There is a revolution afoot, according to the Nike shoe company—a revolution in sneakers, heralded by a $7 million TV ad campaign featuring the Beatles song "Revolution." It's the first time that Capitol Records has licensed an original Beatles record for use in a TV commercial. The 30-second ads, done in a black-and-white documentary style, feature ordinary jocks intercut with sports superstars such as basketball player Michael Jordan and tennis champion John McEnroe, while John Lennon sings, "You say you want a revolution." The new sneakers cost $75 a pair.
Beatles fans are outraged. Chris Morris, the Reader's rock critic, says: "When 'Revolution' came out in 1968 I was getting teargassed in the streets of Madison. That song is part of the sound track of my political life. It bugs the hell out of me that it has been turned into a shoe ad." Morris is right that the Beatles' purpose was not to sell shoes. But the story is a bit more complicated.
The 1968 song criticized young revolutionaries for having "minds that hate." Lennon's lyrics told the 1960s left to "count me out." They attacked kids for "carrying pictures of Chairman Mao." The New Left was shocked when the song first appeared. Ramparts called it a "betrayal," and the New Left Review denounced it as "a lamentable petty bourgeois cry of fear."
"Revolution" was John Lennon's comment on May '68. It was recorded two weeks after student riots in Paris brought France to the brink of revolution. The song wasn't released until August. By that time, a thousand club-swinging New York City cops had driven Columbia University students from occupied campus buildings. In Chicago Hubert Humphrey had been "nominated in a sea of blood," as Theodore White put it. The Rolling Stones released "Street Fighting Man," in which Mick Jagger sang about the time being right for revolution; the record was banned from the airwaves in Chicago and Berkeley. Then the new Beatles single came out, addressing the kids in the streets: "You say you want a revolution..."
The underground press responded immediately. The Berkeley Barb wrote with typical excess, "'Revolution' sounds like the hawk plank adopted in the Chicago convention of the Democratic Death Party." Jon Landau, writing for Liberation News Service, agreed: "Hubert Humphrey couldn't have said it better," he wrote. Robert Christgau wrote in the Village Voice, "It is puritanical to expect musicians, or anyone else, to hew to the proper line. But it is reasonable to request that they not go out of their way to oppose it. Lennon has, and it takes much of the pleasure out of their music for me." Ramparts objected in particular to the line "you know it's gonna be all right": "It isn't," the magazine declared. "You know it's not gonna be all right."
But the song was irresistible, raucous hard rock. The music contained a message of its own, a message of excitement and freedom, which worked against the "sterility and repression in the lyrics," according to Greil Marcus, at the time a writer for the San Francisco Express-Times. "The music doesn't say 'cool it' or 'don't fight the cops,'" Marcus wrote.
There was a second version of the song, released on the White Album two months after the single. The single version had been produced the way Paul McCartney wanted it; the album version was done John's way--slower, so that the words could be understood better. And there was one significant change in the words: after he sang, "When you talk about destruction / Don't you know that you can count me out," he added "in." "I put in both because I wasn't sure," he explained. Nike uses the first version in the ad.
Not everyone on the left attacked "Revolution." The SDS newspaper at Cornell declared that Lennon rightly rejected radicals with "minds that hate," and that the increasing violence of the left needed to be criticized. Then there was the issue of the "shoo-be-do-wahs" with which Paul and George answered John's "You know it's gonna be--" on the album version. Michael Wood addressed that problem in Commonweal. The Beatles are not fools, he argued; they know it's absurd to say "it's gonna be all right." The "shoo-be-do-wahs" suggested "they mean that statements about whether it is or it isn't are all part of that political crap they dislike so much."
The far right also took up the question of "Revolution." William Buckley paid mocking tribute to its message in hissyndicated column, and was promptly attacked by the John Birch Society. "The Beatles are simply telling the Maoists that Fabian gradualism is working, and that theMaoists might blow it all by getting the public excited before things are ready for 'revolution' --'it's gonna be allright.' " The Birch Society concluded that " 'Revolution'takes the Moscow line against Trotskyites and the Progressive Labor Party, based on Lenin's Left-Wing Extremism: AnInfantile Disorder." (The actual title of Lenin's treatise was:Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder.)
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