The Beatles and Dialectics

A brief dialectical look at the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album

For whatever reason, I started listening to the Beatles a lot a few months ago. I haven’t been able to stop, because they’re a very dialectical band, in all kinds of ways. I could write 10,000 words rambling on about the dialectics of the Beatles (much as I did about Elvis). But instead, I will just confine myself to one album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and only three tracks on that album: “Within You Without You,” “When I’m Sixty-Four,” and “Lovely Rita.” These three tracks, in this order, are a perfect example of the dialectical nature of the Beatles—this album is widely considered their best, and these three tracks are the heart of it.

First, a quick big-picture look at how Sgt. Pepper’s is a dialectical album: it’s considered one of the first “concept albums” (a CD that is a unified piece of art rather than just a collection of songs). It’s also regarded as the transition point into the psychedelic phase of the Beatles. And it is more psychedelic and metaphysical than their earlier stuff, by a mile—but it’s also very grounded and familiar. This is the core dialectical tension of the album—their most avant garde album, the most psychedelic and metaphysical, but their most familiar (with songs like “With A Little Help From My Friends” and “When I’m Sixty Four,” that are about as conservative and universally friendly as it gets).

“Within You Without You,” in lyrics and instrumentation, is very mystical, trippy, far out. It ends with the lines “And the time will come when you see we're all one
And life flows on within you and without you.” It is about transcending the physical plane and realizing that the metaphysical world unites us beyond all that we see and experience in this world. The song sounds this way too, as it features Indian instrumentation such as sitar, tambura, dilruba, and other esoteric instruments. It sounds unlike anything else the Beatles did up to that point. You feel like you are being taken for some ride into unfamiliar territory. It’s also over five minutes long, and feels it (in a good way). It’s one of the longer Beatles songs (they mostly did snappy two minute numbers). It’s like entering some alternate universe for a while, and you can lose track of time, space, and yourself.

This song transitions directly into “When I’m Sixty-Four,” a track that is about as different from “Within You Without You” as you can imagine. As the title implies, it is about ageing, and the realities of physical existence—this pits it against the previous song. But it goes deeper than that. It is an earthy song, all about embracing the most modest, domestic, materialist existence, and finding joy and contentment in that: “You can knit a sweater by the fireside, Sunday mornings go for a ride. Doing the garden, digging the weeds. Who could ask for more?” The instrumentation of the song is also very earthy, with a trio of clarinets (two regular clarinets and one bass clarinet) throughout. You can really feel the bass clarinet, and the staccato notes it pumps out evoke a particularly materialist feeling. While “Within You Without You” brings you into the metaphysical realm, “When I’m Sixty-Four” brings you back down to earth.

“Lovely Rita” comes after, and represents a synthesis of the two tracks before it. The instrumentation and musicality is kind of ethereal and spectral—you feel transported to some other strange place—but the lyrics and story of the song are very down to earth and relatable. You hear high-pitched, spacey chanting as soon as the song starts, like you’re blasting off. The chorus starts immediately, with its kind of swirling overdub of Beatles voices. The lyrics depict a story about the singer (Paul) noticing a meter maid named Rita who he thinks is cute, and he works himself up to ask her when she’s free to get tea. It’s about appreciating beauty in unusual places—nobody would usually think of a meter maid as beautiful, but this song finds beauty there, in the most unexpected, everyday place. That, combined with the soaring musicality of the track, makes a perfect synthesis of “Within You Without You” and “When I’m Sixty-Four.”