“While my guitar gently weeps”

When is a song great?  When the lyrics are written by Goethe and the music by Shubert.  I won’t argue.  In my time I reconsider the question because of my on-going response to a song.  This one is by George Harrison, and performed by the Beatles on their “White Album” in 1968.  Perhaps my world is smaller than those listening to lieder.  I understand the odiousness of comparisons.

It is worthwhile to see what Wikipedia says about the song, the difficulties before the final product and the meaning of the lyric.  I hear what they say about the words, but I still find those words, on paper, a random mix of ideas.  Wiki says “The song is a lament for how a universal love for humankind is latent in all individuals yet remains unrealised.”  Dale Allison says “the song conveys spiritual angst.”  The year 1968, with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, to mention some things, was a year to grieve.

The song pulses in a measured way, a bass-line descending in semi-tones, and rising again into sunlit major chords after the darkness of the descent.  It’s this that moves me.  Somehow I don’t mind that the lyrics don’t easily hang together.  It’s what one critic called “the unspeakable mix” in rock music, probably anathema to those listening to lieder or even the age of telling lyrics, the 1920s and 1930s.  The melody lifts above the pulsing, sadly reaching for something, perhaps a crumbling ideal.  There’s grief here.

 

 

© Will van der Walt

www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Bridgewater, Somerset West

2nd September, 2018

 

Sources

Wikipedia While my guitar gently weeps

You Tube While my guitar gently weeps

 

Images

Google, for reasons of their own, won’t allow me even one of their many pics of George Harrison.

My graphics.