What a – Na, Na, Na – Pity, Pity, Pity

Was George Harrison’s downbeat sample of ‘Hey Jude’ a post-breakup slam on The Beatles?

Sounds Like… “Hey Jude” by The Beatles

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Lyrics on Genius.com

Songwriter(s): George Harrison

But first – happy birthday George!

“They say it’s your birthday

We’re going to have a good time

I’m glad it’s your birthday

Happy birthday to you”

John Lennon, “Birthday”

How sweet of John to wish his friend George a happy birthday! The Beatles must have been one great group of friends, free from any semblance of conflict.

In honor of George Harrison’s birthday, I want to take a look at his song “Isn’t It A Pity” (version 1) from the 1970 album All Things Must Pass. He wrote it in 1966, one of several songs on the album that had not been up to The Beatles’ high standards. The last two minutes present a somber alternative to the Na Na’s of “Hey Jude”, a Beatles song suspiciously identical in length to “Isn’t It A Pity” (7:11 min). For this reason, it is easy to believe that this was George’s attack on his band-mates. Like many Beatles stories, George’s transition to solo is a romantic one – a tale of unrecognized potential followed by a hugely triumphant personal project. The album was perhaps George’s best expression and established him as one of music’s brightest radiators of emotion. And among the most emotionally potent pieces of the album is “Isn’t It A Pity.” The song is one of those rare types that was minimally diluted by the journey from the heart to the charts. So, what might have been in George’s heart when he wrote it? Perhaps, like with his music, an unfulfilled capacity for deeply loving relationships. Maybe a slight feeling of disconnect from the people in his life as heartbreaking as the one from his art.

“Isn’t it a pity? Now isn’t it a shame

How we break each other’s hearts

And cause each other pain?”

Harrison’s lyrics are very simple. He sings “isn’t it a pity” with a few variations over and over and he explains exactly what is pitiful. That is, we break each other’s hearts, cause each other pain, take each other’s love without thinking, forget to give back, and become blinded to beauty by tears. Simply, these are some major human vices. And all the song does is lament about how pitifully easy it is to get pulled towards them -as frighteningly easy as the human act of “forgetting,” which he repeatedly sings. George mourns this epiphany like a death. It causes sadness and some anger, which is truly only directed at the world.

“How do I explain

When not too many people

Can see we’re all the same”

The only major nuance of the lyrics is the distinction between “I” and “we.” Throughout most of the song, George uses the self-inclusive “we.” He means to say that all humans slip on the vices at least sometimes. Sad and pitiful as it may be, it is a universal truth: “we’re all the same.” The only thing that sets George apart from most others is that he has realized this fact that “not too many people can see.”    

“Because of all their tears

Their eyes can’t hope to see

The beauty that surrounds them”

Only once, George uses “I” and “their” to express the one pity that he may have outgrown. People expect too much out of themselves and others. This causes them to angrily clutch onto disappointments that are much more natural than they think. The shame of being imperfect is largely displaced when George redirects it to human nature. When eyes are less fixed, they are much more free to see all of life’s beauty.

“Isn’t It A Pity” contains a seven minute base of steady, solemn cycles of piano and guitar chords. It evokes the permanence of human imperfection, from which beauty is unbridled. George’s voice conveys its characteristic feelings of pain and honesty. And, he slides his guitar with a human-like, but this time not so gentle, weeping. In the last few minutes, all of the instruments come together with the most vitality, but brilliantly keep the calm and sad tones. Most notably, there is a clear – but in a weird way easily not recognized – reference to “Hey Jude.”

George wrote “Isn’t It A Pity” in 1966, experienced three or four more years of inflaming Beatles conflict, and then finally recorded it in 1970. According to an NME Magazine article, Paul McCartney was especially dismissive of creative suggestions for “Hey Jude.” So, I reckon it was a perfect souvenir of the pain The Beatles caused George, hence the reference to it in a song about humans being bad to each other. The Na Na’s are integrated in a really interesting way, reconciling Paul’s classic melody with George’s wary mood as he sings “what a pity, pity, pity” at least a dozen times and all the instruments culminate anti-climatically. George does not bitterly insult The Beatles. He humanizes them. He reminds us that greatness is separate from virtue and like everyone, The Beatles must work very hard at being kind.

“Hey Jude” Live, 1968

The view that this song is in any way an attack on The Beatles, a lover, or another seems misguided to me. George does not project his anger and sadness anywhere but onto the song. He asks “isn’t it a pity” rhetorically, as if to elicit a response like: “yea, I guess you’re right. It is a pity. Being human is real heavy, you know. Bloody shame.” His song is purely cathartic. Like a well-handled emotion, it seeps under the skin rather than futilely poking it.

A Mindful Look at Lennon’s ‘Mind’ Full Hook

John Lennon is one of music’s great philosophers and in ‘Mind Games’ he projects an expansive image of humankind

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Lyrics on Genius.com

Songwriter(s): John Lennon

With the track “Mind Games” from the 1973 album of the same name, John Lennon must have been very familiar, at least on an intuitive level, with the philosophical concept of intersubjectivity. Lennon’s other work suggests such a realist life view. Midway through Mind Games is a cheeky track called “Nutopian National Anthem” full of effortless brilliance: three seconds of silence convey the imaginary and arbitrary existence of a nation. On his 1971 album Imagine, Lennon sings “Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do” and on the 1970 John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.” Intersubjectivity suggests that under fine inspection, the human engine runs on nothing but creativity and common belief. The mechanism of cultural evolution is thus as seamless as biological evolution. For, its great potential and longevity comes from its simple, cyclical self-sustainability; not to mention the humbling, freeing admission that our world is an illusion and as such can be imagined in any way we decide. “Mind Games” is Lennon’s celebration of the human mind, which as part of a massive collective powers the prodigious engine of humanity.


“We’re playing those mind games together”

Togetherness is integral to the functionality of our mind games. It takes “millions of mind guerrillas” and many participants in the rituals and mantras to keep the momentum. The individual, especially one like Lennon, is not to be devalued, though. When such a system is not consisting of collaboration, then it is of the accumulation and general application of individualistic efforts. No matter the means of creation, to motorize our mind games requires collective belief in what has been created. Our constructs crumble on the support of only one mind, or even a weak minority. In this sense, a mind game refers to any creative entity, whose existence manifests entirely in common belief.

The lyrical focus on human constructs is absolute. The concept of a game classically embodies the human tendency towards culturally uniting and self-serving fabrications. “Planting seeds” is precisely the innovation that propelled humans irreversibly into the modern age about 10,000 years ago with the Agricultural Revolution. Guerrilla warfare is a creative style of fighting that depends on the united consciousness of a group. A mantra like “peace on Earth” pointillistically fuses the dots of individual spirituality by the symbolic act of chanting. And, a “Druid dude” practices religion and magic, both quintessentially intersubjective.

“Love is the flower… you gotta let it grow”

Love is more complex. It may be all we need. It may be the answer. It may be a figment of our imagination. But it still exists sufficiently in a singular mind. It does not take two to love; only two to be in love. Lennon sings, “Love is the flower… you gotta let it grow.” A flower is a symbol of nature and not human imagination, but its subjective and expressionistic bloom is sure. So is the harmony of its symmetrical and anti-symmetrical design. It is thus the symbol of something objective and subjective, structured and convoluted, whose growth must be nourished but kept free. A symbol of both love and humankind. The difference is that like the flower, love can flourish as a single being in solipsistic fashion, whereas humankind is entirely collectivist.   

“We’re playing those mind games forever

projecting our images in space and in time”

In a single, standout lyric, Lennon captures the essence of intersubjectivity. He explains what it really means to play mind games. It turns out all we are doing is “projecting our images in space and in time.” Lennon’s sentiments are broad yet simple. Confucius’ words here are apt: “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” If we inspect our world from the widest lens, we have scarcely progressed from painting crude images on the walls of caves. Of course, in our own right we have grown monumentally from this point. But we must not let that overstimulate our self-confidence and deceive us. As seemingly divine as our modern advancements have been, we still are just projecting our images in space and in time. We use the most primordial canvas of space-time and project onto it the imagined, intangible contents of our minds. Lennon’s is a brilliant conception of creativity. It is the mind games that move humankind forward.

“Millions of mind guerillas”

Lennon projects an animalistic view of humans quite frequently in “Mind Games.” What in the world is a “mind guerrilla?” Is it someone who uses his mind radically – who creates a stormy sea out of culture’s waters? Or could it be a mind gorilla? Music is an exclusively aural medium and under all circumstances the homophone survives in the tradition of subjective interpretation. Even if Lennon’s lyrical intentions are backed empirically, the song is offspring and though sired by the Beatle lives an independent life in the mind of the listener. In my mind, until I recently looked up the lyrics online, in the song live millions of mind gorillas that play mind games together and forever. Lennon also describes skulls with an animalistic bite, as “the stones of [the] mind.” The effect is that, in the utter mind game that is this track, images of humans’ hairy primate ancestor sneak beneath the stones of my mind. My imagination in turn invigorates these images when I hear Lennon sing “mind” exactly eleven times, suspending and rolling his voice with each. Lennon’s Planet of the Apes reminiscent musical universe not only invigorates the fictive primates and the images in my head, but also the philosophical sentiment. Humans are only mindful monkeys; apes of awareness; mind gorillas. It is truer to define ourselves as such than as intelligent beings loosely and distantly derived from monkeys. The collective mind games that we play only relate to us tangentially. Millennia ago they shot off independently in the manner of a song or a young adult.

“Some call it magic, the search for the grail”

Lennon voices: “Keep on playing those mind games together…We’ll be playing those mind games forever…Some call it magic, the search for the grail.” Mind games have taken flight in mystical skies. Immortal gods have become the sight of atheistical eyes. Mind games are so much more than the sum of their parts. They outlive the individual mind which becomes only a laborer of imagination (I’m getting a Monsters, Inc. vibe with this abstract idea of harvesting for energy feelings of imagination like fear and laughter). Mind games are the massive corporation fueled by lowly labor; they are the Great Wall of China grotesquely fossilizing its toiling slaves. Okay, I admit that these metaphors are overly cynical. Their purpose is to portray the individual as a pawn in the mind games, not to question his happiness. In my opinion, to devote one’s life to creativity in any form carves an existence of the highest quality. The game of chess is incapable of happiness, but not so the pawn. By the same logic, though, the game is resistant to suffering, but the pawn is very familiar with it. Thus, these cynical labor metaphors also survive by means of showing the individual’s close relationship to happiness and hardship relative to the spiritless game.

“Faith in the future, out of the now”

This track is truly optimistic. And Lennon’s open-minded philosophy accommodates it. If we are brave enough to admit that humanity is an imagined entity detached from the individual, then we can more tightly clasp its fate. Lennon urges each of us to surrender to the system: “Yes is the answer…yes is surrender…you gotta let it go.” This does not mean we have to give up our individuality. Solipsism quite contrarily fuels humanity. Lennon claims that “love is the answer” and may therefore be the gateway from the singular spirit to a peaceful society. Each of us has the power to “make love, not war.” Such a loving agency is one of the ways that we gain access to our collective fate. Another way is to have “faith in the future” and get “out of the now.” The future is guaranteed to outlive us and is a perfect symbol of humanity. To have faith in the future means to submit to all that is bigger than us, freeing us from an exhausting apprehension towards insignificance. Our noble purpose as humans therefore is to “[push] the barrier” by “planting seeds” that will continue to grow and spread long after we are gone.