“If You Become Naked”: Sexual Honesty on the Beatles’ White Album

ABSTRACT

The Beatles’ White Album is a musical expression of getting naked, revealing anxiety and doubt in songs that fetishize objects and role play while representing impotence and cuckolding. Anxiety and ambivalence about sexual performance track alongside other attitudes toward time, including nostalgia about the past and an ineffectual desire to move forward, that have biographical significance for the Beatles in 1968. The sexually honest double album strips off the psychedelia of the previous year, and The White Album’s unifying theme is, in fact, voiced explicitly on the record itself – not by a Beatle, but by Yoko Ono.

KEYWORDS:

• The Beatles
• cuckolding
• impotence
• nostalgia
• Yoko Ono
• Eric Clapton

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Kenneth Womack, Mark Lewisohn, Lisa Kremens, and Jon Marc Smith. An extended version of this article will appear in our coauthored book Sex and Gender in Rock and Pop from the Beatles to Beyoncé (Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This introduction, along with the biographical information that undergirds our argument in this article, is informed by Mark Lewisohn’s keynote address, “Double Lives: Between The Beatles’ Grooves,” at Monmouth University’s November 2018 symposium dedicated to The White Album. Lewisohn’s detailed talk highlighted the nude images we discuss in the introduction to this essay, which is an extension and revision of an argument initially presented in Kapurch.

2. “California Dreamin’“ is a melancholy track set in a bleak wintertime away from a warm home in Los Angeles. Unable to find warmth, the singer pretends to pray in a church; the preacher liked the cold (the celibate life) and knows the singer is “going to stay” (to remain unable to achieve warmth). The music is frozen, as shown in every verse ending on V harmony, unable to resolve until the tacked-on final minor triad. Not only does every chorus end on a V chord, it is set with nonresolving 4–3 suspensions whose dissonance hangs in the air from the six- and twelve-string guitars ending the intro on V7/4, and the singers performing that sonority at the end of every chorus. We interpret this inability to resolve as impotence, given the poetic setting.

3. According to Everett, the song’s arrangement “expresses well a satisfaction with things as they are – not only a happiness in singing in a backcountry setting but also a contentment in the situation held since “born a poor young country boy”“ (186).

4. In 1995, Oasis would suggest a sexual connection more explicitly in the line “on the palm of her hand is a blister” in “She’s Electric.”

5. The literary precedence of cuckolding, especially in the British and European imagination, helps explain its importance on The White Album. Cuckolding is a preoccupation with direct consequences for socially determined constructions of masculinity. As such, cuckolding anxiety speaks to conditions of patriarchal systems that treat women as objects of ownership – a system that hurts men, too. Chaucer’s merchant is a comical cuckold who is corrected for his “foolishness,” but other literary cuckolds are driven by “honor” to murderous jealousy and other punishing acts of vengeance that usually result in their own destruction (see Millington and Sinclair 3–9). One might similarly point to the archetypal tragedy of Shakespeare’s Othello, who strangles his wife Desdemona simply because of his unfounded fears of cuckoldry. As do many of his literary forebears, the cheated Rocky goes limp, collapsing in the corner.

6. According to Sedgwick and others, cuckolding is not a straightforward fear and shame about being outmanned; the loss of control that it forces onto the cuckolded party can be its own source of sexual pleasure, a fetish that revels in the fantasy of those seemingly unwanted feelings.

7. Apple Corps was intended to give the Beatles control of their own music, as well as that of other aspiring artists. Underscoring their understanding of power in terms of sexual acts, John explains the creation of their new venture:

“It’s a business concerning records, films and electronics and as a sideline, manufacturing or whatever. We want to set up a system whereby people who just want to make a film about anything don’t have to go down on their knees in somebody’s office (probably yours). The aim of this company isn’t really a stack of gold teeth in the bank. We’ve done that bit. It’s more of a trick to see if we can actually get artistic freedom with a business structure, and to see if we can create nice things and sell them without charging three times our cost.” (The Beatles 287)

Lennon, who delivered the remarks accompanied by McCartney in this press conference, alludes to sexual favors, the very kind of transactions that render one party powerless and exploited. Their “system,” however, included other industries (merchandise and fashion, for example) about which they knew very little.

8. Lancelot’s cuckolding of King Arthur stands as one of the most famous examples in all of Western literature. Since its medieval expressions, authors and later filmmakers have imagined and reimagined the intrigue associated with this legendary infidelity, constructing an Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot love triangle with all of the hallmarks of cuckolding as a sexual fantasy: A king’s power is threatened and eventually toppled by Mordred, his younger kin; Arthur’s shiny Excalibur is either absent or not up to the task. (In earlier versions, Mordred cuckolds Arthur.) This political impotence is prefigured by Guinevere’s adultery with Lancelot, Arthur’s most trusted knight. The homoeroticism available in the entire Round Table scenario is localized in the Arthur-Lancelot relationship. In this light, Lancelot and Guinevere’s infidelity is a taboo source of sexual pleasure, a means of arousing the powerful Arthur, who can’t effectively wield Excalibur anymore. Following Sedgwick‘s logic (49), the love triangle involves not one but two objects of desire. It’s not difficult to see this replicated in the Harrison-Boyd-Clapton trio, which also involves the performance of an object like a sword – the guitar.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katie Kapurch

Katie Kapurch is Associate Professor English at Texas State University. In addition to articles and chapters that address popular culture including the Beatles, she is the author ofVictorian Melodrama in the Twenty-First Century and co-editor of New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles (with Kenneth Womack). Her current projects include Blackbird Singing: Black America Remixes the Beatles, which is contracted with Penn State University Press and supported by an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Walter Everett

Walter Everett is Professor of Music Theory at the University of Michigan. He is the author ofThe Foundations of Rock, a project underwritten by a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and by grants from UM’s Society for Music Theory and the School of Music, Theatre and Dance. His book, The Beatles as Musicians, is available in two volumes: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul and Revolver through the Anthology. He is also editor of the book, Expression in Pop-Rock Music. Dr. Everett’s essays on text-music relations in song and opera, rock music, and Schenkerian theory have appeared in numerous journals and edited book collections. Dr. Everett is the recipient of many awards, including the Kjell Meling Award for Distinction in the Arts and Humanities.