“Everybody had a hard year”: The White Album and the Beatles’ Poetics of Apocalypse

Abstract

Music possesses an innate power to move us in myriad emotional, spiritual, and sensual ways, and the Beatles understood this concept implicitly. They pulsed our adrenaline with “I Want to Hold Your Hand”; they broke our hearts with “Yesterday”; they thrilled our minds with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967); and they touched our souls with “Let It Be.” But with The White Album (The Beatles 1968), the Beatles literally took us everywhere that music can go. In a self-consciously constructed song cycle that guides the listener from the Cold War-inspired “Back in the USSR” through the psychosexual “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” the somber realities of “Blackbird,” and the sheer terror of “Helter Skelter,” The White Album pits our yearnings for love, hope, and peace in sharp contrast with an increasingly fragmented postmodern void.1 Through parody, hyperbole, and bitter irony, The White Album tells the story, in highly metaphorical fashion, of the sociocultural calamity that the world experienced in 1968. From assassination and racial unrest to political disjunction and the growing shadows of the Vietnam War, 1968 displaced the optimism of 1967’s Summer of Love with equal doses of alienation and uncertainty. And The White Album—with the blank, empty space of its glossy pearl cover—dares us to re-inscribe the Beatles’ art with our own passion, our own reality, our own terror.