Pop lyrics as intertextual playground

In 2012 Keith Negus wrote that the popular song, though a pervasive art form, is still largely ignored in literary studies. Despite an increasing number of publications on the literary aspects of music, Negus’s statement remains relevant (Reference Negus2012, 368). This does not mean that people have always kept music and literature strictly separated on grounds of suspected incompatibility, however. A noteworthy work in this regard is Calvin S. Brown’s Reference Brown1970 publication The Relations between Music and Literature as a Field of Study which notes, for example, how in Observations on the Art of English Poesy (1602), the poet and composer Thomas Campion names two devices that both art forms could not exist without, namely meter and rests (Brown 98). A metaphysical approach has often been taken when trying to reveal the relationship between music and literature by contrasting verbal and musical language.Footnote ³ This approach is not sufficiently literary to use as a method to discuss the literary aspects of the popular song, however. In contrast, Therese Wiwe Vilmar’s discussion of melophrasis – how music is represented in literature – aims to construct ‘an accessible analytical framework for literary scholars’ (Reference Vilmar2020, 1), offering a sufficiently literary lens that adds value to both literary and musical studies but does not offer a way to better understand the literary quality of the popular song. As Calvin Brown noted, music-literary studies ‘can take its place alongside the best work in other branches of literary scholarship’ (107), a statement this paper reiterates. Considering Kenneth Womack’s notion that ‘songs involve a rhetorical complex of lyrics and music through which its readers […] share in the creation of meaning’ (Reference Womack2007, 164, my italics), intertextuality offers itself as a valuable tool to analyse pop lyrics and navigate through their ‘tissue of quotations’ (Barthes Reference Barthes and Heath1977, 146).

The pop lyric lends itself to intertextual analysis. In songwriting the title is particularly important as it ‘overcodes the whole text’ (Karrer Reference Karrer and Plett1991, 123) and is, in extension, able to ‘reproduce or challenge the literary canon’ (Karrer 133). Similarly, Julia Kristeva’s formulation of intertextuality posits that all texts are ‘constructed out of already existent discourse’ (Allen Reference Allen2000, 35) and each sign system can be read as a text (McAfee Reference McAfee2004, 26), which renders futile any refusal to proclaim pop lyrics as literary texts and consequently dismisses them as unworthy of a literary analysis. If anything, the postmodern nature of the pop song further enhances its compatibility with intertextual theories: the pop song does not discriminate when echoing and transforming previous texts and is emblematic of how in postmodernism ‘high and low cultural productions are merged’ (Allen 183).

As Heinrich Franz Plett notes, intertextuality is not time-bound and exclusively found in postmodernism but is much more frequently and deliberately employed than in preceding cultural periods (Reference Plett and Plett1991, 26). This inability to separate intertextuality and postmodernism is also underlined by Manfred Pfister’s comment that ‘intertextuality has become the very trademark of postmodernism’ (Reference Pfister and Plett1991, 209). Modernists such as T.S. Eliot came close to foreshadowing the intertextual nature of literature, most notably in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), in which he emphasised the vital importance of acknowledging the simultaneous existence of the past and the present and their contemporaneous existence in the creative mind, which envigorates the literary tradition (Roeffaers Reference Roeffaers2001, 87). However, where modernism continuously granted a prerogative to more reputable pieces of our cultural heritage, postmodernism celebrates what Pfister describes as the reduction of all previous texts to the same level of ‘disposable materials and surface stimuli’ (219). Since the history of the popular song has significant overlap with the increasing superficiality of art caused by reproduction, it is natural that this postmodern superficiality feeds the pop song. This is reflected in Tony Mitchell’s suggestion that post-war pop music exhibits ‘some of the clearest features of postmodern performance, production, and consumption’ (Reference Mitchell1989, 274). This is what renders the pop song such a fertile environment and catalyst for intertextuality: the creation of pop music involves incorporating elements from existing content, inevitably encompassing a multiplicity of texts and, in a characteristic postmodern fashion, dissolving the distinction between high and low culture by mutating and pastiching these texts.

This article offers a method of textual analysis that can be applied to all forms of popular music containing lyrics and created in the postmodern era. Discussing a postmodern art form can seem glib, as intertextuality is almost always used somewhat differently. Plett underlined this aspect of intertextuality in 1991, but it remains true today; the main divide that still exists today is that between what Geoffrey Miller terms the ‘reader-oriented’ and the ‘author-oriented’ (Reference Miller2011, 285). The reader-oriented approach corresponds best with Kristeva’s notion, while the author-oriented approach values ‘authorial intent’ (Miller 287) above the role of the reader. In the former, readers ‘must break down the artificial boundaries erected between texts’ while the latter believes ‘meaning has been determined by … the author’ (Miller 287). Miller notes that a ‘study of the dialogical nature of language, devoid of any fixation on tracing the influence of one text on another, is precisely the kind of study that Kristeva was advocating’ (286).

Scarlett Baron presents the distinction between influence and intertextuality by stating that ‘influence is defined by agency and causality and pertains to authors’, while intertextuality ‘takes a bird’s eye view of the relations between texts, exploding the binary and diachronic structures that sit at influence’s conceptual heart’ (Reference Baron2011, 51). It is such an approach to intertextual studies that I will use here to offer a pragmatic approach to understanding the literary value and postmodern nature of the pop lyric. I will also invoke Gérard Genette’s Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982), in which he develops a model of five subtypes of intertextuality toward a typology of transtextuality. Two subtypes are most relevant here: what Genette labels as ‘intertextuality’ and ‘hypertextuality’. The former arises when there is a ‘co-presence of two or more texts’, whether consciously or unconsciously on the author’s part, while the latter pertains to instances where the text is modelled on a text of reference as is the case with parodies and pastiches (Larsson Reference Larsson2014, 312–314). My use of the term intertextuality will refer to the overarching phenomenon as with Kristeva, and not to the specific subtype of Genette’s terminology. As Kristian Larsson notes, scholars often mean the wider Genettian concept of transtextuality when using the term intertextuality (312). While following Genette’s model might be promising for large-corpus research into popular music’s intertextuality, to maintain a tight focus here, I will select a limited and carefully compiled corpus of song lyrics written in the postmodern period by a single band, the Beatles.

Although the Beatles’ name will no doubt provoke many associations, and ‘qualify as a textual entity’ (Womack 165), the inherent literary aspects of the band have not yet been subjected to intertextual research. As an ‘endlessly iterating text’ (Womack 166), I have selected a corpus of 27 songs that were released across the Beatles’ career. Intertextuality in the band’s songbook is not limited to these songs, but they provide a good starting point for my argument here. By choosing songs ranging from ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ (Please Please Me, 1963) to ‘The End’ (Abbey Road, 1969), the selected corpus reveals evolutionary trends within the songwriting practices of the Beatles. Considering Baron’s distinction between influence and intertextuality, this article will, while acknowledging the Beatles as the authors of these songs, zoom out and venture beyond the authors to take a ‘bird’s eye view’ of their intertextual connections (Baron 51).

A pop group with artistic flairs: Lennon/McCartney from Please Please Me to Rubber Soul

During the early phase of the period from their first LP, Please Please Me (1963) to their pivotal Rubber Soul (1965), Paul McCartney and John Lennon quickly became and would remain the main forces behind the band’s songwriting, leaving only 10% of its catalogue written by George Harrison and Ringo Starr. In considering the band’s collaborative approach Womack states that their output was ‘the explicit result of an intensely collaborative and corporatised process of multiple authorship’ (176). While still acknowledging the multiple authorship, this section will limit its scope to the songs accredited to the songwriting duo of Lennon/McCartney in order to find intertextual trends within them. The intertextuality of this period’s lyrics is twofold, as will be discussed below. These different types of intertextualities will be referred to as modes: the first mode of intertextuality in this early-to-middle period is one that engages with its own specific medium and the longer tradition of the popular song. This intertextual mode can then be subdivided into two categories: adopting and complementing.

The first category, adopting, is the most vampiric one. Here, the pop song feeds off its predecessors by taking an existing line and seamlessly fitting it into a new one. In the case of the Beatles’ early period, the song ‘Please Please Me’ directly feeds off Bing Crosby’s ‘Please’ (1932). The intertextuality being present in the title increases its prevalence since the title ‘overcodes’ (Karrer 123) the song and reproduces the popular song tradition. This already strong connection does not suffice for the new song, and so it takes from another. The image presented in the second line of the bridge, ‘you know there’s always rain in my heart’,Footnote ⁴ finds its strength by feeding off Buddy Holly’s ‘Raining in My Heart’ (1959).Footnote ⁵ The image used in ‘Please Please Me’ has its claws set into the title of Holly’s song, further showcasing the power of the (song) title as an intertextual device. This happens again on the same album through the song ‘There’s A Place’, where the title is latched to the song ‘There’s A Place for Us’ from West Side Story (1957), written and composed by Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein. This vampiric adoption, which aids the new song to claim its place in its broader cultural context, can be found in quite a few other Lennon/McCartney songs from this period. Also on their first album, the famous opening lines of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ display the same intertextual mode as the previous songs discussed. ‘Well, she was just seventeen / You know what I mean’ is an adaptation of Chuck Berry’s ‘Little Queenie’ (1959) in which Queenie is a girl of seventeen, creating a dialogic textual engagement with the Beatles’ predecessor. Furthermore, the song uses typical beat group rhymes in its chorus such as ‘boom/room’ and ‘night/tight’, establishing an intertextual connection to existing popular songs.

Creating an obvious intertextual dialogue with preceding pop songs that gained success is a natural reflex when writing a first album: Lennon and McCartney were young and not quite the experienced songwriters they would later become. However, this is not limited to the very earliest Lennon/McCartney songs: the opening lines of ‘Run for Your Life’ from Rubber Soul (‘Well, I’d rather see you dead, little girl/Than to be with another man’) are lifted from Elvis Presley’s ‘Baby Let’s Play House’ (1955).Footnote ⁶

The second of the categories within the first mode of intertextuality is ‘complementing’. Here, Lennon/McCartney songs seem to shy away from mere adoption and instead create a stronger intertextual connection between them and other pop songs by adding to their narrative. ‘She Loves You’, released as a single in 1963, shows the other side of Bobby Rydell’s ‘Forget Him’ (1963). The latter addresses a girl concerning her seemingly uninterested boyfriend, while the former tells that boyfriend he ‘should be glad’ that he is loved by this girl. In the same song, Lennon and McCartney imbue the prevalence of the interjection ‘yeah’ in rock and pop music from the 1950s with more meaning (see, for instance, Ventzislavov Reference Ventzislavov2014). Where artists such as Elvis Presley often used it as a vocal embellishment or exclamation, ‘She Loves You’ lifts its status by making it a part of the lyric and thus the song’s narrative. This complementing can additionally be found in ‘No Reply’ on Beatles for Sale (1964), which interacts with the narrative of ‘Silhouettes’ (1957) by The Rays, in which suspected adultery is discovered by looking through the girl’s window. Similarly, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ (A Hard Day’s Night, 1964) builds upon Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’ (1959). Here, the latter claims that money is all one should want and need while the former points out that ‘money can’t buy … love’. In addition, the use of a double-negative ‘don’t need no diamond ring’ in the second verse creates a strong intertextual connection with the rock-n-roll canon that bears the linguistic influence of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). This grammatical construction is not simply a linguistic fact but highlights the intertextual nature of the pop song by engaging with its textual roots. Similarly, Negus notes how the single ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ (1964) echoes the Chantels’ ‘Maybe’ (1958) and in doing so, constructs an intertextual relation with the discourse found in girl groups (372).

In contrast to the first mode discussed above, the second mode of intertextuality found in this period of Lennon/McCartney lyrics forms a testament to their artistic flair and desire to elevate popular music to a more serious art form. This mode of intertextuality provides us with a better understanding of how the Beatles’ songbook echoes many textual products beyond popular songs, including high-brow poetic products, as will be discussed in what follows.

One of the most striking instances of intertextuality can be found on Rubber Soul in the song ‘In My Life’. Reflecting on the song, John Lennon commented that it ‘was the first time I consciously put my literary part of myself into the lyric’ (Lennon & Wenner Reference Lennon and Wenner2000, 178–179). By the time Rubber Soul was released, Lennon had already published two of his nonsense books, In His Own Write (1964) and A Spaniard in the Works (1965), a testament to his interaction with the literary tradition and more high-brow media. It is indeed this interaction with high-brow literature that is brought to the surface in ‘In My Life’. The song is unusually nuanced for a pop song, as reflected in the lines ‘There is no one compares to you / […] / Though I know I’ll never lose affection / For people and things that went before’, but its main attraction is its intertextual connection to a literary period seemingly unrelated to the Beatles and their pop songs: The Old Familiar Faces by Romantic essayist and poet Charles Lamb (1798). The poem reminisces about the old familiar faces the lyrical ‘I’ once knew and how he is in search of those faces, while the song places these old ‘lovers and friends’ as ‘memories’ that might ‘lose their meaning’ in comparison with a newfound love whom the song addresses. Despite the differences, both texts bear striking similarities, particularly the poem’s first and final stanzas:

There is a clear echo of these passages in Lennon’s lyric (‘All these places had their moments / With lovers and friends, I still can recall / Some are dead and some are living / In my life, I’ve loved them all’). Further, Lennon’s lyrics construct clear parallels by using the images of lost friends and accompanying nostalgia but invigorated by his modern sensibility and a feeling of fondness instead of lament. ‘In My Life’ shares The Old Familiar Faces’ meditation on time, memories, and loss, but treats it as ‘disposable materials and surface stimuli’ (Pfister 219) to which a new image can be pegged. This natural intertextuality contributes to the pop song’s postmodern nature. In ‘In My Life’ the high cultural value of the Romantic poets is evoked in the low cultural medium of the pop song, chiselling away at the artificial boundaries between high and low poetic products.

The postmodern nature of the pop song, and the Beatles’ pre-1966 songbook, can be discussed through ‘Michelle’ (Rubber Soul), primarily composed by Paul McCartney. The song uses very elementary French such as ‘ma belle’ and ‘sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble’, a trait many listeners find charming. By using such simple French in a 1960s pop song, the cultural prevalence of France is evoked. The powerful cultural currency of directors such as Jacques Demy, Louis Malle, and François Truffaut, and A-listers such as Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon, and Jean-Paul Belmondo is used as a cultural text, which is here free to be recycled and invoked, by reducing it to the French language and giving it a place in a British pop song. In doing so, the song plays on the ‘text’ of French culture to claim its place within popular culture and among continental middle-brow texts. So yet again, a grand narrative is reduced to recyclable material, a superficiality.

This section has discussed the intertextuality of Lennon/McCartney lyrics from the Beatles’ early to middle period, spanning Please Please Me to Rubber Soul. By examining a selected corpus of their songs, the section uncovers how the Beatles engaged with their own medium and tradition of popular song while also showcasing their artistic flair and aspiration to elevate popular music to a more serious art form. The analysis reveals a twofold intertextuality: one that draws from the popular song tradition and another that extends to literary and cultural texts beyond the realm of pop music. Through examples like ‘In My Life’ and ‘Michelle,’ the Beatles’ songs construct an intertextual connection with the texts of Romantic poetry and French culture, blurring the boundaries between high and low culture and highlighting the postmodern nature of their lyrics. This exploration not only enhances our understanding of the Beatles’ songbook but also reinforces the previously made argument regarding the literary value and postmodern textual nature of pop lyrics.

Artists in the pop song medium: Lennon and McCartney from Revolver to Abbey Road

When the Beatles entered their post-touring studio years (1966–1970), popular music had already evolved tremendously, in part due to the Beatles’ own earlier output. As James Carey discovered in his statistical study of forms of courtship in popular music, a clear shift had taken place: the passivity towards romantic relations present in songs from 1955 was replaced by more active images of courtship by 1966 (Reference Carey1969, 730). The Beatles were not only growing up but working in a medium (and industry) that was also maturing rapidly. This entering into adulthood was reflected in the changes within and around the group. The band had gained increasing control of their own activities (Hames & Inglis Reference Hames and Inglis1999, 184), which allowed their aesthetic unity to reach new heights (Womack 166). As previously discussed, the band would become less cohesive from 1966 onwards (West & Martindale Reference West and Martindale1996, 105), resulting in less unity within the joint authorship of Lennon/McCartney – hence the change to Lennon and McCartney in this section. The songs discussed in this section will be seen as either primarily Lennon or primarily McCartney compositions.

Aside from their own music, both Lennon and McCartney became increasingly involved with the booming art scene, specifically McCartney, who was well aware of developments made by avant-garde composers such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen (McGrath Reference McGrath2003, 6), and Luciano Berio (Connolly Reference Connolly2017, 2). Lennon’s affiliation with the art scene came later, leading to his encounter with his future wife, the artist Yoko Ono. As I will show, the Beatles’ studio years not only brought with them increasing music experimentation but also an increase in intertextual density. This development marked their departure from being pop idols to becoming ‘artists working in the medium of popular song’ (Connolly 13). While literary studies of the pre-Revolver period are scarce, there is an increasing interest in the literary connections that specific songs seem to evoke.Footnote ⁷ These connections range from McCartney’s narrative parallels with James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) to a shared celebration of indolence between Lennon and the Romantics, specifically William Wordsworth.Footnote ⁸

Where the songs of the Beatles’ first period saw the band finding their own voice within tradition of the relatively young medium of pop music as well as the wider literary tradition, the Beatles’ studio years are marked with a deeper exploration of intertextuality, particularly within their own output. This intratextuality – defined by Kareen Martel as intertextuality within a specific corpus which can be either one work by an author or an author’s collection of work (Reference Martel2005, 98) – is most prominent in ‘Glass Onion’ on The White Album (officially The Beatles, 1968), where the lyrics directly reference ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘There’s A Place’, ‘I Am The Walrus’, ‘Lady Madonna’, ‘The Fool On The Hill’, and ‘Fixing A Hole’, using images from these songs to create a new poetic image. The lyrics of ‘Glass Onion’ go even further in their intertextuality by explicitly addressing the listener with the repeated formulation of ‘I told you about…’, and ‘I tell you…’. By mentioning McCartney in the line ‘The walrus was Paul’, the song not only creates a textual interplay with their songbook but also with the notion of themselves, ‘The Beatles’, as a cultural text.

This playful textual awareness was present on ‘Paperback Writer’ (Revolver, 1966), primarily written by McCartney. The song opens with ‘Dear Sir or Madam’, adopting an epistolary style unusual for pop lyrics but not unfamiliar to readers of classic literature through works such as Pamela (1740) and Dracula (1897). Even the manuscript of the lyrics is written like prose (Davies Reference Davies2017, 148), abandoning the typical verse-like structure of lyrics. In addition, the song deepens its intertextual nature through the narrator stating his book is ‘based on a novel by a man named Lear’ (Turner 151). Edward Lear was an important figure in Victorian nonsense literature, publishing collections of poems, short stories, and songs, but never a novel; Lear and his work are evoked but used as a mutable reference, another surface stimulus to further thicken the intertextual fabric.

Much of Lennon’s work of the period from 1966 engages much more extensively with the Victorian nonsense writers, specifically Lear and Lewis Carroll, to increase the intertextual density. In the opening lines of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ (Magical Mystery Tour, 1967), the listener is invited to be taken ‘down’ to a surreal place where ‘nothing is real’, evoking parallels to the first chapter of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), titled ‘Down the Rabbit-Hole,’ where Alice follows the White Rabbit into his burrow and enters a nonsensical, dreamlike world (‘No one I think is in my tree / I mean, it must be high or low / That is, you can’t, you know, tune in, but it’s all right / That is I think it’s not too bad’).

In ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ high modernism manifests itself through the Joycean interior monologue, reminiscent of Leopold Bloom’s ‘verbal slippages’ in Ulysses (Boone Reference Boone and Stanford Friedman1993, 194), a connection strengthened by James Joyce’s presence on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). This intertextual linking of the Victorian nonsense tradition and high modernism is, however, not unnatural. As James Rother notes, modernists such as T.S. Eliot believed that the nonsensical tradition was worthwhile and the form of poetry most closely related to music (Reference Rother1974, 187). ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ can thus be read as more than Lennon’s fondness for the works of Carroll, and instead as a continuation and reiteration of the intertextual dialogue between literary periods. The surreality of Alice’s adventure is joined with the interior monologues of Joycean characters in a pop song, manifesting the medium’s postmodernist eclecticism.

Furthermore, this connection to Joyce’s Ulysses in ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is also established in ‘A Day in the Life’ (Sgt. Pepper). The song features both Lennon and McCartney lyrics, creating a clear distinction between the two lyrical voices which is amplified by compositional choices. Where Lennon’s part talks vaguely and associatively of a car accident, a film, the House of Lords, and ‘four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire’, McCartney delivers a banal, straight-as-can-be story of waking up, drinking tea, and running to catch the bus. Only when the lyrical ‘I’ in McCartney’s part says he ‘went into a dream’ (198) does the more abstract reasoning of Lennon’s part return. This clear distinction between voices and narration is intensified by the sudden musical clarity of McCartney’s part in contrast to the harmonically dense and almost psychedelic sound of Lennon’s part. This distinction between voices, which permeates every level of the song, is similar to the way Joyce switches between the minds of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. Stephen’s inclination to overthink and Bloom’s rootedness and directness are reflected in Lennon’s and McCartney’s parts respectively. Once the switch in ‘A Day in the Life’ happens, it is like turning the page on the ‘Proteus’ episode and encountering Bloom for the first time, making breakfast in his kitchen, in ‘Calypso’. Therefore, analysing both ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘A Day in the Life’ can help in interpreting Joyce’s presence on the Sgt. Pepper’s album cover and further understanding its intertextual implications.

This magpie collection of nonsense and high-brow literature reaches another height in ‘I Am the Walrus’ (Magical Mystery Tour, 1967). Through its title, the song creates an overcoding connection with the poem ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ from Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871), and Lennon’s creation of nonsense words such as ‘crabalocker’, ‘texpert’, and ‘goo goo g’joob’ further establishes this connection. Cultural giants such as Edgar Allen Poe and the Eiffel Tower are mentioned in passing, and the song’s nonsensical whirlpool ends with a recording of a BBC radio broadcast of Act IV, scene VI from William Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear. ‘I Am the Walrus’ thus treats Poe, the Eiffel Tower, and Shakespeare’s towering presence as equal to Lennon’s nonsensical images, tearing down the artificial boundaries between texts. This song, like others previously discussed, absorbs a torrent of images and treats them like surface stimuli that can be used or altered in any way. In addition, the use of a recording of a BBC radio broadcast evokes the incorporation of adverts, newspapers, and textual scraps in the fiction of postmodernist authors such as William S. Burroughs. Lennon uses this technique, intertextual in nature, again in ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite’ (Sgt. Pepper’s), the subject and subsequent imagery of which is taken from a Victorian circus poster (Davies 227). This practice, especially its connection with postmodernist art and literature, again highlights the eclectic intertextual nature of the Beatles’ songbook.

Despite this wider intertextual frame, the Beatles’ later output also retained the intertextual relationship with their musical heroes found in their early period. Both ‘Back in the USSR’ (The White Album) and ‘Come Together’ (Abbey Road) are interesting cases in point. ‘Back in the USSR’ (1968), a song primarily written by McCartney, has a clear connection to the Chuck Berry’s ‘Back in the USA’ (1959), while also venturing into a wider intertextual dialogue with the narrative of American nationalism and identity in its jingoistic refrain. It provides the inverse to Berry’s song by offering a pastoral, romantic view of the Soviet Union, and in channelling Bakhtin’s literary ‘carnivalesque’, which brings together opposites, degrades the high images, includes laughter for laughter’s sake, and mocks the current political environment (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984, 51). Gulnara Karimova notes that ‘the significance of the carnivalised text of popular culture’ resides in how it ‘establishes a dialogue between various, often contradictory, voices’ which ultimately leads to ‘reinforcing modern society’ instead of causing a significant shift (Reference Karimova2010, 48). Similarly, the dialogue between opposing voices presented through ‘Back in the USSR’ results in an amusing image that ultimately does not provide an alternative way of experiencing modern society. After all, the Beatles can be seen as conservatives or reactionaries, and their enterprises as ‘a typical English-bourgeois art form spiced with some rebellious elements’ (Heilbronner Reference Heilbronner2011, 103). The playful intertextuality present in ‘Back in the USSR’ can thus be understood as carnivalesque due to its playful engagement with political opposites and inability to condemn or promote either; the contradictory nature of the song is comical but after the song ends, it is as if nothing has changed, and the carnival is over.

‘Come Together’ was primarily written by Lennon, and it also references a record from the Beatles’ beloved Chuck Berry, the phrase ‘old flat-top’ being a direct quote from ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ (1956). The song steps into a dialogue with the rock canon but, as with ‘Back in the USSR’, it goes much further: ‘Come Together’ is taken from Timothy Leary’s campaign slogan when he ran against Ronald Reagan for Governor of California in 1969. Leary approached Lennon to write a song to aid his campaign, but the collaboration soon withered and never happened (Davies 359). Lennon, however, never shy of textual recycling, simply repurposed the song as a Beatles track and retained the slogan as another throwaway reference. To further thicken the intertextuality, the lyrics mention ‘Coca-Cola’, an emblem of the omnipresence of commodities and their accompanying imagery that marked the postmodern period, evoking an awareness of the increasing prevalence of commercial images and stimuli. The product here is reduced to its textual value and used as yet another superficial reference.

Two songs from Abbey Road – ‘Golden Slumbers’ and ‘The End’, both primarily written by McCartney – establish a firm yet obscure connection to the Early Modern period. The title of ‘Golden Slumbers’ is a direct borrowing from a poem by Thomas Dekker, a contemporary of Shakespeare which was printed as part of Dekker, Haughton, and Chettle’s play Patient Grissil in 1603 (Marino Reference Marino2015, 2). What makes this case interesting is that the connection to the Early Modern period becomes trivial; the textual gravity of the Early Modern period is reduced to yet another throwaway image, another surface stimulus that is free for the taking. ‘The End’ does create a somewhat clearer dialogue with the Early Modern period: the minimal lyrics of the song end on a rhyming couplet (‘And in the end the love you make/Is equal to the love you take’), echoing Shakespeare’s well-known tendency to end plays – as well as thoughts and scenes within them – with a rhyming couplet. But again, there is no further thematic or narrative resonance with Shakespeare’s work. Even The Bard manages to be reduced to an ephemeral scrap of text within the Beatles’ intertextual songbook.

The period from Revolver to Abbey Road marks a significant evolution in the Beatles’ intertextual engagement within the medium of popular song. As the band matured, both musically and personally, both Lennon’s and McCartney’s lyrics became increasingly rich with references and allusions, weaving a complex tapestry of literary and cultural influences. From playful nods to Victorian nonsense literature to notable connections with high modernist and postmodernist techniques, the Beatles’ songbook manifests a remarkable depth of intertextuality in its true postmodern sense.

Echoes in the shadows: intertextuality in the lyrics of Harrison and Starkey

The considerably smaller lyrical output by George Harrison and even more minimal output by Ringo Starr leaves both Beatles often overlooked and left in the shadow of the Lennon/McCartney duo. Harrison is accredited with twenty-two songs while Starr has just two songs, and even though Harrison’s ‘Something’ (Abbey Road) gained large success and was covered by artists worldwide, Frank Sinatra would introduce it in performance as a Lennon/McCartney composition (Davies 360). This imbalance, largely caused by the Beatles’ inner authorial practices, makes the uncovering of an intertextual trend somewhat more difficult but still worthwhile – after all, it is important to remember that they were the Fab Four, not the Fab Two. In this final section I will discuss a selection of Harrison songs along with one Starr song, using the same intertextual lens as developed and applied in the previous sections.

Intertextuality can be discerned in Harrison’s lyrics even from the Beatles’ early period. In ‘Think for Yourself’ (Rubber Soul), Harrison adopts the typical ‘from me-to-you’ technique frequently used in pop songs of the time (McGrath 2). However, as seen in Lennon/McCartney songs from Rubber Soul, this medium-specific intertextuality became increasingly enriched with images extending to the wider literary tradition. In ‘Think for Yourself’ Harrison includes more complex vocabulary such as ‘opaque’ and ‘rectify’, a departure from the simpler lexicon previously used, which can be read as a testament to the attempted elevation of popular song’s status among more high-brow art.

This escaping of the narrow confines of traditional pop lyrics becomes increasingly obvious in ‘Taxman’ (Revolver). Here, Harrison’s lyrics still seem to use the ‘from me-to-you’ technique but channel a grotesque villain, the taxman, as its narrator. The song’s warning tone, especially clear in the final verse (‘Now my advice for those who die/Declare the pennies on your eyes/Cos I’m the taxman’) is reminiscent of the Victorian children’s literature to which Lennon’s lyrics often constructed a connection. This warning of a dangerous monster can be found in Carroll’s poem ‘Jabberwocky’, from Through the Looking Glass, further extending the established intertextual dialogue with Victorian children’s literature found in the Beatles’ songbook:

An intertextual connection that appears to be distinctive of Harrison’s lyrics is the strong connection to Eastern philosophy, especially Indian mysticism. Songs such as ‘Within You Without You’ (Sgt. Pepper’s), ‘The Inner Light’ (Magical Mystery Tour), and ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ (The White Album) all deal extensively with the subject matter and literary images found in Eastern thought. The songs all offer a deeper and more sincere textual engagement with the actual content, which was often not found in the lyrics of Lennon and McCartney. The three songs, amongst others, earnestly echo and interact with texts such as the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, first published in English in 1868 (Davies 267), and the I Ching, commonly known as the Book of Changes (Davies 289). Given the interest and limited scope of this paper, these songs should be further discussed in different research but are relevant here in that they display how Harrison’s lyrics construct a more earnest intertextual dialogue with literary texts than those of Lennon and McCartney.

However, this does not mean that Harrison’s lyrics never lean into the postmodern nature of the pop song. His song ‘Savoy Truffle’ (The White Album) is a testament to this. It is intertextual in nature because of the similar technique seen in Lennon’s ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite’ and ‘I Am the Walrus,’ both of which incorporated scraps of found and existing texts to create a new text. Harrison’s song goes further by using the names found in Mackintosh’s Good News chocolate box to structure its lyrics (Davies 320). Using the quasi-literary names of delicious commodities such as ‘Crème tangerine’, ‘Montelimart’, ‘Savoy Truffle’, and ‘Ginger Sling’, the song displays the postmodern tendency to use any found ephemera. ‘Savoy Truffle’ shows how Harrison’s lyrics can be as playfully intertextual as those of his two bandmates.

Ringo Starr’s second and last song for the Beatles, ‘Octopus’s Garden’ (Abbey Road), adds to the already well-established intertextual connection the Beatles’ catalogue had formed with children’s literature by further engaging with the surreal literature of Carroll that Lennon so often evoked in his own lyrics. It is remarkable that with such limited output, Starr does not opt for the typical subject matter for a popular song but chooses to create a dialogue with his partners’ interest in children’s literature and their talent for playful intertextuality.

While George Harrison’s and Ringo Starr’s contributions to the Beatles’ lyrical repertoire are notably more limited than those of Lennon and McCartney, their work remains useful for exploring intertextuality. Harrison’s songs, marked by a blend of traditional pop techniques and literary references, reveal a nuanced interaction with Eastern philosophy alongside playful postmodern experimentation. Starr’s ‘Octopus’s Garden’ adds another layer to The Beatles’ intertextual landscape, echoing the group’s penchant for children’s literature. Despite their relatively small output, the lyrics of Harrison and Starr underscore the importance of recognizing their role in shaping the Beatles’ collective identity as the Fab Four.