The Purple One Got it Wrong: The Beatles song Prince didn’t understand
It wasn’t so much that Prince didn’t like The Beatles; it’s just that he never really ‘got’ them. They didn’t click for him. It wasn’t until well into his recording career that he inadvertently heard ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ and he finally started to listen to them with any degree of regularity. By that point, he was enthused but out of the loop, which meant he approached their back catalogue in an entirely new way.
Hell, it’s unique enough that ‘Good Morning Good Morning’, out of everything, was the song that turned him onto the band. But as his drummer, Bobby Z, recalls, “But that moment, I think he realised that The Beatles were more than he thought.“ So, he went away and studied their sound, but as usual, this was a studious exploration conducted with the aim of nabbing little notes and motifs for his own work rather than revelling in their back catalogue as a fan.
That element of delving into The Beatles would come later for Prince, and when it did, the journey that led him there gave him so pretty unique opinions. For instance, the accepted consensus on ‘I Am the Walrus’ is that it is a revolutionary track that completely overhauled the direction of music. Prince didn’t quite see it that way. He found the whole thing hard to relate to, which feels a bit self-explanatory.
In fact, Prince thought that Lennon hit upon greater universality in his years outside of The Beatles. He claimed that the Liverpudlian “would have never written the beautiful music he wrote at the end of his life if he hadn’t gone through what he did with Yoko and himself.” He continued: “He would have never written ’Imagine.’ And ’Imagine,’ thank God, is going to be around in 2,000 years, but a song like ’I Am The Walrus’ isn’t. You know why? Because John wasn’t the walrus, he was John. ’Imagine’ is a song about truth and will always win out in the end.“
“John wasn’t the walrus, he was John“ is a line that almost sounds like some form of bizarre parody. So, was Prince missing the point entirely? Well, frankly, to a large degree, the little genius was, but this is also indicative of his outlook on life at the time. He espoused his critique of ‘I Am the Walrus’ at a time when he was not only venturing deeper into religion but was also battling against his label for ownership over his work, reconciling the personal meaning of his art rather than the explorative side of things.
Nevertheless, ‘I Am the Walrus’ will arguably be one of The Beatles’ most enduring songs for a long time to come. It represents everything that the latter-day Fab Four strived to achieve. It has transcended society to such an extent that even today, you can say to a niece or nephew, ‘I am the Walrus’, and they’ll reply, ‘Goo-coo-cachoo’, whatever the hell that means.
There is no way that a song inspired by the sexual kinks of Eric ‘The Eggman’ Burdon, a working-class Geordie singer, transmuted in the drug-addled mind of John Lennon, run through a ringer of an avant-garde collision of rock and classical orchestration, taking on the ground-breaking compositional structure of a harmonic Moebius strip, should reasonably expect to be a hit that lives on for centuries. However, contrary to Prince’s persuasions, even over half a century later, it is still gaining relevance.
It is bending experimental and innovative, a million miles from the typical mainstream. Yet, the banned song defied the odds, hit the charts, and can be heard as clearly as anything else in The Beatles’ back catalogue in the strains of today’s emerging alternative music.
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