Please Please Me | With the Beatles | A Hard Day's Night | Beatles for Sale | Help! | Rubber Soul | Revolver
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band | Magical Mystery Tour | The White Album | Yellow Submarine | Abbey Road | Let It Be
Past Masters | The Beatles Anthology | The Beatles: Get Back
- Broken Base:
- "Wild Honey Pie" is either a hilarious So Bad, It's Good track, or just a plain bad, unlistenable, and completely pointless addition.
- "Revolution 9". For some, it's brilliant and revolutionary; for others, it's a horrific, unlistenable, pretentious mess, not helped by the fact that it's the longest song the Beatles ever put out (clocking in at eight and a half minutes). Others split the difference, recognizing that it's brilliant and revolutionary but not actually liking it.
- As with most long double albums, there's the constant debate over if it would've been better as a single album, and if so, which songs are filler and should be cut. It doesn't help that this is probably the album where the differences between John and Paul's writing stand out the most.
- Critical Backlash: "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" routinely finds its way onto "worst songs of all time" lists, which confuses fans who both find it to be a silly, but fun, little toe-tapper, and wonder why it gets singled out for such a bad reputation of all the songs on the album, given that "Wild Honey Pie" and especially "Revolution 9" are more likely to draw criticism from fans.
- Fan Nickname: The title "The White Album". Also began the informal convention of nicknaming a band's Self-Titled Album after the defining feature of its cover art, usually its color (e.g. the Weezer self-titled albums, named after the background colors), but also, like Peter Gabriel's first three albums, the image in the cover photo.
- Funny Moments: Poor Rocky Raccoon and his "showdown" with Dan.
- Also, the line about the ex-girlfriend's name ("Her name was Magill, and she called herself Lil, but everyone knew her as Nancy"), which might imply that she was a prostitute... making his reaction to the breakup even more stupid.
- Genius Bonus: "Helter Skelter" takes its name from a type of slide used at carnivals, but it was originally an older English expression meaning "in confused, disorderly haste" — a pretty good description of the song itself.
- Germans Love David Hasselhoff: "Don't Pass Me By" became a #1 hit in Denmark.
- Harsher in Hindsight:
- "Yer Blues" has the line, "If I ain't dead already, girl you know the reason why
." - "Julia" is a tribute song written by a musician who met with a tragic, untimely death to his mother, who met with a tragic, untimely death.
- "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" is probably not something John Lennon would have agreed with.
- "Glass Onion" is a Take That! to people looking for hidden meanings in their songs. And looking for non-existent hidden meanings elsewhere on the album is exactly what Charles Manson did.
- "Savoy Truffle", a song inspired by Eric Clapton's sweet tooth, is light enough in itself, but compulsive candy eating is also a symptom of opioid abuse, and Clapton did have a heroin problem.
- "Yer Blues" has the line, "If I ain't dead already, girl you know the reason why
- Hilarious in Hindsight:
- From "Rocky Raccoon", "Her name was Magill, and she called herself Lil, but everyone knew her as Nancy". In 2011, Paul married Nancy Shevell.
- Also from "Rocky Raccoon", Rocky's line "It's only a scratch" became more amusing after both George Harrison and Ringo Starr befriended the cast of Monty Python, whose film Monty Python and the Holy Grail featured a more memorable instance of the phrase.
- Memetic Mutation:
- "I GOT BLISTERS ON MAH FINGERS!"Explanation
- "Number nine... number nine... number nine..."Explanation
- Misaimed Fandom:
- "Glass Onion" was intended as a sarcastic attack on all those Beatle fans who sought for hidden messages and meanings in their songs.
- Sadly, American cult leader Charles Manson still managed to interpret the lyrics of the songs "Piggies", "Revolution 1", "Revolution 9", "I Will", "Honey Pie", "Blackbird", and "Helter Skelter" as convoluted prophecy of an apocalyptic race war, which he then attempted to instigate by forming a cult of serial killers, who then proceeded to commit one of the most notorious series of murders in American history at Manson's direction. For a more elaborate description of his Cloudcuckoolander interpretations, see this link. The mere fact that "Honey Pie", possibly the most innocuous song in the history of English-language popular music, was taken by Manson as a secret message to him and his followers (the key line was "your Hollywood song", which Manson took as a Shout-Out to him in Los Angeles), gives you an idea of how deranged he was.
- Narm Charm: Whilst the lyrics to "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" are completely ridiculous, nonsensical, and intentionally childish, the actual performance of the song's composition by the band is so driven and passionate that it makes it hard to hate the song.
- Nightmare Fuel: The album in general has an overall harsher, unsettling quality to it. Instruments and vocals have weird textures, songs are played roughly (sometimes with proto-heavy metal distortion) and end in minor keys, songs end (or begin) in disjointed ways, Last Note Nightmares abound. Many of the songs lyrically deal with death, violence and mortality in a way Beatles records hadn't before. Even the more lighthearted songs don't help matters. The Reality Subtext of the band falling apart is audible. It's the band's darkest album. There's also the fact that insane cult leader Charles Manson would twist the meanings of the songs into a megalomaniacal scheme to cause a race war through mass murder.
- Once Original, Now Common: "Helter Skelter" was one of the heaviest rock songs in The '60s, but this quality is less unique nowadays, given the many, many heavy-metal bands out there. Ironically, McCartney created "Helter Skelter" to outdo The Who's "I Can See For Miles", which The Who claimed was their loudest, harshest song yet.
- One-Scene Wonder:
- Eric Clapton came to the studio at his friend George's request to play on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". He delivered probably the best and certainly the most skillful guitar solo to ever appear on a Beatles record.
- The prominent fiddle on "Don't Pass Me By" was played by session musician Jack Fallon.
- So Bad, It's Good:
- "Why Don't We Do It In The Road?"
- "Wild Honey Pie"
- "Yer Blues", and deliberately so. Just check out the lyrics and the guitar solo.
- Suspiciously Similar Song:
- The 50th anniversary box set has Paul breaking into a jam on "Blue Moon" in between takes of "I Will", which demonstrates the similarities in the two songs (especially their bridges).
- "Sexy Sadie" clearly drew some inspiration from "I've Been Good to You" by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, which opens with the lines "Look what you've done, you made a fool out of someone."
- Sweet Dreams Fuel: "Good Night".
- Unintentional Period Piece:
- "Revolution" has the line "If you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow". Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Maoism was more popular and widespread among leftist youth than it is now (to the point where pictures of Mao were in fact known to be carried around in several protests of '68), largely because the human rights abuses committed during Mao's tenure as chairman weren't widely known in the west until after his death in 1976.
- "Back in the U.S.S.R." has "1960s period piece" written all over it. In addition to the obvious fact that the U.S.S.R. was disbanded in 1991, the song is written as a parody of The Beach Boys' 1965 hit "California Girls," has a title that's both a Shout-Out to Chuck Berry (specifically 1959's "Back in the U.S.A.") and a pun on the "I'm Backing Britain" campaign (which is little more than a historical curiosity today), and contains a reference to "Georgia on My Mind" (originally written in 1930 and popularized by Ray Charles in 1960). BOAC was also merged into British Airways in 1974.
- Vindicated by History: The album received mixed reviews on release, in large part because of its eclectic approach and lack of political commentary during an extremely turbulent year, but is now regarded by many fans as one of the Beatles' best albums. For instance, its Genre Roulette style was dismissed as being incoherent in its original release, but now is hailed as an engaging variety of songs of the band displaying its terrific versatility. That said, it's still rather divisive among hardcore Beatles fans.
