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Author Topic: I Am The Walrus  (Read 3768 times)

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Mrs.Nicholson

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I Am The Walrus
« on: August 05, 2004, 11:22:25 PM »

Is it me or is I Am The Walrus a strange video. I saw it from Magical Mystery Tour.
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Re: I Am The Walrus
« Reply #1 on: September 04, 2004, 06:28:05 AM »

It's pretty strange but that's why I like it.
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Re: I Am The Walrus
« Reply #2 on: September 04, 2004, 06:37:33 AM »

It is strange, yet, beyond Fool On The Hill, it is the best music film in the movie.

 The song itself is strange so of course the vid would be.  But it fits beautifully somehow.

The rest of the movie, with only a very few seconds of exceptions, sucks. :)
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Re: I Am The Walrus
« Reply #3 on: September 04, 2004, 06:44:12 AM »

That and the "Your Mother Should Know" video were the only parts of the movie that I liked.
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Sondra

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Re: I Am The Walrus
« Reply #4 on: September 04, 2004, 06:59:23 AM »

I like when they're the wizards. John sounds like Groucho Marx or something!
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Indica

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Re: I Am The Walrus
« Reply #5 on: September 04, 2004, 07:43:25 PM »

I am the Walrus is a great Video, just for the slap dash way it is made.
It has cheap yet effective imagery, and the instruments on display are amazing.
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Kiss My Bad Self

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Re: I Am The Walrus
« Reply #6 on: September 06, 2004, 08:59:16 AM »

The video was made in a air field thats about ten mins from my house in Kent, England Beatle fans. The egg head cap that John wears in the video i think is what they used to make Victorian mental patients wear.
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Almighty Doer of Stuff

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Re: I Am The Walrus
« Reply #7 on: January 21, 2010, 10:59:15 PM »

*bumps ancient thread*

Yes, it's old, but I want to post my interpretation of what the song, "I Am The Walrus", is about and see what people think.

John Lennon, who wrote the song, claimed it wasn't about anything, but rather that he wrote it to frustrate a teacher who was making his students pick apart and analyze Beatles songs. He claimed the first two lines were inspired by an LSD trip. He also claimed that at the time he wrote the song, he did not know that the walrus was the villain in the Lewis Carroll story, and that when he found out, he was dismayed.

I believe he was lying on both occasions.

John was a very intelligent man, as I'm sure we all know, and he was a huge fan of Lewis Carroll as well. Surely he would have known after the poem in "Through The Looking Glass", Alice argues with Tweedledee and Tweedledum about which character, the walrus or the carpenter, is the villain, and that the whole point that is made clear is that there is no right answer when the question is phrased that way, but that in fact they're both the villains and the oysters are the victims. I believe that when he told us that he never knew that the walrus was the villain, that he wanted us to infer that he knew what the story was about all along.

We also know he loved clever wordplay, and therefore I believe that when he related the anecdote about the teacher, that he wanted us to infer that indeed, there was more to the song than was apparent. He claimed the first two lines were inspired by an LSD trip, and this may have been true, but he did not say the same about the rest of the song.

So here's my interpretation of "I Am The Walrus". Although it is told through vivid psychedelic imagery, and although it may be disturbing to think that Charles Manson may have been right (about this one song, anyway), I believe the song is the story of how a man murders numerous people and gets away with it.

Here's the line-by-line:

Quote
I am he, as you are he, as you are me, and we are all together

The narrator has assembled two accomplices for what he wants to do, and he makes it clear that they're all in it together.

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See how they run like pigs from a gun

Fairly straightforward.

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See how they fly

Their souls flying to heaven.

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I'm crying

The narrator is wounded in the process.

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Sitting on a cornflake

A little unclear on this one, but I'd guess that this is the first of several reference to one of the accomplices defecting.

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Waiting for the van to come

The paddywagon, so to speak.

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Corporation T-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday

He's wearing incriminating evidence, with the blood of both the victims and himself, and doesn't have time to ditch it.

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Man, you've been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long

He's chastising his accomplice, who is in hysterics.

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I am the eggman, they are the eggmen

He and his accomplices can "prove" they're innocent, like unborn babies.

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I am the walrus

All they have to do is confuse the court about who is actually guilty.

Quote
Goo goo g'joob

Baby talk. "Let's put on an innocent act."

-----

Quote
Mr. City Policeman sitting pretty little policemen in a row

The police dispatcher is giving some policemen their orders, to go deal with the situation.

Quote
See how they fly like Lucy in the sky, see how they run

The police chase them on foot while helicopters follow them overhead.

Quote
I'm crying, I'm crying, I'm crying, I'm crying

The police wound him again, and he makes a big stink about it. "Police brutality! How dare you attack an innocent man like this!" etc.

-----

Quote
Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog's eye

He tells the court that his wounds are infected, making the police look like the bad guys.

Quote
Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess. Boy! You've been a naughty girl, you've let your knickers down

He digs up dirt on a juror and blackmails her.

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I am the eggman, they are the eggmen, I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob

He proclaims himself and his accomplices to be innocent, again trying to confuse the jury.

-----

Quote
Sitting in an English garden, waiting for the sun. If the sun don't come, you get a tan from standing in the English rain.

He's waiting while the jury deliberates and hoping they'll decide he's innocent (a good thing, like the sun coming up). If the jury says he's guilty, however, he'll fry in the electric chair for standing up to the British government. "Rain" is a pun for "reign".

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I am the eggman, they are the eggmen, I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob

Same general idea as previous iterations.

-----

Quote
Expert, texpert! Choking smokers! Don't you think the joker laughs at you? See how they smile like pigs in a sty, see how they snide!

The jury deliberating. A minority of the jurors, maybe even just one, criticizing the defendants, getting angry because the other jurors fell for their trickery.

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Semolina pilchard, climbing up the Eiffel Tower

A pilchard is a fish, going back to the "crabalocker fishwife". The juror they blackmailed stands up and casts the deciding vote in the defendants' favor.

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Elementary penguins singing "Hare Krishna!

The idiots who thought the defendants were guilty cheer. "Praise God!"

Quote
Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allen Poe

Poe being, of course, a very depressing man who might bring someone down, they jeered at the juror(s) who voted "guilty".

Quote
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen, I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob, goo goo g'joob, (etc)

The defendants cheer when they hear the verdict. "We're innocent! We're innocent!"

Quote
Oompa, oompa, stick it up your jumper!

"UP YOURS, M*****F*****S!"  ;sorry

Also, The Tragedy of King Lear is mixed in and out of the song. The play is basically about a series of people killing people in power, taking their places, and then being killed themselves. This fits in with my interpretation, and may even indicate that the people who were killed were in fact government officials. This would also fit with the bit about the English reign, although the beginning of the song doesn't necessarily indicate it.

-----

If this interpretation is correct, and I think it is, it's no wonder Lennon made it so confusing!

What do you all think?
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I_Will

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Re: I Am The Walrus
« Reply #8 on: January 21, 2010, 11:03:23 PM »

^^I really, honestly mean this with no disrespect, but are you on something?
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emmi_luvs_beatles

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Re: I Am The Walrus
« Reply #9 on: January 21, 2010, 11:47:06 PM »

^^I really, honestly mean this with no disrespect, but are you on something?

 :o ha2ha

 ;sorry
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Almighty Doer of Stuff

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Re: I Am The Walrus
« Reply #10 on: January 22, 2010, 04:48:56 AM »

For your information, I am on something: the effective opposite of what John Lennon was on when he wrote the first two lines of "I Am The Walrus"!  :P

Why is it so hard for people to believe that I Am The Walrus was really about something serious? I'll never understand it.
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Kevin

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Re: I Am The Walrus
« Reply #11 on: January 22, 2010, 09:56:18 AM »

For your information, I am on something: the effective opposite of what John Lennon was on when he wrote the first two lines of "I Am The Walrus"!  :P

Why is it so hard for people to believe that I Am The Walrus was really about something serious? I'll never understand it.
You don't understand us, we don't understand you. Makes us evens.
We have Lennon's (admittedly not always reliable) testimony that the lyrics are goobledegook. We have Pete Shotton as a witness to the lyrics random assembly. We have George Martin's testimony that the King Lear ending was a happy coincidence of a live BBC broadcast that was on the radio at the time of mixing.
But I guess like Manson and MDC: if you really want to find a hidden meaning in a song you will.
again I'm astounded by people's abilities to convince themselves something is true, despite all the evidence to the contrary, merely because they want it to be so.
Have fun, but don't be suprised if you're not taken too seriously. It's pop music, not the Da Vinci code.
But if this is a joke, there's egg on my face (goo goo ga joob) and I admire the effort, if not the result.
« Last Edit: January 22, 2010, 10:12:59 AM by Kevin »
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AngeloMysterioso

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Re: I Am The Walrus
« Reply #12 on: January 22, 2010, 06:54:57 PM »

Sorry, Almighty Doer of Stuff, but after putting a lot of thought on it, and respectfully, I simply don’t buy it. Yes Lennon was an intelligent person.  But again, I think the simplest, dumbest boring explanation does it for me.

I also did read somewhere that it was written after the Beatles were going through fan mail, and one they picked out turned out to be from a school John attended while he was young: the letter said that they were analyzing the lyrics of his songs in class. For what I have read, it is rather by reacting to that, that John wrote up that song. Elsewhere, I also have seen that most (not the two first verses) of the lines were written by John, scribbling on scrap paper, under the influence of acid. Lennon said that he spontaneously wrote these lyrics in some kind of a surrealist automatic writing fashion.

More specifically, John has said that Semolina was a type of pudding that he was forced to eat as a child, and Pilchard is a type of sardine that was usually fed to cats, back then. There is also another interesting theory about Semolina Pilchard: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/aug/01/thebeatles.freedomofinformation

And so on and so forth.

More simpler, there is no doubt that Lennon was the actual author of these words, that he choose them as they came up from what he was thinking at that moment: out of his own thoughts, situation and experience. Instead of choosing one word, he used another one; and instead of writing down sentences in one way, he wrote them down in a way that he liked better, etc. Being the author of these lyrics, there was no chance outcome in his choice of words, of sentences. And so, there are, most probably, many valid subconscious or psychoanalytical interpretations to all of this nonsensical juxtaposition of words.

But in the sense of some concealed, coded, hidden message? I just can’t believe it.

Too complicated; and commercially useless. Sorry.
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AngeloMysterioso

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Re: I Am The Walrus
« Reply #13 on: January 22, 2010, 07:37:25 PM »

And there is something else. As talented he was, I think that Lennon simply had no time, whatsoever, to invest in such complicated double-entendre schemes writing down lyrics. In the specific case of I Am The Walrus, at least 25 (twenty-five) takes were made of it, notwithstanding all the complicated overdubs, strings, reverse splicing and stuff like that. It seems humanly impossible to me to spend that much time coding lyrics – while working on other pieces of music, lyrics. All that before stepping in the studio, and even rehearsing.

And eat, sleep and do bi-weekly 8 hours acid trips.

It can’t be.
« Last Edit: January 22, 2010, 07:41:49 PM by AngeloMysterioso »
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Mairi

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Re: I Am The Walrus
« Reply #14 on: January 22, 2010, 08:22:07 PM »

You know, it's possible to like something without ascribing deep meaning to it. Personally I hate I Am The Walrus, but other people seem to enjoy it, and I imagine it's because it's catchy, fun, and has some lyrics that sound good (even if they don't mean anything). Just because a song isn't intelligent or complex, that doesn't make your appreciation of it any less valid.
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danielcelano

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Re: I Am The Walrus
« Reply #15 on: August 27, 2010, 03:06:07 PM »

I want to ask you something. How many places is that extra music stroke before "Yellow Matter Custard" on I Am the Walrus located?
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