“It's taken more than four decades for his words to be vindicated. But for a brief moment this month, John Lennon could rest assured that the Beatles were indeed bigger than Jesus. At least that's what's been suggested by the graph above, which compares Google's search traffic for the terms ‘jesus’ and ‘beatles’ over the last 30 days.
“Admittedly, it's taken a while for the Liverpool band to reach this high point in their career. It was back in March 1966 that the rebellious Beatle first told the Evening Standard: ‘I do not know what will go first, rock'n'roll or Christianity … we're more popular than Jesus now.’ It's fair to say the words didn't go down too well at the time. Across the US, angry Beatlemaniacs burned their Fab Four vinyl in protest, while Lennon was forced to issue a slightly confusing apology: ‘I wasn't saying whatever they're saying I was saying. I'm sorry I said it really. I never meant it to be a lousy anti-religious thing. I apologise if that will make you happy. I still don't know quite what I've done. I've tried to tell you what I did do but if you want me to apologise, if that will make you happy, then OK, I'm sorry.’ ”
(Boosted from The Guardian)
But then I thought How does Jesus compare with other popular things, memes or otherwise? And that's when I proceeded to entertain myself for like 20 minutes.
It turns out Jesus is also less popular than President Dreamboat, jobs, naked ladies, and, of course, the ever-popular ASS! (Sorry, Jesus. Maybe October'll be your month.)
Musical accompaniment -
A hard one, which you probably hear in your head when you see my ass, and which may or may not put you in a trance and make you want to commit some murders with Squeaky Fromme,
“Helter Skelter”
mp3.
A soft one, which gets Top 5 Beatles Songs status and that is not up for debate so please do not email me with your arguments against, thank you,
“You've Got to Hide Your Love Away”
mp3.
And an in-between-soft-and-hard one, from the Revolver sessions, which I saw the Dead open a show with in '93 at Pauly Pavilion, I think? My pop took me; it was raining that night so it was a not-very-clever musical pun that they decided to play this but I loved it so.
“Rain”
mp3.
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1 comment:
"Rain." From The Beatles Again, a key part of my childhood soundtrack. Almost never mentioned because it wasn't an official studio release, but for the love of God look at the music! "Rain" was also my first experience with attempting to spin an LP backwards at thirty three and a third rotations per minute, and where for the only time I actually deciphered words that had been recorded backwards! (That gibberish at the end is "When the rain comes they run and hide their heads" in case you didn't know.) I think most LP-related nostalgia is bunk (sorry) but the inability to manually manipulate the direction and speed of newer forms is kind of a shame.
The backwards-playing took a stressful and nonsensical turn when the same "answer to everything is Jesus" folks you mention (or Jesus plus nothing as the case may be) caused my neurotic teenage self to check if my beloved Rush was hiding satanic messages in their music. They weren't, and fuck the fundies for saying so, and fuck the Browns too by the way.
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