This is a short post because most of its content is at the linked pages.
For those who don't know, after a serious illness the writer known as Priscilla Bird (not related to me; follow her blog for a whole different reading experience) had some memory loss, which she treated by listening to popular songs that brought back other memories from the years she temporarily lost. Her blog, howtomeowinyiddish.blogspot.com, has a long forum section where she and readers post all the old songs that come to mind, if the songs can be found on Youtube. Most readers are baby-boomers--early or late--and favored artists include 1960s and 1970s favorites like the Rolling Stones, The Who, Crosby-Stills-Nash-and-or-Young, Mark Knopfler, Tom Petty, and of course the Beatles. When discussions of news and politics suggest that somebody's blood pressure may be rising, a favorite cooling-down song is the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever."
Words are available online: just type "beatles strawberry fields forever lyrics" into a search engine.
A couple of different video recordings are available online; this one currently plays moving pictures as well as sound on my computer, though my astigmatic eyes prefer not to watch the moving pictures.
It has that soothing, pre-AIDs, pass-the-joint sound, and it probably was played at pot parties, and when the Beatles got tired of variations on the theme of "A loves B, yeah yeah yeah" they did, in historical fact, search for fresh ideas via drug trips. "Strawberry fields" sounded like something someone visualized while smoking marijuana, but, for John Lennon, the phrase had a specific meaning. He didn't live on a farm that had an actual strawberry field but he did live, as a child, near a charitable institution that was (no doubt ironically) called the Strawberry Field. As a child the future singer, writer, and rock star even played in the Strawberry Field's children's park with all the little dead-end kids.
So this is actually a song about a young man who has talents and a future, contemplating his contemporaries who have neither, remembering the approach to life that made much of the difference between him and them. During his short life Lennon may have tried to relax by thinking that "nothing is real," but on the whole his life was real and earnest; he put lots of energy into lots of projects.
The Beatles went to India and tried to wrap their minds around Hindu philosophy...and what's the first duty of a young Hindu man, before he can renounce worldly goods and live in mystical contemplation? Artha is. Artha is what linguists call a cognate word to "Earth." It means doing your duty as a material being. Before he can spend his days meditating on non-being a Hindu must provide material wealth for his children, his parents, and traditionally a large domestic staff, because the duty of rich families was to hire help; it was a sin to cook their own food, change their own light bulbs, pick up their own wet towels after a bath, because it was a duty to pay people who needed jobs to do those things. (If not rich the young Hindu might never be able to lead a contemplative life. In Hindu philosophy that was all right because his desire for the contemplative life was likely to indicate that in another incarnation he'd be born into a richer family.)
Before going to India the Beatles had already become rich and famous. They could afford to think the kind of thoughts expressed in "Strawberry Fields Forever." They did not get there, however, by thinking that kind of thoughts. It took work to make sing-along tunes and cheap instruments into a fresh sound that interested adults.
This history gives the song a moral many Beatles fans didn't recognize (and may not want to recognize now): If you want to be a dead-ender, lie back, "retire," and tell yourself that "nothing is real." If you have reasons to want to stay alive, keep working.
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