“It’s not about anything”: The song Eric Clapton said meant absolutely nothing
Rock and roll has never run short of great protest songs. Some of the greatest anthems ever written have come out of someone lashing out in anger, and it’s no different when those loud guitars have a specific target in mind when they blare out of the speakers. When Eric Clapton stepped up to the plate with a seemingly political song, though, he wasn’t exactly giving Rage Against the Machine a run for their money in the lyrical department.
Granted, Clapton’s lyrics were never supposed to be on the same level as Bob Dylan’s. He was far better suited to speaking through his guitar, and when he did manage to hit on something profound like ‘Tears in Heaven’, he could always rely on his sense of melody to bring him back from the brink instead of having to rely on some witty turn of phrase to get him over the line.
And that’s no different from the kind of idols that Clapton listened to growing up. He certainly had an appreciation for artists like Dylan, who could twist words around and make something no one had thought of. Still, other examples of classic bluesmen have become legendary by turning ordinary words into something extraordinary purely through their sense of swagger and attitude.
Once Clapton started writing a song called ‘Revolution’, though, people were up in arms about what he would say. All of his peers had made songs about uprisings and riots in the streets back in the 1960s, but now that we had reached the 2000s, this could have been ‘Slowhand’s excuse to say his piece about what was happening in Iraq or the ‘War on Terror’ going on in America.
However, when looking at the lyrics independently, some lines hardly make any sense from one stanza to the next. Half of the time, he seems to be talking about a woman who did him wrong in the same blues tradition, but the chorus about this flame wanting a revolution never really goes anywhere outside of a few one-off lines.
And that wasn’t necessarily an accident, either. When talking about dissecting the lyrics upon release, Clapton felt that no part of the song connected with each other, saying, “I just started making up crazy words. It’s not really a statement about anything. I don’t know what it is.” At the same time, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, either.
Listening back to some of Clapton’s best work during the 1960s, not every part of the song made sense, so this may as well have been his way of getting back to that kind of psychedelic head-trip that made the Summer of Love sound so different. Considering he was also coming off his final tour with Cream, this may have been his way of making the lovelorn nonsense akin to what Ginger Baker had done when making ‘Pressed Rat and Warthog’.
Nothing about the song ‘Revolution’ screams uprising in the streets, but looking back on it, we may have dodged a bullet. After all, this is the same person who went on a racist tirade onstage and eventually bitched and moaned about Covid-19 restrictions, so seeing him try to get serious and talk about the greater problems with the world would have probably divided the room in an instant.
