The Beatles hit song John Lennon claimed “doesn’t say anything”
John Lennon and Paul McCartney were an unmatched songwriting duo; that’s a fact. Their enduring partnership is celebrated as the secret ingredient behind much of The Beatles’ success, alongside broadly being one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed in music history. Yet, it wasn’t always harmonious behind the scenes.
Lennon and McCartney first crossed paths in the late 1950s during their late teenage years. After McCartney joined Lennon’s band, The Quarrymen, they embarked on a musical partnership that left a lasting mark on the world of music. However, after the group officially disbanded in 1970, the duo embarked on a years-long feud that became the focus of public attention.
Aside from discussing their dislike for each other in interviews, both musicians often wrote and released tracks that openly slated each others’ work. At the same time, the pair – particularly Lennon – never shied away from talking about which McCartney-written Beatles songs he didn’t particularly enjoy. For instance, one of the band’s biggest hits, ‘Yesterday’, became one Lennon largely disliked.
Speaking to David Sheff in 1980, he said: “The lyrics don’t resolve into any sense, they’re good lines. They certainly work, you know what I mean? They’re good— but if you read the whole song, it doesn’t say anything; you don’t know what happened. She left, and he wishes it were yesterday, that much you get, but it doesn’t really resolve. So, mine didn’t used to either. I have had so much accolade for ‘Yesterday.’ That’s Paul’s song, and Paul’s baby. Well done. Beautiful— and I never wished I’d written it.”
Although the duo would later reconcile, their public fall-out started as their personal and professional conflicts grew. As the dynamic soured, their attempts to effectively “diss” each other worsened. For instance, Lennon said that McCartney’s first solo album was “rubbish” and McCartney wrote ‘Too Many People’, to which Lennon responded with his brutal track ‘How Do You Sleep?’.
McCartney acknowledged Lennon’s attempts to ridicule him, addressing the line in ‘How Do You Sleep’, “The only thing you done was ‘Yesterday’,” saying: “I had to work very hard not to take it too seriously, but at the back of my mind, I was thinking: ‘Wait a minute, All I ever did was ‘Yesterday’? I suppose that’s a funny pun, but all I ever did was ‘Yesterday’, ‘Let It Be’, ‘The Long and Winding Road’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Lady Madonna’…fuck you, John.”
Even though ‘Yesterday’ became the subject of Lennon’s resentment, it remains one of the band’s most significant hits and one of rock music’s most enduring contributions. Its simplicity is, in fact, its allure. The Beatles, especially in the songwriting partnership of Lennon and McCartney, possessed the extraordinary skill of evoking profound emotional reactions from the most basic of compositions, and ‘Yesterday’ serves as a testament to that ability.
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