Track-by-track: the Beatles' Rubber Soul reconsidered on its 50 year anniversary
‘Plastic soul’, a description used by black musicians of the time to describer Mick Jagger – a white man singing soul music – warped by Paul McCartney into ‘Rubber soul’ (also a play on rubber soled-shoes), finally finding its rightful home as the title of the Beatles’ sixth studio album.
Regarded by many as the first album to truly cement the band’s musical maturation, Rubber Soul is an curious mix of the Beatles’ influences up until this point: pop, folk rock, R&B and the first stirrings of psychedelia. Knocked up just in time for the Christmas market, the album climbed to the top of the charts (replacing The Sound of Music soundtrack) and chilled out there for 42 weeks.
Fifty years on, we take a track-by-track look at the album to see if it stands the test of time.
‘Drive My Car’ The first version of the lyrics for the McCartney-penned ‘Drive my Car’ were blasted as ‘crap’ by Lennon and, in truth, they were. ‘You can buy me golden rings’ worried the pair that they’d fall back on to lazily rhyming ‘rings’ with ‘things’, so, after a ciggie break, ‘baby, you can drive my car’ was swapped in. Surprising no-one ‘drive my car’ was a euphemism for sex, but, in a nice twist, gender roles are reversed and it’s the women who’s out to get hers.
By: Kirstyn Smith
Source: The List
