YOU ASK ME FOR A CONTRIBUTION

The last of the four Beatles remasters that I bought was the white album. That sprawling, bawling, yawing, hawing, mess of an album.

The thing is so schizophrenic that an actual schizophrenic heard in it messages to foment violent revolution.

Never mind that one of those songs was a slight but noisy ode to a fairground ride (Helter Skelter). Mind that one was a fairly vitriolic attack on middle-class values (Piggies).

And I have to say, whereas Helter Skelter always felt kind of cleansing to me, Piggies still just sounds nasty and condescending. I mean, that line about “clutching forks and knives to eat their bacon” (cannibalism, you see) is positively Swiftian—well, if Swift had been a moralizing, humorless prig, that is.

To indulge in some parlour games, here’s my version of the great single-album tracklist:

Side A
1. Back in the USSR
2. Dear Prudence
3. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
4. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
5. Happiness is a Warm Gun
6. I’m So Tired

Side B
1. Birthday
2. Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey
3. Sexy Sadie
4. Julia
5. Helter Skelter
6. Revolution 1