What does ‘Yellow Submarine’ actually mean?
In many ways, ‘Yellow Submarine’ is more than just a song. In fact, probably more than any other, it is a title with a cultural gravitas so strong that it hardly warrants an introduction. This was The Beatles at their unfathomable peak, spearheading the summer of love and marking their irresistible flaunt with experimentation.
But with all that in mind, and much like the other myriad of frenzied conspiracies that eddied around the Fab Four, there is still an ongoing debate to this day about what the blazing maritime symbol actually means and whether John Lennon and Paul McCartney were trying to communicate some more subtle metaphors through it.
Released in 1966 as part of Revolver and paired with ‘Eleanor Rigby’ on a double A-side, ‘Yellow Submarine’ certainly found itself in distinguished company. However, the song also marked a period of new horizons for The Beatles. Both tracks stood apart from the rock genre they had come to define, signalling a willingness to explore uncharted musical territory and defy expectations.
Famously, Lennon and McCartney claimed they wrote the track for the purpose of being a children’s song, but with the flying freedoms of this period of the 1960s as well as the Beatles’ own well-publicised penchant for a substance or two, inevitably, a swirling psychedelic undercurrent to the song emerged, marking more of a hippie high than ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It’.
So, what does ‘Yellow Submarine’ actually mean?
You could rhyme off a seemingly never-ending list of possible theories behind ‘Yellow Submarine’, but ultimately, none of them are ever going to be fully proven. We can start with the claim it’s for the kids – salient in the sense it did obviously spurn a cartoon film off its back – yet there’s just no getting away from the Beatles’ draw to drugs and the impact that it permeated through much, if not all, of their work from the time.
Is the object of a ‘Yellow Submarine’ itself an allusion to a certain type of pill, perhaps, or more in the sense of the journey it provides being a ‘trip’ to the underworld and back? Some argued there was a much more politicised message lurking beneath its depths, however – that the Far Four were the captains and their audience the passengers going on a voyage towards a unified world, or that it was even a protest song against the use of nuclear submarines in the raging Vietnam War at the time. Needless to say, the majority of these suggested messages centred on the cornerstones of peace and love – can’t you tell it was the ‘60s?
Marrying all these theories together is to say that ‘Yellow Submarine’ is the addiction in itself – for young and old alike, hypnotised by Beatlemania and let loose into a world of starry eyes and zebra crossings and strawberry fields. The band’s two lyrical maestros may have insisted on the song being a pure, innocent novelty, but it’s clear their intentions and lyrical covertness dove so far beneath the sea that it was anything but.
