What on earth does “crabalocker fishwife” mean in The Beatles’ classic ‘I am the Walrus’?
Decades after the single release of ‘I Am the Walrus’, The Beatles song still has millions of listeners stumped as to the meaning of many of its manic, meandering, and magical lyrics.
That was the whole point, with its writer, John Lennon, making a mockery of anyone subjecting his band’s songs to close analysis. Some of its lines don’t stand up to literary scrutiny because they’re intentionally nonsensical.
None more so than the expression “crabalocker fishwife”, which to this day remains shrouded in the obscurity of Lennon’s acid-drenched imagination. All we can do is give our best guesses about what it means.
Working backwards from other references in the song, we can assume the term “fishwife” has something to do with the later lyric “semolina pilchards”, a type of flour-battered fish plate commonly found in Mediterranean countries. Perhaps she has something to feed the “elementary penguins” who appear later in the track. Lennon clearly had sea creatures on his mind while he was writing his song, not least in the shape of the titular “walrus”.
The words immediately following this mysterious expression are “pornographic priestess”, which juxtaposes the sanctity of a religious cleric with the perversion of sexual imagery. “Boy, you’ve been a naughty girl,” Lennon then exclaims. “You’ve let your knickers down.” It could be that the image of a “fishwife”, a doting homemaker married to a fisherman, aligns with his mention of the “priestess”. Both are examples of gender roles traditionally imposed on women, which he’s aiming to subvert.
And what about “crabalocker”?
The word “crabalocker” is yet to enter the English dictionary, and it may never be clear exactly what Lennon meant by it. However, we may at least be able to clarify where he got it from.
Around a year before ‘I Am the Walrus’ was written, an episode of the celebrated puppet-animation TV series Thunderbirds called ‘Paths Of Destruction’ premiered on British television. The episode featured a mechanical vehicle used for clearing forest landscapes to make way for the construction of new roads, which the show’s writers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson called a “crabber logger”.
This contemporary reference is hard to miss once we see it. Lennon obviously adapted the vehicle’s name, compacting it into a single word with a different spelling. And, we can assume, a different meaning. Perhaps inferring a abundantly snappy – as in, a ‘a locker full of crabbiness’. Or no meaning at all. The “crab” part marks the appearance of another sea in the song, but that doesn’t help us make sense of the “locker”.
Lennon’s lyrics will keep people guessing long after we’ve exhausted our search for more clues. And that’s surely a testament to the brilliance of his composition, which remains worthy of the futile scrutiny it deliberately courted.
Why it matters
This wasn’t just joyously irreverent nonsense, though. The Beatles were the most popular act in history by this stage, and here they were dropping strange colloquialisms that no A&R expert would ever advise. It was exotically non-commercial. This , in many ways, implied to the public the sentiment that as things grew more popular, they also grew more experimental.
So, in some regards, that marks the maddening inscrutable nature of “crabalocker fishwife” genuinely one of the more important utterances that The Beatles ever deployed. It is, in effect, the avant-garde inverse to the simplicity of “all you need is love”, a similarly simple expression that broadcast a vague but far-reaching epithet to the public: your culture is important.
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