It’s either pay attention to the news or stay sane today, so since it’s the fourth day in a row of 100 Years of Solitude-type rain in San Francisco and I feel like writing, I’m going to be self-indulgent, apolitical and irrelevant.

In my long-running grip that the 60s were totally overrated except insofar as the middle class learned to chill the fuck out about sex–if anything they got more conservative re drugs and alcohol in the decades since–I’d like to debunk the notion that the Beatles were particularly revolutionary.

Most of their lyrics are decidedly not racy or political.  There is a reference in Penny Lane to “fish and finger pie,” which sounds kind of raunchy to me, but it might be Scouser slang for something.  In their entire catalog I can only think of two stridently political songs: “Taxman” and “Revolution.”

“Taxman” (1966) criticizes socialist Britain’s high tax rates, 95% for top earners into the 1970s.  (This is of course the marginal rate; it’s not like anyone was actually forking over nineteen shillings on the pound over their entire personal income.)  It name-checks two prime ministers, Ted Heath and Harold Wilson, Conservative and Labour, for allowing things to stay that way decades after the war ended.  Kind of a departure from “She Loves You,” but definitely not left-leaning.  The most sonically radical song on Revolver is Tomorrow Never Knows, but there’s nothing political about seagulls squawking in reverse.

Then there’s “Revolution” (1968).  It’s basically John Lennon, almost twenty-eight years old and pan-galactically famous (although not as wealthy as the band’s success might lead you to believe) shitting on anyone with aspirations to overthrow capitalism.  He’s explicitly not a Maoist.  I wonder what Godard would say about that.

Of course, Lennon later went on to record “Imagine,” which could only be described as peaceably anarchic. Pat Robertson, Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye have all cited it as the possible anthem of the “New World Order” which, after the Rapture, will briefly control things for the seven years leading up to the Glorious Reappearing of Christ on earth. But the Beatles were certainly not hellbent on radical social upheaval.

That, according to Marge Simpson’s therapist, Dr. Zweig, was the Monkees.