“Doo-doot-doot-doot-doo…I know this! How do I know this?”

December 19, 2022 11:13 PM

Aspiring singer-songwriter (CAZZA) and YouTuber Call Me Caroline does a first listen + musical analysis of The Beatles' Rubber Soul

If you enjoyed that, I highly encourage you to go back to the beginning and watch her do the same for each Beatles album in chronological order*:

Please Please Me (Released: 22 March 1963)
With The Beatles (Released: 22 November 1963)
A Hard Day’s Night (Released: 10 July 1964)
Beatles For Sale (Released: 4 December 1964)
Help! (Released: 6 August 1965)
Rubber Soul (Released: 3 December 1965)
Revolver (Released: 5 August 1966)
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Released: 26 May 1967)
Magical Mystery Tour (Released: 27 November 1967)
The White Album, pt.1 (Released: 22 November 1968)
The White Album, pt.2 (Released: 22 November 1968)
*Let It Be (Released: 8 May 1970)
*Abbey Road (Released: 26 September 1969)

*At the suggestion of her subscribers, Caroline chose to review these two albums in the order they were recorded rather than by release date.

Bonus material (singles, EPs)
From me to you, Thank you girl, She loves you & I’ll get you
Yes it is & I'm Down
We can work it out & Day Tripper
Rain, Paperback Writer, Strawberry Fields Forever & Penny Lane
Yellow Submarine, Hey Jude, Lady Madonna & Revolution
The Inner Light, Old Brown Shoe, Don't let me down & more…

posted by Atom Eyes (24 comments total)

This is great. My knee-jerk reaction is to wonder about her upbringing, how she could not have heard all of these albums multiple times and then I realized I'm just old.

I want to watch her to listen to Only a Northern Song now.
posted by chavenet at 1:27 AM on December 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I get suspicious of many youtube musician/composer/songwriter reaction videos that purport to hear some really obvious old pop songs. I mean, I'm ostensibly a musician, and have had a voracious appetite for music well beyond the biggest pop acts of the 20th century since I was a kid. It's mostly been since the 1980s that it's become more difficult to widely survey the pop music field as acts become more niche and the distribution model moved away from big music promotion via mass media.

But these videos sometimes are fun to watch.
posted by 2N2222 at 4:58 AM on December 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

It's pushing my boomer button partly due to the time of year: getting a few albums for xmas and sitting in my room, listening intently.
posted by brachiopod at 7:03 AM on December 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

That timeline is just bonkers. Right through to Magical Mystery Tour you got a new Beatles album, on average, about every six months — and that without live albums or compilations. Then in 1968, in recompense for having to wait an entire year, you got a double album. And throughout there were EPs and singles-only tracks.

Not to mention that the span from “P.S. I Love You” to “Tomorrow Never Knows” is just under four years. Is there music now that would have been unrecognizable four years ago?
posted by argybarg at 7:52 AM on December 20, 2022 [7 favorites]

Seeing people nerding out on things at a layer just beyond what I understand is definitely my favorite thing about the internet.

* ("just beyond" is very generous to my knowledge of musical theory, but I did grow up with a beatles loving bar musician)
posted by DigDoug at 8:00 AM on December 20, 2022

This is my least favorite Beatles album, so it was fun to see someone hear it with new ears!
posted by kensington314 at 8:08 AM on December 20, 2022

I have to admit, these kinds of videos hold no interest for me anymore, it's like watching a video of someone "discovering" and analyzing Beethoven or something--while it's nice to see someone discover something that so many of us have known is great for a long time, this music is SO well listened-to and thoroughly analyzed that there really is nothing insightful any musician could say on first hearing that hasn't already been said or written a thousand times. The rest of us are talking about "Rubber Soul" from a perspective of a 5,000th listening, built upon thinking/talking/reading about it for years; I personally have read multiple actual, scholarly analysis of Beatles songs and records (even written one myself) and this is mostly like watching a kid discover Scooby Doo....it's fun to see their enthusiasm, but it doesn't really make the thing any different for me. Maybe I'm just a big grump these days, but I'd much rather see her react to and analyze much newer music, that is much less completely, totally, obviously familiar to so many people. Or maybe I'm just old enough now that things that are obviously old and well-worn and well-known and well-loved to me are brand new to younger adults and I need to just hush and let them enjoy the discovery.

Or maybe I'm just over watching people's reactions to things at all--like, awesome things are awesome, I know this, I don't need to see someone else's excitement to make me excited, I just need to listen to the thing and I'll be excited, too. It's like the internet is now making us voyeurs of voyeurs, a kind of meta-level audience behavior. This video positions us as a secondary audience for a primary audience, who is actually listening to the music and reacting to it. We're in Plato's Cave but we're not even watching the shadows, we're watching the people watch the shadows, and reacting to their reactions. It's just too far from an actual, primary experience for me, and content framed this way feels increasingly alienating.

(I'm in a weird place this morning, I think. But how long until we get reaction reaction videos, i.e., videos of people reacting to reaction videos? How far from primary experiences will our mediated experiences take us?)
posted by LooseFilter at 8:14 AM on December 20, 2022 [8 favorites]

(I'm in a weird place this morning, I think. But how long until we get reaction reaction videos, i.e., videos of people reacting to reaction videos? How far from primary experiences will our mediated experiences take us?)

Those things exist already. The public facing internet is 90% crap. That's always been true, there's just more of it. You don't have to stop at the first thing fed to you. You can use it as the beginning of a journey. This person has hundreds of videos, one click away, and I don't recognize a fair bit of it. If you like how they break down something you know, you might appreciate how they break down something you don't.
posted by DigDoug at 8:28 AM on December 20, 2022

You don't have to stop at the first thing fed to you. You can use it as the beginning of a journey.

Is that how the internet works? Huh, TIL.

/s
posted by LooseFilter at 8:40 AM on December 20, 2022

This is my least favorite Beatles album, so it was fun to see someone hear it with new ears!

Rubber Soul is best thought of as a transition album, and easily gets lost in the discussion, despite there being a good bunch of songs on it, especially on side-1. The Beatles are moving away from their "mop top" period here. RS bridges nicely from Help! to Revolver, which loudly shouts they are done with the mop-top thing. Definitely, ending the album with Run for Your Life, though, was a huuuuge mistake, as it really ends things on a dark and sour note.

Anyway...I like a lot of "first listen" videos, and this one was sweet. I liked that she was deep listening to the mix, as this definitely is a well-mixed album, chock-full of a lot of fun details in the background. An interesting thing is, you can can hear them doing little things with their sound that you start hearing in music from other bands throughout the rest of the decade.

Too bad about her having to cut the end short (because of her battery dying) I would have like to hear her talk a bit more about the harmonies throughout the album.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:52 AM on December 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm similarly in the skeptics' corner when it comes to reaction videos of musicians "discovering" renowned music. This isn't quite like a musician in the '60s doing a first listen of Nick Lucas or Florrie Forde. It's hard to imagine that, however young one is today, they haven't heard some sizeable chunk of The Beatles' (or any other megagroup of the '60s/'70s) work in movies/TV/malls/mixtapes. Now, they may not have heard the work in context and in its entirety as an LP, but I feel that, as soon as a camera is introduced, people will feel compelled to provide a show, even with music they may have heard before. So, "discovery" videos would be, to my taste, better pitched as "I'm going to do a deep listening dive to music with which I have only somewhat familiar." I guess that probably wouldn't yield as many clicks.
posted by the sobsister at 8:56 AM on December 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Re: “how can they not have heard this??”

I am an Eighties Kid(TM) and had never heard Brown Eyed Girl or Sweet Caroline until a high school dance (age 13 or 14), where I was bewildered, seeing everyone around me perfectly familiar with these mystery songs. [shrug emoji]

There’s just so much good techno being made these days, who has time for (checks FPP) “The” “Beat…les??”
posted by TangoCharlie at 9:25 AM on December 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

For the skeptics, there are several times throughout the videos that Caroline admits to being familiar with a particular song, so I don’t think it’s a put-on in any way. She says her parents weren’t Beatles fans, so growing up her only exposure to their songs was incidental.
posted by Atom Eyes at 9:49 AM on December 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Just watched her Revolver video, and it was a ton of fun watching a first-listen of what is one of my fave albums (of anyone) of all time. I did catch myself yelling at her innocence? of not recognizing a drug song or being able to catalog Tomorrow Never Knows as psychedelia. Kids these day, eh?

Kind of disappointed she didn't catch that all of the songs on the album clock-in under three-minutes long. For me, that's one of the things that make Revolver so special. There's a ton of stuff packed-into each song, and they seem far longer (in a good way) than they really are.

..............
There’s just so much good techno being made these days...

Please do an FPP! I've gotten so out of touch with techno.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:53 AM on December 20, 2022

> Please do an FPP! I've gotten so out of touch with techno

Ha ha, I was half-trolling (even though I do love techno). IIRC, I would recommend looking up posts from Filthy Light Thief, but I’m sure there are many MeFites capable of answering this call.
posted by TangoCharlie at 10:08 AM on December 20, 2022

I met a young man recently who had never heard of Van Halen. I should have brought up Jump on my phone, maybe he would have recognized it. So that's it, I'm officially an Old.

I love reaction videos, but only for music I also love. Seeing someone experiencing a song I love for the first time can be a joy. Also vocal coaches reacting to bands/singers I like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVyeoo5UCJU
posted by Billy Rubin at 10:20 AM on December 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

I too am an Old, and in charge of our daughter's (10) musical education. I'm proud to announce that two of her favorite songs are Cheap Trick's "Surrender" and Chuck Berry's "Run Run Rudolph."
posted by kirkaracha at 11:44 AM on December 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Bonus material (singles, EPs)

Most bands would kill for a catalog half as good as the stuff The Beatles didn't put on their albums, including several candidate for best single/B-side ever:

"We Can Work It Out"/"Day Tripper"
"Paperback Writer"/"Rain"
"Penny Lane"/"Strawberry Fields Forever"
"Hey Jude"/"Revolution"

And of course "Komm, gib mir deine Hand"/"Sie liebt dich"
posted by kirkaracha at 11:54 AM on December 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Rubber Soul (US mono)* is my favorite Beatles album. While I'm not normally a proponent of suits meddling with artists' work, the US version is wholisitcally a very strong album- this is the record that inspired the Beach Boy's Pet Sounds and even more specifically "God Only Knows". It's the first post-LSD Beatle album and you can sense that the horizon has expanded and even the love/heartbreak songs have deeper meaning and context- "In My Life" is grown up and wise, nostalgic and present at the same time. I love this album because it's worldly, yet not quite as cynical as Revolver. While I do think leaving "Nowhere Man" off the US release was a mistake, "What Goes On" was a sensible omission- young people in the US were not enamored of retro rockabilly tunes by that point. I think the UK version- which is what is used in the video and which most people have heard on CD or streaming services- is almost an entirely different ride from start to finish, and I honestly don't believe it holds together as well as the US version. Smoke a bowl and listen and I think you'll see what I mean.


*Also my first musical memory. I still have my parents' album that we listened to in the living room of the first house I really remember.
posted by oneirodynia at 12:24 PM on December 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

In My Life is probably my favorite Beatles song. Such a great album overall …
posted by caviar2d2 at 3:46 PM on December 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

I love this type of thing, I also wonder how people can get through life without hearing some of these songs, but then I also know there are plenty of pop culture things out that that everyone assumes I would know and I'm just like ???.
Thanks for posting this!
posted by newpotato at 1:07 AM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm almost 50 and have been a life-long Beatles fan, thanks to the influence of my Boomer brother who played their music non-stop from my earliest days. In any case, when the Beatles' music was released on CD in the late 80s I started collecting their albums, one by one and in 1990 I picked up Rubber Soul. I loved a lot of the songs on their already but one I hadn't heard before was If I Needed Someone. I still remember the day-- an overcast but balmy early fall day, sitting in my room doing homework while my parents were out of town, spinning that disc for the first time all of the way through. When it got to that song I honestly believed it was the best thing I'd ever heard up until that point in time. It still ranks as one of my favorite Beatles' tunes, but Rubber Soul was just chock-full of great songs.
posted by drstrangelove at 3:56 AM on December 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

So that's it, I'm officially an Old

I hit "an Old" with the Beatles when some youtube drum guy was covering Ringo's drumming, some of his hardest rhythms to play, and he opened with "Act Naturally", which is a pretty straight cover of a Buck Owens song. Pick a Beatles original you hack!!
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:11 AM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

One of my favorite songs on Rubber Soul is "Wait" for reasons similar to what she pointed out in the video. Everything but the kitchen sink is in the choruses but almost everything drops out for the verses, and the bridge is even more spare. So good.
posted by pianoblack at 8:36 AM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]