The Beatles song that John Lennon was too “self-conscious” to take seriously
They say shyness, that slimy and smothering feeling of being self-conscious or too caught up in your own head, is the thief of greatness and can keep a person from giving something their all, holding them back like chains that stop them from reaching the peak. Sure, no one would ever claim that John Lennon didn’t make it to the top, but it doesn’t mean he wasn’t still tangled up in blue.
It is not really possible for anyone to be truly and completely free of feelings of self-consciousness, even though it may seem like there are plenty of artists who seem to have achieved that, think David Bowie in his many seductive forms, or Lady Gaga wandering around in a meat dress. One wonders that surely it must mean that artists who go so extreme in their presentation, who deliver at the absolute lengths of craziness and shock, must have managed to silence that inner voice.
But still, even with those artists, you can see glimmers of it, as in interviews, the person behind the performances is rarely as bold, and you can see that they still hold an element of shyness. The key is simply being able to put it to one side for the art, and if it were rid of completely, chances are what you’d be left with is a dangerous narcissist, so perhaps some amount of self-consciousness is necessary, just not in the recording studio.
That’s where it can end up, keeping an artist locked in chains if even in the sacred artistic space, they can’t shake them off. These things come in waves, easing up one day but then gripping someone the next, hitting them hard with a sudden and intense bout of self-conscious feeling that can take a strong hold, and in mid-August 1968, it gripped John Lennon.
The band were at EMI studios working on the White Album amidst a famously frosty environment, which may have been what caused this sudden patch of awkward shyness in Lennon as he faced up to having to present his ideas to a more critical panel, wherein his bandmates weren’t exactly the friends they once were. Maybe that’s what left him so conscious of himself when it came to putting ‘Yer Blues’ on tape, and the result was an odd track. ‘Yer Blues’ is obviously a blues song, but Lennon added a sarcastic edge that he always claimed was purposeful but might just have been protective.
“There was a self-consciousness about singing blues,” he once said, “We were all listening to Sleepy John Estes and all that in art school, like everybody else. But to sing it was something else. I’m self-conscious about doing it.” In short, Lennon was stepping into a world he loved, and so it was a world that he wanted to live up to, and that scared him.
So his solution seemed to be to make it all a joke. “I think Dylan does it well, you know. In case he’s not sure of himself, he makes it [a] double entendre. So, therefore, he is secure in his Hipness,” Lennon said, looking at Dylan’s own sarcastic edge and seemingly seeing it as a safe haven. So, he decided to go there too, writing a track that takes the mick out of exactly what he was: a British man trying to sing the blues.
Taking jabs out of the British blues boom and its late, white-washing adopting of Black American music, the lyrics are largely a piss-take where Lennon himself becomes the butt of the joke, really.
But to McCartney, that was a cop-out, for he believed in Lennon’s ability to sing the blues and sing it straight. “Paul was saying, ‘Don’t call it ‘Yer Blues’. just say it straight’. But I was self-conscious, and I went for ‘Yer Blues’,” Lennon explained, openly admitting that it was shyness that held the track back from being something serious, and perhaps being something greater.
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