A question about A Hard Day's Night

Cafe Society
,
41

Much as I admire them and their body of work, the crudeness and sloppiness is sometimes amazing. In “If I Fell” the misuse of pronouns is downright comical. That song in particular seems to describe a relationship that makes no sense in the first place–the speaker talks about a hypothetical romance that would make his current girlfriend upset, and he would “be sad if our new love was in vain,” whatever that means, but the pronouns are ridiculous–the speaker says that new girlfriend “would love me more than her,” when of course he means that she would love him more than she (the current GF) does, not that she would love him more than she (the new GF) loves her (the current one.) This is only one of several solecisms in the song. Lyrically, it’s a gigantic mess, and the story, as far as you can impose one on the song, is a confused jumble, as if Lennon (who wrote it) invented a melody, and then spent all of ten minutes attaching some lyrics about getting rid of girl #1 to start up with girl #2 without giving the slightest thought to coherence or grammar.

Their formula early on was simply to write love songs that prominently featured personal pronouns, full of I and you and she --they gradually got to realize that they could make hit records, and a lot of them, by churning out stuff and nonsense about these romantic relationships that rhymed and had decent backing music to. The genius part was all in the melodies and harmonies and riffs and arrangements, so the more crap they could write with these pronoun-heavy lyrics, the more money they would make.

42

Other than the improper “her,” I’m not getting your other criticisms. It’s a song about the singer’s anxiety about entering a new relationship. And taking offense at improper grammar in rock and roll is, well, an interesting concern. The Stones must give you fits.

And anyway, “If I Fell” is musically a masterpiece. So there’s that.

43

You really want more details, or are you going to dismiss them as meaningless grammatical nitpicking too? The song’s basically gibberish. Well-done, tuneful gibberish that appeals to romantic teens but exploitative nonsense nonetheless.

44

I reread the lyrics before I posted just to be sure, and I stand by my comments. Not a big deal. Feel free to make your case, but not on my account.

45

There was nothing particularly egregious in “If I Fell” in 1964; the Brill Building ran on gibberish. Words serviced the melody back then; not the other way around. Bob Dylan (who the Beatles met right after AHDN) changed all that.

46

Cool. Can you tell me the situation being described in the song?

In my reading, it’s a mess, a bunch of romantic cliches, as if Lennon had no idea what he was trying to describe, beyond someone addressing his new girl. What does he want to understand? What does the word “too” refer to in the lines

If I trust in you
Oh please
Don’t run and hide
If I love you too

That he loves her in addition to loving the first girl? Is that a selling point–he’s going to leave his GF but he still loves her? Or look at the next line:

Oh please
Don’t hurt my pride like her

How was his pride (which isn’t referenced up to this point, nor after this point) relevant? (Hint: “pride” rhymes with “hide.” just as “too” rhymes with “you.”

Nearly every line contains some kind of nonsense like this, as if Lennon is free associating/rhyming one cliche with another. It’s a dog’s breakfast disguised as lyrics.

Oh, the other pronoun howler? That’s in the other misuse of “her” in that last-quoted line: “Oh please/Don’t hurt my pride like her.” As native speakers of the language know, it would be “she” who has hurt his pride, not “her.” (It’s “like she has,” not “like her has.”) There’s no way to fit in “she has” to the one-syllable trap Lennon has laid out for himself, but who’s listening to the words, anyway, right?

This song is a masterpiece of drivel, perfected by Lennon/McCartney in their voluminous output of songs about me and you and her and him that didn’t require any real sense or coherence or story-telling, and I take my hat off to them in figuring out variations on this formula, which they abandoned about 1965 but which sustained them through their early successes. I still enjoy listening to their “boy band” tunes, but they’re a pretty cheap thrill sometimes, none cheaper than this piece of piffle.

47

Lennon had plenty to say about his early efforts. What did he say about If I Fell? As much as it’s loved, it wouldn’t surprise me if he just thought it was “craft”.

48

John: “Stop harping on me pronouns!”

49

I think it’s what I said: He’s considering leaving his relationship for someone new, but he’s anxious based on the hurt from his current girlfriend. Again, the “her” pronoun misuse aside, it seems pretty straightforward.

“If I love you too” seems to parse as “if I love you as I’ve loved my current girl.” “Don’t hurt my pride” references how his girlfriend has treated him. How did she hurt his pride? I don’t know. There’s only so much backstory in a 2-minute song.

Did he select certain words because they rhymed? Sure. So did Cole Porter. But they still served a story.

Listen, I’m not saying it’s Shakespeare. But I’d actually slot it a peg or so above the normal “Oh my gosh, I sure love you so much” sentiments of that era. He’s tentative about starting a new love affair because of the pain he’s experienced.

Combine that with the absolutely sublime harmonies, the chords that create a melancholy where needed that help to tell the story, the brilliance of the intro chords (is that a modulation? I don’t know what it is, but it certainly works perfectly), and you get a pop gem. If you would have initially said, “You know which Beatles song is a bit of an embarrassment?,” I’d never have guessed “If I Fell.”

Again, not a big deal, but I figured it would have been bad form not to play along. :blush:

50

Oh, yeah. Very sophisticated. I don’t know how they came up with that. I always wondered if that sequence (I’d call it that or a chord progression; as I understand it, modulation has more to do with melody than harmony) was borrowed from somewhere else, because I have a hard time imagining John and/or Paul working out those chords with just a guitar or two.

51

I always assumed—and looking at the lyrics, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable assumption—that “her” was an ex, not a current girlfriend (although maybe an ex who still has feelings or hopes of getting back together).

I understand the song as saying, “I want to fall in love with you, but I just got out of a bad relationship and I’m afraid of being hurt again.” I don’t think the lyrics are either especially good or especially bad, for a pop song of their era.

52

Yeah, the chords sound absolutely “organic” to the song, but when you learn what they actually are, you go, “Wait, what?!” The intro begins on a major chord a half step above the song’s home key, if I remember correctly, just for starters, which is why I said it’s maybe a modulation. But I’m not sure what it is, other than really, really clever.

53

A reasonable read, and I agree that as an example of particularly bad lyrics from that era, “If I Fell” is not a good choice.

54

Yeah, it doesn’t seem that difficult to grok to me, though it is delightfully ambiguous at times. I prefer ambiguous lyrics to clear ones, myself, so I may be biased. But I think it is a good effort from him, lyrically.

For the theory stuff, Alan W. Pollack always is good for this stuff when it comes to the Beatles:

Interestingly, he does have a few words about the lyrics:

The lyrics are deceptively simply and full of elliptical, ambiguous word play so typical of John’s best work. Examples abound — the dangling question (“[would you] help me understand?” — understand what??), the use of “to”, “too” and “two” in close proximity to each other, and the non-sequitur of the second repeat of the verse extension (“'cos I couldn’t stand the pain”) when it follows the line “she will cry when she learns …”

But beneath the mere cleverness of it all, what makes this song so potent is the desperate vulnerability it manifests; a veritable obsession with the subjunctive “iffy-ness” of love, described as a state in which people might run and hide and pride be hurt. For me though, the greatest ambiguity of all here is in the tension between the hero’s begging for love’s being requited on the one hand, while at the same time holding back from freely offering it for fear of being rejected. Is this ingenuous realism, such a lot of chutzpah, or likely a bit of both?

55

Great cite. Looks like I misremembered the first intro chord, but it is in fact a modulation—from a home key yet to be established! Who does that?

56

FWIW, McCartney composed the preamble “If I fell in love with you, would you promise to be true…” which was tacked onto Lennon’s original opener, “If I give my heart to you…”

57

Over the years, McCartney has composed more and more of Lennon’s songs.

58

:smile:……

59

This reads to me like a ridiculous over-interpretation of trashy nonsense so it seems mysterious and profound. You could do the same without much effort for any crap I might produce (but why would you?). If I wrote some garbage lines, like:

You could give to me

Your precious love, and see

That I understand as I take

Your precious hand, and then

To me, you’ll love to live

And know what it is to give

A precious thing like love to me

For I would shake like a frail tree,

My precious love, and we would be

In love if you’d give your love to me.

I could go nuts, praising this stupid crap (that took me under two minutes to write) for its ingenious internal rhymes (“hand” and “understand”) and repetitions of “precious” as modifier of “thing” and “hand” and “love”, with love being used both as a noun and a verb and blablabla, but of course it’s sheer nonsense, utterly without value.

“If I fell” succeeds purely musically, expertly disguising its reliance on vagueness and cliches of teenage love. The interpretations above rely on interpreting the bejesus out of words, like “pride” so that the speaker has suffered some unspeakable pain in the past at the hands of a previous lover whom the listener is supposed to know all about (how?) and in this song she is being asked to be true to the speaker who can’t express his feelings for her other than conditionally (If I Fell, indeed) but there is no sense of irony in the great contrast between the lack of commitment on the speaker’s part and the deep commitment he is demanding of his listener.

Oh, sure, I could go on and on about that irony being central to the song, how Lennon has brilliantly created a speaker who asks for commitment but offers none, highlight his lack of confidence and self-awareness, and blablabla, but I’m out of the bullshit business for now.

It’s just a terrible set of tossed-off lyrics–it never ceases to amaze me how people can torture words to make them produce the effects they want those words to mean.

60

OK. Well, I like it fine as is.