The Beatles, Album by Album--Rubber Soul

Rubber Soul is probably the earliest album chronologically in the Beatles' career that most people buy. That is probably because critics have been bowing at its feet for quite some time now. It's a great album, no doubt about that, especially in relation to other artists' catalogues. But whether it's quite as good as people make it out to be, I'm not so sure. Rolling Stone has it as their number five album of all time, ahead of the White Album and Abbey Road and countless other albums (all but four of them, in fact) by others. Now I don't want to sound like I'm bashing Rubber here, but of course my opinion is that you should try their albums before this too.

This is vintage mid-period Beatles, complete with a trippy-looking cover and the introduction of the biting humor in their lyrics that marked the mature Beatles (plus the first appearance of a sitar on "Norwegian Wood"!). On here we see the lyrics catch up to the musical innovations that had been bubbling for a few albums now, but especially on Help!. The first two songs illustrate this point well. Both are about the kind of dominant, aggressive women that were not typically depicted in the very male-oriented early years of rock, full of girls waiting by the phone for a call from their boyfriend and always eager to please. On "Drive My Car" and "Norwegian Wood," Paul and John, respectively, paint a very different picture of women, and both wind up being the ones feeling used at the end of the song, instead of the other way around. "Norwegian Wood" is especially notable for having an interesting and slightly Eastern-sounding melody to go along with the sitar in it (George apparently saw this in a shop and liked it so much that he stuck it on their next record). John said he wrote this song to try to disguise an affair he had with another woman from his wife, but really, did he even try very hard to disguise it? Seems pretty obvious to me. I do like how they turn the sexual tables upside down on these first two songs. Even without the lyrics, though, these are classic tunes.

George returns here with a vengeance, and though there are varying opinions on his two numbers on here ("Think for Yourself" and "If I Needed Someone"), I for one think they are great. Both are in the classic fuck-you genre that he seemed to love. "Think for Yourself" has a thunderous fuzzbox bass riff that propels the song, which features George berating a girl for seemingly no reason. Though George was known as the quiet Beatle, the opening lyric really sums up what happened when he did have something to say: "I've got a word or two to say about the things that you do." I can't imagine any girl (or guy, because it might be about one for all I know) liking this having been written about them. "If I Needed Someone" is almost equally nasty, but its lyrics are surrounded by beautiful ringing guitar lines and harmonies. This was apparently George's tribute to the Byrds, who like I said earlier, seemed to base their whole career off George's Rickenbacker 12-string guitar sound and the Beatles for Sale song "What You're Doing" (this isn't too fair to the Byrds, I'll admit, but you can tell how much they were influenced for sure). But it's a nice way for George to pay tribute, since this does sound very Byrdsy.

Lennon had stepped up his lyrical game, from the quintessential lost-in-young-adulthood song "Nowhere Man" to the biting portrayal of love-domination in "Girl." "Nowhere Man" is one of the Beatles brightest sounding songs (especially that guitar solo--that last harmonic note is like a teardrop of an angel!), full of stacked harmonies. I think this is a rather interesting accompaniment for a song about someone feeling empty inside, but it has grown on me. "Girl" is a pretty brutal song about a kind of girl that everyone has known, one that takes out her internal pain on a guy who loves her through subtle emotional manipulation. Apparently this was John singing about some sort of idealized girl, a woman that he loved though he hadn't even met yet but would find in Yoko. Weird stuff. He obviously had some issues with women, especially when you get to a song like "Julia" that combines his feelings for his dead mother who left him and the earth spirit/idealized mother he found in Yoko. It all makes for good songs though! "Run for Your Life" was perhaps his most despised song that he ever wrote. I can see why, since those are some pretty misogynistic lyrics, but oh well.

"What Goes On" is your obligatory Ringo-gets-shit-on number of the lot and it takes the verbal beating farther than it had ever gone. "You didn't even think of me as someone with a name. Did you mean to break my heart and and watch me die? Tell me why." Wow, brutal stuff. If this came out of Lennon's mouth it would be emotionally devastating, but when Ringo sings it, you just want to give the big guy a hug. "Michelle" is often bashed for being sentimental, but it clearly preys on my love for European women and has a beautiful melody. John could write some cool and oftentimes very emotional songs, but no one write a bitchin' melody quite like Paul.

Finally we have "In My Life," which was perhaps the last great composition written in large part by both Paul and John. I love the romantic image of these two sitting nose-to-nose writing all-time classics, as they supposedly did while banging out "I Want to Hold Your Hand" by the piano at Paul's girlfriend's house. From this point forward, the group's members would increasingly work on their own. This was a gradual process, though, which would hit its culmination in the White Album/Let It Be time. "In My Life" is absolutely stunning, with some beautiful guitar, a wistful lyric, and a great sped-up piano/harpsichord solo from the one and only George Martin. This manages to capture both a feeling of nostalgia and the joy of new love in one fell swoop. It is a remarkable illustration of a band just beginning to hit the emotional maturity of adulthood, able to look back and look forward at the same time, and to condense their life experiences into artistic form through the gift of their bodacious, kick-ass songwriting talent.

--Edward