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garranI put "Run For Your Life" at the end of one of my mixes, and of course I own "Rubber Soul", so I've got to hear the reactions both visceral and considered that a bunch of people I know have had to this song. The tendency is to be bemused and kind of nervous; at least one person has gone so far as to evince real distaste for it. I think these reactions totally make sense, though I personally really like the song.
Visceral music pleasure aside, there are a couple of reasons why I do. The first, the one that got me when I first heard the song (on my first Teen Trip, which was seven freaking years ago and what the heck), is just the joke: that it's this enormously antisocial and alarming song sung catchily with nice harmonies by the Beatles. The fact that it's actually the Beatles makes a pretty big difference; it wouldn't be nearly as amazing if it were just sung by some other band in the style of the Beatles -- for one thing, that would be a much more obviously intentional incongruity. The second reason (which has grown as I've become more of a fan) is that I really appreciate the way that it's kind of the logical extreme of one of the major trends in John Lennon's early songwriting.
A profound apparent distrust of women he is attracted to shows up repeatedly in John's songs up to this point; girls he's with are going to leave him, and those who have left him were motivated to do so by the blackest of malice. This is especially evident on a bunch of the tracks from "A Hard Day's Night". "If I Fell", ostensibly a positive song about starting to love someone new, introduces a former girlfriend who left him and then glories in how she'll suffer to see that he's happy again. In "I'll Cry Instead", a breakup is again a thing to be revenged, though the target of the anger seems to get more general; by the end of the song, he has progressed from wishing he could make the offending party sad to vowing, like a male Miss Havisham, to break the hearts of girls "around the world". And "You Can't Do That", most relevantly, is about a guy who obscurely threatens his girlfriend ("I'm gonna let you down / and leave you flat") and demands that she stop talking to other men.
What "Run" does is to take something a lot like "You Can't Do That", but remove the illusion that it's socially acceptable. In "You Can't Do That", the speaker argues that 'everybody' agrees with him about what's acceptable in a relationship -- "if they'd seen / you talkin' that way, they'd laugh in my face!" -- and the implication of violence is a vague thing in the background, suggested but not committed to. "Run For Your Life" gives up all that pretense; the guy is dangerous and irrational and unjustified, and nobody is going to mistake that he's overreacting. It's probably worth noting, though also probably obvious, that I don't think the narrator of the song is actually John, or something John approves of -- I think he's being intentionally and pointedly over-the-top, and that, to the extent that it's serious, it's a song about his demons as much as anything.
I also think it's interesting that he then stops writing about relationships for a while -- "Run" is the last track on "Rubber Soul", and for several albums starting with "Revolver" John goes through a very different phase in his songwriting: mostly psychedelia, with digressions on such worthy topics as sleeping in all morning and having seen a film today (oh boy).
(Paul still writes some love songs in this period, or at least through "Revolver". For what it's worth, Paul, though not as extreme about it, also clearly has his moments of being a terrible boyfriend; instead of violent jealousy, he tends to the selfish and manipulative. Check out his apparent position in "We Can Work It Out": 'Our arguments don't really matter much in the long run, and you're as likely to be wrong as I am, so why not let me win? Otherwise, I might leave you!' He pulls that 'Let me have my way or I'm going' thing a lot ("Another Girl", "I'll Follow The Sun", etc.) -- it would have been hell on John's relationship insecurities. Now I'm imagining Beatles slash fanfiction, which means that it's time for this parenthetical to end.)
Anyway, according to the book which first really turned me on to the Beatles, Steve Turner's A Hard Day's Write, this story has a happy ending (which is good, because John is going to need to stock up on as many of those as he can get). Eventually, in therapy, John figured out that his abandonment issues were mostly about his mother, who had left his family when he was young, and then died, when he was a teenager, shortly after reestablishing contact; and so he started trying to write those songs about her directly[1]. Some time not long after this epiphany, he met Yoko Ono. The love songs he started writing again then (a bunch of which are on the White Album) seem both more specific and a lot more respectful -- even and especially the ones about trust.
[1]: I don't think any of these songs about Julia Lennon actually made it onto Beatles albums; "Julia", the most obvious candidate, was about Yoko Ono.
Visceral music pleasure aside, there are a couple of reasons why I do. The first, the one that got me when I first heard the song (on my first Teen Trip, which was seven freaking years ago and what the heck), is just the joke: that it's this enormously antisocial and alarming song sung catchily with nice harmonies by the Beatles. The fact that it's actually the Beatles makes a pretty big difference; it wouldn't be nearly as amazing if it were just sung by some other band in the style of the Beatles -- for one thing, that would be a much more obviously intentional incongruity. The second reason (which has grown as I've become more of a fan) is that I really appreciate the way that it's kind of the logical extreme of one of the major trends in John Lennon's early songwriting.
A profound apparent distrust of women he is attracted to shows up repeatedly in John's songs up to this point; girls he's with are going to leave him, and those who have left him were motivated to do so by the blackest of malice. This is especially evident on a bunch of the tracks from "A Hard Day's Night". "If I Fell", ostensibly a positive song about starting to love someone new, introduces a former girlfriend who left him and then glories in how she'll suffer to see that he's happy again. In "I'll Cry Instead", a breakup is again a thing to be revenged, though the target of the anger seems to get more general; by the end of the song, he has progressed from wishing he could make the offending party sad to vowing, like a male Miss Havisham, to break the hearts of girls "around the world". And "You Can't Do That", most relevantly, is about a guy who obscurely threatens his girlfriend ("I'm gonna let you down / and leave you flat") and demands that she stop talking to other men.
What "Run" does is to take something a lot like "You Can't Do That", but remove the illusion that it's socially acceptable. In "You Can't Do That", the speaker argues that 'everybody' agrees with him about what's acceptable in a relationship -- "if they'd seen / you talkin' that way, they'd laugh in my face!" -- and the implication of violence is a vague thing in the background, suggested but not committed to. "Run For Your Life" gives up all that pretense; the guy is dangerous and irrational and unjustified, and nobody is going to mistake that he's overreacting. It's probably worth noting, though also probably obvious, that I don't think the narrator of the song is actually John, or something John approves of -- I think he's being intentionally and pointedly over-the-top, and that, to the extent that it's serious, it's a song about his demons as much as anything.
I also think it's interesting that he then stops writing about relationships for a while -- "Run" is the last track on "Rubber Soul", and for several albums starting with "Revolver" John goes through a very different phase in his songwriting: mostly psychedelia, with digressions on such worthy topics as sleeping in all morning and having seen a film today (oh boy).
(Paul still writes some love songs in this period, or at least through "Revolver". For what it's worth, Paul, though not as extreme about it, also clearly has his moments of being a terrible boyfriend; instead of violent jealousy, he tends to the selfish and manipulative. Check out his apparent position in "We Can Work It Out": 'Our arguments don't really matter much in the long run, and you're as likely to be wrong as I am, so why not let me win? Otherwise, I might leave you!' He pulls that 'Let me have my way or I'm going' thing a lot ("Another Girl", "I'll Follow The Sun", etc.) -- it would have been hell on John's relationship insecurities. Now I'm imagining Beatles slash fanfiction, which means that it's time for this parenthetical to end.)
Anyway, according to the book which first really turned me on to the Beatles, Steve Turner's A Hard Day's Write, this story has a happy ending (which is good, because John is going to need to stock up on as many of those as he can get). Eventually, in therapy, John figured out that his abandonment issues were mostly about his mother, who had left his family when he was young, and then died, when he was a teenager, shortly after reestablishing contact; and so he started trying to write those songs about her directly[1]. Some time not long after this epiphany, he met Yoko Ono. The love songs he started writing again then (a bunch of which are on the White Album) seem both more specific and a lot more respectful -- even and especially the ones about trust.
[1]: I don't think any of these songs about Julia Lennon actually made it onto Beatles albums; "Julia", the most obvious candidate, was about Yoko Ono.
