, and he was Chandler's lodestar. Hemingway, in moments, something Chandler acknowledges when he has Marlowe call a cop Hemingway because he keeps saying the same thing over and over. Jean Rhys—not that Chandler or anyone else in his time and place would have known her. Not O'Hara. Not Cain. Not Dorothy Parker. Not West or Horace McCoy—to stay within the bounds of the competition and affinities—you couldn’t compare Chandler to Faulkner any more than you could compare French to Chinese—at the time. But in Red Harvest, the conceit of the story, the pervasiveness of the corruption, the dead ends at the close of every paragraph—all that cleaned up the writing and pushed Hammett to realize a vision. I like The Dain Curse but it's telling that the movies of The Maltese Falcon and The Big Knockover (the Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing) are so much better than the books.

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Do you think John Lennon’s song “Working Class Hero” has aged well? I often think these days about the verse that calls citizens out for being clever but still being peasants. If you took out the word “sex” and replaced it with “guns” you might even have a fairly apt description of much of Donald Trump’s citizen base. Still, Lennon was trying to look at his success from an ironic detached perspective and I’m still not sure how I feel about the way the song turned out. —BEN MERLISS

What makes the song work for me is not so much the words but the tiredness of the whole performance.  To me that writes the song, whatever the formal lyrics: I’m sick of thinking about this. I’m disgusted with the way my life has never left me, that I can’t escape it. I still can’t believe that the press said we were middle class and the middle class Rolling Stones were working class because they dressed in scruffy clothes!

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