‘A Day in the Life’
That line from a song played in my mind after I read the news of “surgical” air strikes gone awry, displacing thousands in Marawi, and of a president agog with martial law. I wanted to shake my head and sing instead.
The song is “A Day in the Life” by the Beatles, from their ground-breaking album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The album is ranked number one of all time by some music critics and celebrated its 50th year last June 1.
The album established the Beatles as the voice of the 1960s generation, a counterculture of the youth in the USA in upheaval, with the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and with the Vietnam War. Four trippy Liverpool musicians with cool music and hair became the youth’s symbol.
What does a 50-year-old hippie album and song like “A Day in the Life” speak to us in the age of memes, tokhang and martial law? The song “A Day in the Life” is a mix of reality and dreams. Mostly written and sang by John Lennon, it starts with a first-person narration of a man reading the morning news filled with war, a socialite dying of a drug overdose, and a road full of holes. Those news are no different from the stories we hear nowadays.
“The English Army had just won the war/ A crowd of people turned away/ But I just have to look/ having read the book.”
There seems to be a silent nod there to the war on terror in Marawi and Mindanao. We think we feel safe. But John mentioned a book that made him look at the war deeper.
You know, we are now getting information from news, fake news, filtered news, and rarely do we read books. Books were written about martial law, Ferdinand Marcos, yet do we act like the narrator who reflects on the news and goes to books for context and reference?
The middle of the song segues into a different beat written and sang by Paul McCartney, where the narrator suddenly wakes up from reading and realizes he’s late, falls out of bed, rushes for coffee and for his bus ride to work. Then Paul ends this verse saying “Somebody spoke and I went into a dream.”
This part seems to show a blur of reality and dreams. It’s like saying, aren’t we tired of the doldrums of work, or the disconnection of the news to our day-to-day living? We wake up, eat, work, read, and sleep. Repeat. Isn’t it better to dream?
The song builds from a slow narration to the rush in the middle to the spiraling words “I’d like to turn you on” that ends with one thunderous piano note. It’s a cacophony of sounds and images that captures the noise of urban drag and grips of media. It speaks about our yearning to open our minds to dreams.
In June 1966, the Beatles had their biggest concert in Manila with a crowd of 80,000. My late uncle was also there. But they were traumatized the next day when the Marcos ordered a mob to chase them all the way to the airport for snubbing a presidential dinner. The Beatles tasted political harassment and forced eviction.
Marcos is gone. But the news still go on, and so do the songs that yearn for our dreams. I’d thank the Fab Four for that. In these times, I’d love to turn you on.