The art of pop music may be simple, but its sociology is endlessly complex.
The Beatles first movie, A Hard Day’s Night, released 50 years ago last summer, featured the no. 1 song, “A Hard Day’s Night,” from the album of the same name; it was an immensely successful Beatles signature song which charted for the entire second half of 1964, and into 1965.
The lyrics of “A Hard Day’s Night” express what is now a rather outdated sentiment: the hard-working man comforted by the domesticated wife.
It’s been a hard day’s night and I’ve been working like a dog. It’s been a hard day’s night and I should be sleeping like a log. But when I get home to you I find the things that you do will make me feel alright. You know I work all day to get you money to buy you things. And it’s worth it just to hear you say you’re going to give me everything. So why on earth shall I moan cos when I get you alone you know I feel okay. When I’m home, everything seems to be right. When I’m home feeling you holding me tight.
These words sum up the key trope of society.
Fifty years ago, in the post-war boom, a husband working “all day,” could support his stay-at-home wife, who in turn, was happy to please her husband by “holding” him “tight.”
Here—in a pop song—is the single most pertinent social and economic fact of our era: the man can no longer support his wife; she must work, too, and further, she often chooses to work—an added feature in the collapse of the life “A Hard Day’s Night” depicts.
Not only do the lyrics of “A Hard Day’s Night” reflect
1. the crucial economic fact of our time,
but the changes implied in the song are at the center of every significant social issue, as well:
2. feminism, as just mentioned; also
3. the plight of Blacks, with the absence (and incarceration) of black fathers, and,
4. the rise of radical Islam, driven by hatred of the “freedoms” in the West, precisely those mostly feminist ones which have undone the world of “A Hard Day’s Night.”
We do not wish to seem guilty of our own “fundamentalism” by making the lyrics of “A Hard Day’s Night” the template of everything that matters, but isn’t it remarkable how words such as “when I’m home, everything seems to be right” and “I work all day to get you money to buy you things,” an innocent, euphoric, pop song from 1964, sits, in its simple expression—that very innocence now questioned—at the center of everything?
Scarriet 