The Beatles
- Zone: Surface (level 1 of 5)
- Genre: Rock, Art rock
- Mood: sprawling, mischievous, restless
- Sound: tape collage, genre-hopping, heavy riffs, double album, lo-fi home recordings
The Beatles is a sprawling, 30-track double album that keeps each song faithful to one genre, so it jumps between rock and roll, blues, folk, country, reggae, hard rock, music hall and the avant-garde. Most of the songs were written at a meditation course in India and demoed acoustically at George Harrison’s house, then recorded over several months at Abbey Road and Trident, often with one Beatle playing most of the parts alone. Its most experimental piece is “Revolution 9”, an eight-minute tape collage of loops and spoken-word extracts in the style of Karlheinz Stockhausen, put together by John Lennon, Harrison and Yoko Ono. Elsewhere, there are fragmentary snippets like “Wild Honey Pie”, a loop of pigs grunting on “Piggies”, and “Helter Skelter”, one of the earliest heavy, noisy rock tracks.
Track list
- Back in the U.S.S.R.
- Dear Prudence
- Glass Onion
- Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
- Wild Honey Pie
- The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill
- While My Guitar Gently Weeps
- Happiness Is a Warm Gun
- Martha My Dear
- I’m So Tired
- Blackbird
- Piggies
- Rocky Raccoon
- Don’t Pass Me By
- Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?
- I Will
- Julia
- Birthday
- Yer Blues
- Mother Nature’s Son
- Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey
- Sexy Sadie
- Helter Skelter
- Long, Long, Long
- Revolution 1
- Honey Pie
- Savoy Truffle
- Cry Baby Cry
- Revolution 9
- Good Night