Please Please Me | With the Beatles | A Hard Day's Night | Beatles for Sale | Help! | Rubber Soul | Revolver
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band | Magical Mystery Tour | The White Album | Yellow Submarine | Abbey Road | Let It Be
Past Masters | The Beatles Anthology | The Beatles: Get Back
- Alternative Character Interpretation: The scenario played out in the lyrics of "Norwegian Wood" is presented in a vague, somewhat elliptic manner that makes the whole thing open to interpretation. The easy take is that the narrator is a Jerkass who burned down a woman's house simply because she wouldn't sleep with him. But she comes across as a bit of a Master of the Mixed Message, inviting him to her house, offering him alcohol, then waiting until late in the night before revealing that she had to go to work in the morning, then, to top it off, she still let him sleep in her bathroom, and he didn't try to force himself onto her...so he says. Unreliable Narrator might also be in play here.
- Do Not Do This Cool Thing: It doesn't matter how horrible the sentiments expressed in "Run For Your Life" are, John Lennon just makes them sound so damn cool.
- Epileptic Trees: "Norwegian Wood" was the first Beatles song with cryptic lyrics, so it's invited some oddball interpretations, particularly over the significance of "Norwegian". Among the more amusing takes are that "Norwegian Wood" was John goofing around with the phrase "knowing she would", or that "wood" is a code word for marijuana.
- Germans Love David Hasselhoff: On a regional level, the American version was particularly popular among the San Francisco Bay Area counterculture and was a major influence on the nascent psychedelia scene, including bands like Jefferson Airplane.
- Genre Turning Point: Rubber Soul marked the point where rock musicians started to focus on albums rather than singles. It was also the point that critics started to take the band, and popular music as a whole, more seriously.
- Growing the Beard: While Help! was the band's first album to be viewed as art, many regard this as the Beatles' first truly great album from an artistic standpoint. This was the album where the band started their experiments with sound and instruments, evolving away from the guitar-pop music of their earlier albums, as well as writing more introspective lyrics on songs such as "Nowhere Man" and "In My Life". Hell, the mangled American version of the album was still so good it inspired Brian Wilson to grow his own beard with The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds.
- Heartwarming Moments: "In My Life" where a man stops and reflects on the loves and friends from days past he misses now. Almost a Tear Jerker song except that the man is still happy to have known them, realizes he will not forget them, and compares them favorably to a current lover he knows he loves most of all.Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more... - Refrain from Assuming: The second track is officially titled "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)", but people nearly always omit the parenthetical bit.
- Values Dissonance:
- "Norwegian Wood" is an elegant little waltz about a date not going well, and it implies strongly that the narrator, after his date took him to her place but nixed having sex with him, lit her house on fire in retaliation. With more awareness about consent and entitlement issues and the repudiation of the notion that anyone is owed sex, it's not uncommon for the song to leave a bad taste in the mouth of some modern-day listeners, though, as mentioned in Alternative Character Interpretation above, the whole song is quite ambiguous. It's worth mentioning that it wasn't even John Lennon, the principal songwriter, but Paul McCartney who threw that ending in, as a joke!
- "Run For Your Life", in which Lennon seems to advocate for spousal murder. This was hardly noticed at the time, but soon enough even Lennon himself considered it the worst song he wrote for the band. Doesn't help that there's an overwhelming about of Lyrical Dissonance within it. Was he intending for it to be a serious love song with an unintentionally unhealthy perspective, or was it made to make fun of people who would actually believe such ideologies? Pop songs from 60s girl groups playing Stalker with a Crush straight would probably indicate the former with the style of the time; plus, Lennon coming to regret making the song only increases the likelihood of the song intending to actually be romantic. Another possible consideration was that a song with a more aggressive lyrical bent might have been a ploy to appeal to male fans more. In interviews at the time the band fretted the perception that their fanbase consisted of screaming teen girls, and admitted that one reason they started getting more adventurous in their music was to get more male listeners.
- Woolseyism: A few fans feel that the original US version works better as a whole album than its UK equivalent, since it's more musically uniform (with a focus on the acoustic side of the band).
