The Experimental Movement That Created The Beatles’ Weirdest Song, “Revolution 9”

As of this writ­ing, the Bea­t­les’ “Rev­o­lu­tion 9″ has more than 13,800,000 plays on Spo­ti­fy. This has no doubt gen­er­at­ed decent rev­enue, even giv­en the plat­for­m’s oft-lament­ed pay­out rates. But com­pare that num­ber to the more than half-a-bil­lion streams of “Black­bird,” also on the Bea­t­les’ self-titled 1968 “white album,” and you get an idea of “Rev­o­lu­tion 9”’s place in the band’s oeu­vre. Sim­ply put, even ultra-hard-core Fab Four fans tend to skip it. Regard­less, as Ian Mac­Don­ald writes in Rev­o­lu­tion in the Head: The Bea­t­les’ Records and the Six­ties, “this eight-minute exer­cise in aur­al free asso­ci­a­tion is the world’s most wide­ly dis­trib­uted avant-garde arti­fact.”

Mas­ter­mind­ed by John Lennon, “Rev­o­lu­tion 9” is not exact­ly a song, but rather an elab­o­rate “sound col­lage,” assem­bled in broad adher­ence to an aes­thet­ic devel­oped by such avant-garde cre­ators as William S. Bur­roughs, The Bea­t­les’ graph­ic design­er Richard Hamil­ton, John Cage, and Karl­heinz Stock­hausen. “While the cut-up texts of Bur­roughs, the col­lages of Hamil­ton, and the musique con­crète exper­i­ments of Cage and Stock­hausen have remained the pre­serve of the mod­ernist intel­li­gentsia,” writes Mac­Don­ald, “Lennon’s sor­tie into son­ic chance was pack­aged for a main­stream audi­ence which had nev­er heard of its prog­en­i­tors, let alone been con­front­ed by their work.”

In the new Poly­phon­ic video above, Noah Lefevre takes a dive into those prog­en­i­tors and their work, pro­vid­ing the con­text to under­stand how “the Bea­t­les’ weird­est song” came togeth­er. Points of inter­est on this cul­tur­al-his­tor­i­cal jour­ney include com­pos­er Pierre Scha­ef­fer­’s resis­tance-head­quar­ters-turned-exper­i­men­tal-music-lab Stu­dio d’Es­sai; Nazi Ger­many, where the ear­ly Mag­ne­tophon tape recorder was devel­oped; the BBC Radio­phon­ic Work­shop; avant-garde rock­er Frank Zap­pa’s Stu­dio Z; and the Mil­lion Volt Light and Sound Rave, a 1967 hap­pen­ing that host­ed “Car­ni­val of Light,” a Bea­t­les com­po­si­tion nev­er heard again since.

What did Lennon, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with George Har­ri­son and Yoko Ono (with whom he’d only just got togeth­er), think he was doing with “Rev­o­lu­tion 9”? “To the extent that Lennon con­cep­tu­al­ized the piece at all, it is like­ly to have been as a sen­so­ry attack on the citadel of the intel­lect,” writes Mac­Don­ald, “a rev­o­lu­tion in the head aimed, as he stressed at the time, at each indi­vid­ual lis­ten­er — and not a Maoist incite­ment to social con­fronta­tion, still less a call for gen­er­al anar­chy.” Indeed, as Lefevre points out, it expressed his ambiva­lence about the very con­cept of 1968-style revolt as much as the com­par­a­tive­ly con­ven­tion­al “Rev­o­lu­tion 1,” which comes ear­li­er on the album. The six­ties may be long over, but Lennon’s atti­tude has­n’t lost its rel­e­vance: we still hear an end­less stream of promised solu­tions to soci­ety’s prob­lems, and we’d still all love to see the plan.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How the Bea­t­les Exper­i­ment­ed with Indi­an Music & Pio­neered a New Rock and Roll Sound

The Bea­t­les’ 8 Pio­neer­ing Inno­va­tions: A Video Essay Explor­ing How the Fab Four Changed Pop Music

Hear Paul McCartney’s Exper­i­men­tal Christ­mas Mix­tape: A Rare & For­got­ten Record­ing from 1965

The 10-Minute, Nev­er-Released, Exper­i­men­tal Demo of The Bea­t­les’ “Rev­o­lu­tion” (1968)

How George Mar­tin Defined the Sound of the Bea­t­les: From String Quar­tets to Back­wards Gui­tar Solos

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.