My view on the Beatles White Album

The Paranoid Style on Twitter is one of my favorite accounts. She does a great job making fresh observations about music. I don’t agree with her about the White Album but I respect her opinion.

When I was bored at work meetings, I would make a list of all the songs from an album when I was in high school decades earlier. One time I was at a conference which was so bad, I did the White Album. I remembered 29 or 30 songs. The nest day,, I recalled the one I missed (“Sexy Sadie”) and I even like that.

To me, “Honey Pie”, “Wild Honey Pie”, “Helter Skelter”, “Revolution #9”, “Good Night” and “Long Long Long” are trash. In “Back in the USSR”, they are parodying a band (Beach Boys) who weren’t as good as them. “When I’m 64” was fresh. The old time stuff got weaker as they did “Your Mother Should Know” and “Honey Pie”.

The paradox of the 'White Album' is that there is no way to extract its weaker material and still maintain the menacing dream-logic which makes the entire experience so powerfully psychically dislocating. I wonder if it is the first LP to consciously employ bad songs as a tactic.

— The Paranoid Style (@paranoiacs) August 20, 2021

I think some of the best Beatles songs were done near the end where they circled back to basic rock and roll enhanced by their growth and experience. I'm talking about "Get Back", "The Ballad of John and Yoko", "Don't Let Me Down" and "Old Brown Shoe".

— Harris Levy (@HarrisL585) August 20, 2021