RICHARD POIRIER
Aloof from politics, their topicality
is
of music, the sentiments
and the social predicaments traditional to folk songs, and ballads.
Maybe the most important service of the Beatles and similar groups
is the restoration to good standing of the simplicities that have fright–
ened us into irony and the search for irony; they locate the beauty
and pathos of commonplace feelings even while they work havoc with
fashionable or tiresome expressions of those feelings. A particularly
brilliant example is the record, released some weeks after the Sgt.
Pepper album, with "Baby You're a Rich Man" on one side and
"All You Need Is Love" on the other. "Baby You're a Rich Man"
opens with an inquiry addressed by McCartney and Harrison to
Lennon, who can be said to represent here a starry-eyed fan's version
of the Beatles themselves: "How does it feel to be / One of the beauti–
ful people?" This and subsequent questions are asked of the "rich
man" in a reverentially high but devastatingly lilting voice, to the
accompaniment of bursts of sitar music and the clip-clopping of
Indian song. The sitar, an instrument Harrison studied in India for
six
weeks with the renowned Ravi Shankar ("George," he reported,
"was truly humble") here suggests not the India of "Within You,
Without You" evoked on the Sgt. Pepper album, the India of the
Bhagavad Gita. It is rather another India, of fabulous riches, the
India of the British and their Maharajahs, a place for exotic travel,
but
also
for josh sticks and the otherworldliness of a "trip." All these
possibilities are at work in the interplay of music and lyrics. Contri–
buting to the merely social and satiric implications of the song, the
Indian sounds operate in the manner of classical allusion in Pope:
they expand to the ridiculous the cant of jet-set, international gossip
columns - "one of the beautiful people" or "baby, you're a rich
man now," or "how often have you been there?" But, as in Pope, the
instrument of ridicule here, the sitar, is allowed in the very process
to remain unsullied and eloquent. The social implications of the song
carry more than a hint of self-parody since the comic mixtures of
verbal and musical phrasing refer us to similar mixtures that are
a result of the Beatles' fantastic fortune: Liverpool boys, still in their
twenties,' once relatively poor and now enormously rich, once socially
nowhere and now internationally "there," once close to home both
in fact and in their music but now implicated not only in the Mersey
beat but in the Ganges sound, in travel to India and "trips" of a
kind for which India set the precedent for centuries.
