When it comes to the titular track on The Beatles’ parting effort, John Lennon was always strongly dismissive.
“That’s Paul,” he bemoaned. “What can you say? Nothing to do with The Beatles. It could’ve been Wings. I don’t know what he’s thinking when he writes ‘Let It Be’.”
In essence, his gripe was that the band were revolutionaries who once said that they were bigger than Jesus, and yet their closing remark was defined by a quasi-religious ballad that had more to do with hymns than Hendrix and the psychedelia they had stirred up with the likes of Sgt Pepper.
“We were going through hell,” Lennon commented at the time in an interview with Howard Smith that wasn’t uncovered until 2013, and ‘Let It Be’ proved a little too heavenly for his money. Yet, that dichotomy was always part of the magic of the band. Thanks to the patchwork makeup of the members, the music they produced was an equally indefinable affair.
That all-encompassing sentiment is writ large across their farewell record. The straight and knowable title track, for instance, sits only two songs away from the mystic and malleable ‘Across the Universe’. In Lennon’s view, the latter is the finest cut on the whole album.
While he might have written it himself, he was quite sure he had happened upon something rare in music. “It’s one of the best lyrics I’ve written,” he asserted. “In fact, it could be the best, I don’t know. It’s good poetry or whatever you call it. Without tunes it will stand.”
In effect, it disproved the one thing Lou Reed always lamented about rock ‘n’ roll when he quipped, “You don’t want to actually listen to the lyrics of a rock ‘n’ roll record. I mean, for what? It’s not like when you read a book and you come across a great line, it would be great if you got that in a song, I thought.”
But how could you not be startled by an opening couplet like, “Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup / They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe.”
And so, Lennon cited the song as not only the best track on Let It Be, but one of the best that The Beatles ever mustered. Written in a sleepless haze in the middle of the night, Lennon let his pen squirm unchecked, giving rise to an anthem of unspooling quietism. There are no answers to be found in ‘Across the Universe’, but there is no apathy either. Instead, the song weaves towards limitless contentment in a world of limited escape.
What does ‘Across the Universe’ really mean?
Though mystic and ambiguous, it’s a song that truly defines the troubled farewell of the Fab Four. Its sweet sound is one of sleepy acquiescence to a more pillow-propped dream than the visceral one the band had imagined when they first burst onto the scene as revolutionaries. Contrary to the lyrics, in many ways, they had changed the world irrevocably.
But as the break-up bubbled up to a boil of bitter capital dispute, the group were simply worn-out and absorbed by a system that they had always seemed to stand aside from. So, one quiet night, Lennon reflected on the many ways in which they hadn’t changed the world too.
That makes the anthem a beautiful sonic dream, written in a fitting state of weariness and escape, whose beauty exposes the futile fight for real-world transformation that, nevertheless, called Lennon “on and on across the universe”. There’s an oil-slick swirl of hope and an uncannily prophetic, resigned melancholia that, like a proverbial ton of feathers, imbues the song with dumbbells of weightlessness.
That accidental encapsulation of the dithering, uncertain zeitgeist and seamless triumph of transcendence defines the beauty of The Beatles that is perfectly displayed on Let It Be. While Lennon might have bemoaned the title track, it was a necessary pop hit that grabbed the attention of the masses, just as the band always had.
Meanwhile, for the grittier counterpoint to ‘Across the Universe’ and its drifting Eastern mysticism, you only have to wait a few songs before you find the band recovering their bite and sense of perfunctory protest with ‘Get Back’, a very real bid to change the universe in the face of Enoch Powell’s rising racism that still stands up to sickeningly similar circumstances today.
