jillery wrote:
Matt Beasley wrote:
What all do we need besides Food & the Five Metals in the Ehrlich-Simon bet?
Anyone have a list?
All You Need Is Love
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EGczv7iiEk>
-------------------
The song was Britain's contribution to Our World, the first live global TV link,
for which the band were filmed performing it at EMI Studios in London on 25 June.
The program was broadcast via satellite and seen by an audience of over 400 million
in 25 countries. Lennon's lyrics were deliberately simplistic, to allow for the show's
international audience, and captured the utopian ideals associated with the Summer of Love.
The single topped sales charts in Britain, the United States and many other countries, and
became an anthem for the counterculture's embrace of flower power philosophy. -------------
The Our World broadcast took place in the wake of the Arab–Israeli Six-Day War and,
for the Beatles, amid the public furor caused by McCartney's admission that he had
taken LSD. On 25 June, the live transmission cut to EMI Studios at 8:54 pm London time,
about 40 seconds earlier than expected. Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick were drinking
scotch whisky to calm their nerves for the task of mixing the audio for a live worldwide
broadcast, and had to scramble to hide the bottle and glasses beneath the mixing desk
after being told they were about to go on air.
The Beatles (except for Starr, behind his drum kit) were seated on high stools, accompanied
by a 13-piece orchestra. The band were surrounded by friends and acquaintances seated
on the floor, who sang along with the refrain during the fade-out. These guests included
Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Richards, Keith Moon, Graham Nash,
Pattie Boyd (Harrison's wife), along with Mike McGear and Jane Asher (McCartney's brother
and girlfriend, respectively). The studio setting was designed to reflect the communal aspect
of the occasion while also demonstrating the position of influence that the Beatles held among
their peers, particularly following the release of Sgt. Pepper. Many of the invitations were
extended through Beatles aides Mal Evans and Tony Bramwell, who had visited various
London nightclubs the night before the broadcast.
Also among the studio audience were members of the Small Faces and the design collective
the Fool. Balloons, flowers, streamers and "Love" graffiti added to the celebratory atmosphere.
The Beatles and their entourage were dressed in psychedelic clothes and scarves; in his report
on the performance, Barry Miles likened the setting to a medieval gathering, broken only by the
presence of modern studio equipment such as large headphones and microphones. According
to Michael Frontani, an associate professor of communications, whereas Sgt. Pepper showed
the Beatles as artists and "serious musicians", Our World emphasised their identity as members
of the hippie counterculture.
--------------------
In a 1981 article on the musical and societal developments of 1967, sociomusicologist
Simon Frith described "All You Need Is Love" as a "genuinely moving song" and said that,
further to the impact of Sgt. Pepper, the international broadcast confirmed "the Beatles'
evangelical role" in a year when "it seemed the whole world was waiting for something new,
and the power of music was beyond doubt."[103] Psychiatrist and New Left advocate
R. D. Laing wrote about the song's contemporary appeal:
"The times fitted [the Beatles] like a glove. Everyone was getting the feel of the world as a global village –
as us, one species. The whole human race was becoming unified under the shadow of death ... One of the
most heartening things about the Beatles was that they gave expression to a shared sense of celebration
around the world, a sense of the same sensibility."
Doyle Greene writes that because of its presentation as the conclusion to Our World,
"All You Need Is Love" provided "a distinctly political statement". He says that the song was
"selling peace" on a program that aimed to foster international understanding in a climate of
Cold War hostility, the Vietnam War and revolutionary unrest in the Third World. By contrast,
NME critics Roy Carr and Tony Tyler detected self-parody in the song, saying that the Beatles
sought to debunk their elevated status during the Summer of Love.
According to author Jon Wiener, "All You Need Is Love" served as "the anthem of flower power"
that summer but also, like Sgt. Pepper, highlighted the ideological gulf between the predominantly
white hippie movement and the increasingly political ghetto culture in the US. Wiener says that
the song's pacifist agenda infuriated many student radicals from the New Left and that these
detractors "continued to denounce [Lennon] for it for the rest of his life". He also writes that, in
summer 1967, "links between the counterculture and the New Left remained murky", since a full
dialogue regarding politics and rock music was still a year away and would only be inspired by
Lennon's 1968 song "Revolution".
The Rolling Stones' 1967 single "We Love You" was inspired by the message of "All You Need Is Love",
and John Lennon and Paul McCartney appeared on the song, contributing backing vocals.
In the mid-70s, according to Carr and Tyler, it was still "impossible" to hear the start of the
French national anthem without launching into "All You Need Is Love", yet even a contrite
"reformed hippie" could "bellow tunelessly along with this glorious, irreverent single without
any real embarrassment – a measure of its internal strength and durability".
In 2005, a handwritten copy of the lyrics sold at auction for $1.25 million (equivalent to
$1.87 million in 2022), more than tripling the record for a lyric manuscript previously held
by Lennon's "Nowhere Man".
Retrospective criticism
-------------------------------
Maybe in the Sixties we were naive and like children and later everyone went back to their rooms
and said, "We didn't get a wonderful world of flowers and peace." … Crying for it wasn't enough.
The thing the Sixties did was show us the possibility and the responsibility we all had. – John Lennon, 1980
In the decades following the record's release, Beatles biographers and music journalists
criticised the lyrics as naive and simplistic and detected a smugness in the message; the song's
musical content was similarly dismissed as unimaginative. Ian MacDonald viewed it as "one of
The Beatles' less deserving hits" and, in its apparently chaotic production, typical of the band's
self-indulgent work immediately after Sgt. Pepper. Regarding the song's message, MacDonald writes:
"During the materialistic Eighties, this song's title was the butt of cynics, there being, obviously, any number of
additional things needed to sustain life on earth. It should, perhaps, be pointed out that this record was not
conceived as a blueprint for a successful career. "All you need is love" is a transcendental statement, as true
on its level as the principle of investment on the level of the stock exchange. In the idealistic perspective of
1967 – the polar opposite of 1987 – its title makes perfect sense."
Writing in 1988, author and critic Tim Riley identified the track's "internal contradictions (positivisms
expressed with negatives)" and "bloated self-confidence ('it's easy')" as qualities that rendered it as
"the naive answer to 'A Day in the Life'". By contrast, Mark Hertsgaard considers "All You Need Is Love"
to be among the Beatles' finest songs and one of the few highlights among their recordings from the
Magical Mystery Tour–Yellow Submarine era. In his opinion, Lennon's detractors fail to discern between
"shallow and utopian" when ridiculing the song as socially irrelevant, and he adds: "one may as well
complain that Martin Luther King was a poor singer as criticize Lennon on fine points of political
strategy; his role was the Poet, not the Political Organizer."
Writing in 2017, Ludovic Hunter-Tilney of the Financial Times said that the song "appears hopelessly
naive 50 years on" yet its espousal of global connectedness had become increasingly relevant.
In his view, through Our World, "'All You Need Is Love' marked a new chapter in the world's colonisation
by telecommunications", and its message inspired the sentiments behind "Love Trumps Hate", displayed
on placards protesting Donald Trump's 2016 US presidential win, and the One Love Manchester benefit concert.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Need_Is_Love
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