Альбом "Револьвер": музыкология: анализ структуры песен

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Of George Harrison’s second incarnation on Revolver, Melody Maker said it best, crediting the Beatles on “Love You To” with “going the whole Indian hog.” From its first cascading arabesque of shimmery, bejeweled notes, the track unfolds like a musicological expedition East of Suez, as the first in a series of quixotic attempts to translate the formal elements of Indian raga into the format of Western pop. Though Paul adds a spot of harmony and Ringo a tambourine, the track is a one-Beatle show, spotlighting George alone, singing and playing the sitar to the rather shaky accompaniment of a tabla drummer, recruited from the Asia Music Circle, by the name of Anil Bhagwat. The track begins with an unaccompanied sitar prelude that corresponds to the ruminative, introductory movement of a raga known by the term alap. Filled with croaking drones, pregnant pauses, and softly elasticized notes, the effect is both a stereotypic evocation of the Mysterious East and a total surprise (in its very presence on a pop album). Eventually the sitar settles on a ceremonious eight-note riff that serves the song as a hook, the tabla come bounding in, and the song itself begins. Lyrically, “Love You To” is the pop equivalent of a carpe diem poem. It means to counterpoise an ecstatic and presumably Eastern sensibility (“Make love all day long! Make love singing songs!”) against a repressive and presumably Western one (the second verse refers darkly to “people standing round, who’ll screw you in the ground”). But the tone of George’s vocal is so priggish and judgmental that it’s hard to know which side he’s on. “Love You To” plays at metaphysics the way that other bad pop lyrics play at romance; it trades in puppy wisdom in place of puppy love.

And still, despite its shortcomings, the presence of this little outpost of internationalism on Revolver was a signal pop event. By inspiring other musicians to take up Indian instruments, or to simulate Indian tonality using electric guitars, it loosed upon the music scene a torrent of “raga-rock.” And as one of the most brazenly exotic acts of stylistic experimentation ever heard on a popular LP, the track represented a bold declaration of artistic autonomy on the Beatles’ part. It showed the extent to which recording stars who could afford to do so would henceforth do as they liked on their records, regardless of whether the results had any redeeming commercial value, or conformed in the least to the current stylistic parameters of pop. And for George Harrison himself, the track was the first overt manifestation of the Orientalist bent that would provide him with the sharply defined identity, as a musician and as a public personality, that had eluded him thus far.