Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 14

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Popular Culture Review

mythic criticism and Lennon’s gloss consider again verse 2: “No one I think is in
my tree/I mean it must be high or low.” Here the loneliness, the anxiety, and,
arguably, the arrogance of Lennon’s subjective reflections on his childhood (in his
aforementioned comment on SFF) are transcoded, metaphorized: “In my tree” both
stands in for and transcends—ambiguates—the more straightforwardly declarative
“hip as me.” This commutation arguably invites listeners such as a radio station
music director interviewed for this study to first identify the line as denoting
“loneliness” and then to identify with Lennon as one who experienced a loneliness
with which the radio executive can connotatively identify, even re-experience.
Similarly, “high or low” both stands in for and ambiguates “crazy or a genius.”
Indeed, which of the two did Lennon consider “high” and which “low?”
In her inquiry into the lasting popularity of another popular culture text; the
film, E . T , Rushing insists that all “statements expressing the[is] contemporary
sense of fragmentation and the corresponding impulse toward unity are of
considerable rhetorical [and cultural] significance” (189). Heard as a mediation
of, or meditation on, such hopes or “yearning[s,j for wholeness” (188) and such
fears of permanent “separation from self, society and the universe” (189), SFF is,
like E.T., an expression of “mythic transcendence” (189). In sum, SFF, “a study
[of] uncertain identity, tinged with the loneliness of solitary rebellion] against all
things institutional [and simultaneously,] an eerie longing for a childhood of hideand-seek and tree-climbing” (MacDonald 173), endures, again in part, because it
retains its communicative and cultural power to serve a variety of audiences as
mythic discourse. For a program director of a radio station in a populous city or
market, the song’s “longing for childhood...is something everyone can relate to,
which probably explains its lasting power.”
The following section builds on this introductory analysis by considering SFF’s
textuality in a way that echoes its organization. An analysis that develops its
arguments by reproducing the organization of the text it analyzes may have any
number of advantages over alternatives that develop arguments otherwise. A fact
about the SFF’s production supports this study’s rhetorical choice: The version of
SFF that Lennon first brought to the recording studio did not start with the chorus—
as the song-recording released did. (The early version began with ihe firsl verse
line: “Living is easy with eyes closed.") Marlin reporls. ho\\e\er. lhat Lennon
voiced qualms about starting the song with a negati\e thought. Attuned to the
syntagmatic dimension of verse, even if he never called it that. Lennon eomposeil
an alternative, the chorus. For Marlin. ‘“ Let me lake >ou down. *eos Fm gtiing it)
Strawberry Fields’ was a good move, becau.se the lyric now immediately seized
you[, the auditor,] by the throat. The song made you share an intriguing journey,
instead of beginning with an abstract comment” (17). In the words of an adult
respondent interviewed for this study, the song “suggests Paradise.” My attempt to