Shut up, George Harrison isn't your favourite Beatle

Let's toss an old perfunctory music convo cliché in the bin already

Oh, sorry, did I just hear you say that George Harrison is your favourite Beatle? What a surprising take! And in response to a question that probably nobody asked you! I’m sure you have really considered this opinion and don’t just say it because it’s a safe yet “interesting” contrarian take on the most popular band in human history that provides you with some stock response to anyone mentioning The Beatles because you have nothing else to say about them, while imbuing you with some sort of individualization from the flock—you’re “not like the other Beatles fans,” are you?

I’m kidding, of course—“George Harrison is my favourite Beatle” is so thoughtlessly repeated across culture that it’s practically a cliché. But come on. Fuck off. That’s not true. George is absolutely not your favourite Beatle. Unless you mean in his dress sense, in which case… I mean, yes. Obviously, yes. You’re cleared and free to leave because that goes without saying. Just look at this shit!

Look, I’m not perfect, as much as my sneering snob affect I put on for your entertainment may suggest I think otherwise, I’ve written before about how I have been suckered by—and called out for—stupid received opinions I myself have thoughtlessly regurgitated, such as the staple ““We Built This City” by Starship is the worst song ever made” line.¹ We all do it. I’m still going to mock you, sure, but we all do it.

So if it’s not George’s unshakable style sense and good looks, then what is it for you? His songwriting? Don’t get me wrong, he’s got some bangers. “Something,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “Within You Without You,” “I Me Mine,” all great songs, I even have a soft spot for “Piggies” as an album interlude in spite of how fucking stupid it is. But are you really going to tell me you like those songs and that one solo record (it’s the only one most of you know, let’s be real) over Paul putting out “Get Back,” “Helter Skelter,” “I’ll Follow the Sun,” “Yesterday,” “Let It Be,” “Two of Us,” “Golden Slumbers,” “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” “Sgt. Pepper’s,” “I’ve Just Seen A Face,” “Drive My Car,” “The Fool on the Hill,” “Back in the USSR,” “All Together Now,” and “Penny Lane” along with solo albums like Ram, McCartney II, Run Devil Run, Flaming Pie, and… several Wings albums of fluctuating quality, but including a few legitimately great ones and some great songs off some maybe less great ones, and one of the best James Bond themes ever made? Really? How about John Lennon’s “Help!,” “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “A Day in the Life,” “Norwegian Wood,” “Ticket to Ride,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” “In My Life,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Dig A Pony,” “Across the Universe,” “Come Together,” “Because,” “I Feel Fine,” “Day Tripper,” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” (which is not a James Bond theme albeit sharing its name with one of the worst Bond movies), as well as Plastic Ono Band, Mind Games, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Double Fantasy? Bullshit! Both Paul and John had their missteps—“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” is a stain on Abbey Road that should have been left on the cutting room floor, and frankly John’s “Imagine” is just a piss-poor attempt at Paul’s “Let It Be”—but neither of them put out an entire album of playing a synthesizer like a scared caveman who has just seen one appear out of a time vortex.

No! Bad George! No touch! Off the Moog! [sprays with water]

“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” features The Beatles’ greatest guitar solo and it’s not even by George, who is literally singing about HIS guitar gently weeping in the song HE wrote. It’s by Eric Clapton, who would later cuck George even further by fucking his wife. And then writing one of the worst songs in rock history about her. You really want to try to say that you like George’s output more than the others? Who’s your second favourite Beatle, fucking Ringo? Fuck off. So it can’t be his musicianship or songwriting, so what is it? His personality? How much do you actually know about George Harrison?

As a Beatles-crazed tween I embarrassingly watched the entire twelve hour hagiographic documentary about The Beatles, The Beatles Anthology, part of a likewise-named propaganda blitz in the 1990s meant to erase the fact that The Beatles were remarkably uncool to like for years after they broke up (summed up contemporaneously by Lester Bangs in an excerpt I’ll provide you in this footnote²) from popular memory, downplay the height of their rivalry with the Rolling Stones (a frankly better and unarguably much more influential band who never had the privilege of owning their own label to propagandize for them exclusively—listen to any of the music from the decades following the breakup of The Beatles and you tell me whose influence you hear more of), and cement them in the canon as the “best band of all time.” The legacy-cultivation on display is extremely shameless, but by far the most ardent sensationalist in the series is George Harrison, who narcissistically attributes a ton of innovations to The Beatles, ranging from the simply incorrect, such as claiming to have innovated the use of the sitar in rock music—no, that would be The Kinks—to the completely insane claim that The Beatles invented Jimi Hendrix. The man. That is a direct quote. What justifies such a claim? The fact that one opening note of “I Feel Fine” utilized feedback.

Okay, so he was a self-aggrandizing tosser. Well, he was a fucking gullible idiot too. To refer again to Bangs, because I don’t think anyone summed him up better: “George Harrison belongs in a daycare center for counterculture casualties.” Harrison was tricked into cults not once but twice. Fuelled by an orientalist fervour, the obvious projection of an uninterrogated British post-Imperial guilt complex, Harrison spearheaded his band’s involvement with fraudster creep Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, leader of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) cult. In spite of claiming to be celibate, it came to light that Maharishi was probably using his practice to groom young women—including Mia Farrow, my GOD can that woman never catch a fucking break?—which led to John Lennon, who believed the allegations, to force Harrison to leave with him. Harrison would later go back on this and supported the Maharishi until Harrison’s own death. Maharishi, on the other hand, would go on to ask the world’s governments for “one billion dollars” so that he could manifest world peace, not unlike a prosperity-gospel-preaching televangelist, and Maharishi’s nephew would wind up being booked for using the woo-woo nonsense of his uncle to create an environment in which to rape women. Now TM is an international monolith. Thanks, George!

Then there was, of course, Hare Krishna, yet another watered-down perversion of South Asian religion and spirituality with the goal of duping stupid Western hippies. That was of course catnip for Harrison and he wound up making an album for the cult which… I think is underrated! I really like that record, actually! It’s probably my second favourite album by a former guitarist of a popular rock band for the benefit of a cult next to OG Fleetwood Mac alumnus Jeremy Spencer’s Jeremy Spencer & The Children made for the Children of God. The Krishnas themselves, on the other hand, would descend into becoming a drug trafficking and prostitution racket in order to fund themselves, before a schism splintered the group into a faction led by a notorious pedophile rapist and a faction led by a coke-addicted bazooka-armed psychopath that ended with effective Krishna paramilitaries, several murders, and the legal retention of Allen fucking Dershowitz.³ And it was aaaaall helped along by good ol’ Curious George. Say what you will about John Lennon—and you can say a lot, the man was a cunt—at least the only person he ever got killed was himself. No other Beatle can attest to having influenced a fucking body count. Unless we count the group’s general utilization as a propagating force for MKUltra which is a whole other topic.

Then there’s the matter of Harrison’s political expressions. Yes, we know about all he did for Bangladesh, but I think we can chalk that up to merely an altruistic side effect of his weird orientalism. I suppose it’s better than Jimmy Page’s charity work for children in Brazil, which is probably just a front for his sex tourism. [looks around lawyer-ly] Allegedly. But read this Twitter thread about Casa Jimmy and tell me you don’t get Jimmy Saville energy from it, especially considering Page’s own history with minors:

Anyways. I don’t know what Harrison’s takes were on Israel or South Africa, for instance—though he was somewhat barred from both countries, both for reasons that were sort of our of his control. Largely it seemed like Harrison’s positions were flighty and depended on what he thought was cool in any given moment or what benefited him personally. For instance, Harrison applied for a visa extension in the US but was denied it, leading him to send this letter to Nixon:

Sir, how can you bomb Cambonian citizens and worry about kicking me out of the country for smoking marijuana at the [same] time. Your repressive emperaour war monger ways stop before too piece luv. We will run the world Harry Krisher, Hare Hara Krishne Hare Hara Hare Hara Krishner. George Harrison.

Leave it to George Harrison to pen a letter to the president identical to the ones he probably gets every day from schizophrenics. Ignoring the bizarre spelling and grammar (possibly dictated and not read), what the fuck is he even saying in this letter? Nixon is a hypocrite because he bombs Cambodian citizens BUT he also won’t let George Harrison stay in America and smoke weed? I guess the insinuation is that Nixon is doing something as evil as killing innocent civilians while Harrison is doing something as harmless as smoking weed, and is evidently no threat to America. Harrison then ends the letter by pledging to overthrow the government. Hare Krishna Hare Krishna! Keep in mind that he’s only even making this protest because he’s mad that he is being impacted. Is Harrison aware that the President of the United States likely didn’t personally deny Harrison his visa extension?

It’s hard to believe that Harrison actually gives a shit about Nixon’s record as a politician and isn’t just pissed about his own inconvenience. As evidence of that fact, here’s George Harrison with former Nixon VP Gerald Ford:

If George Harrison ever sent Ford a letter complaining about the president’s endorsement and material support of the Indonesian slaughter in East Timor, I can’t find it. “Piggie” indeed.

It wasn’t the first time that Harrison’s political expressions were directly resultant from his own personal setbacks rather than actual coherent principles. Afterall, he railed against taxes in “Taxman” after being mad that in becoming rich he had to give some of it back. Another banger, yes, but an undeniably politically-odious one.

Then we must consider him interpersonally, in which case he was a petty whiner and a spoiled prima donna prone to tantrums (anyone who has even just watched Get Back should be able to attest to this) and, in spite of his reputation as a calm and peaceful guy, was actually an explosively-angry person. Not to mention an opportunist. You may know about Harrison’s “All Those Years Ago,” his terrible muzak tribute to his dear dead friend John Lennon who had been killed not long before. What you may not have heard is the persistent rumour that after Ringo had declined the single for himself, Harrison had been writing an anti-John-Lennon song up until the moment John got plugged, something I don’t find all that hard to believe considering George had released the anti-John song “Not Guilty” a year before John died. 1981’s “All Those Years Ago” wound up being Harrison’s biggest hit since 1973’s “Give Me Love,” and so of course after his next album, Gone Troppo, ate shit, Harrison desperately tried the formula again on his 1988 record Cloud Nine with the equally terrible “When We Was Fab.” He’d asked the other two surviving members to appear in the music video but Paul declined, likely because he’d already played on “All Those Years Ago” and didn’t feel like he owed George a boost to his transparently cynical nostalgia single after all the years George had been kind of a dick to him, writing songs like “Run of the Mill” about him and even appearing on John’s own (terrible) diss track “How Do You Sleep?” (although George’s part on that is great) which itself was only a year after the tempestuous George had dissed John himself (and Paul) on “Wah Wah.” “When We Was Fab” again returns to his fear of taxes, where he sings “back when income tax was all we had” while standing in the midst of miserable 1980s Thatcherite austerity.

If you’re going to dub a single individual Beatle your favourite on the merits of them as a person… well, I mean, it certainly shouldn’t be John, even if you overlook the fact that he was just plainly a bad fucking person he just seemed fucking annoying to be around. The Beatles were a funny band—Paul, Ringo, and, yes, George, are/were funny guys—but John was the exception. Listen to how John ruins the introduction of “Two of Us,” which is one of my favourite Paul songs, by trying to be funny and somehow coming up with this as a result:

No! Bad John! No touch! [sprays with water] Which one of you let him watch Monty Python again? You know he doesn’t understand any of it, it scares and confuses him and it makes him act up.

There’s also John’s inane “introduction” to Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, a personal favourite book of mine (terrific mind salve) that predates John even being in her life and yet for some reason my copy forces me to acknowledge his existence on every fold:

Excruciating cringe.

Lennon’s musical output likewise makes him sound like a perpetual headache and it’s no wonder Yoko opted to get him hooked on heroin considering it probably at least got him to shut up a bit. A ton of Lennon’s songs are ruined by philosophizing so sophomoric that anyone with half a brain can see how full of shit it all is, and when he’s not ruining his songs that way he’s ruining them by way of obnoxious self-reference. “The Ballad of John and Yoko” could have been a great song if you removed all of the subject matter, “Hold On” is a great song up until he starts addressing Yoko by name, and “God” is a tired postmodern nihilist nightmare that is only made worse by Lennon penning lines like “I don’t believe in The Beatles” and “I believe in Yoko” and “I was the Walrus, but now I’m John.” In every respect John just sort of reads as self-obsessed, such as the hilarious sentence he utters in his famous Playboy interview in which he expressed frustration that George Harrison didn’t write enough about him in his autobiography, saying “I don't want to be that egomaniacal, but he was like a disciple of mine.” Well… you may not want to be that egomaniacal, John, but…

Paul, on the other hand, has always been pretty charming and precious, was always clearly smarter than John but never seemed to feel the need to rub it in, and I love that video of Paul telling a dirty joke, but we can speed by all that because obviously the winner in the personality contest is Ringo. Look at this photo of him with the absolute worst Joy Division parody shirt I’ve ever seen, both in concept and execution:

Adorable. I don’t even use Twitter and never really have, but Ringo’s presence on it makes the entire site worth its existence. Elon should make the algorithm spam him into every user’s feed. He’s awash with stupid boomer positivity in the most intoxicatingly infectious way and he uses more emojis than my mom.

He’s like the lawfully good counterpart to Pat Beverley.

Sure, Paul makes snazzy records these days that get remixed and covered by people like St. Vincent and Beck, but meanwhile Ringo Starr, a man with an alleged net worth of a third of a billion dollars, puts out bizarre outsider art statements that look and sound like this:

There’s no way he didn’t animate this himself, and, based on the terrible mixing, I imagine he did everything else himself too. Did he not look at the final product and think “hmm. Looks like shit. Maybe I should hire an animator.” No. He did not. He is richer than anyone I know and is as DIY as Daniel fucking Johnston. He’s truly and simply in it for the love of it. He’s remarkable.

That’s it. This is all this was really leading up to. Just an excuse to praise Ringo. Ringo is the best Beatle.

Peace and love. ☮️❤️✌️

1. My final position on the song: it’s inoffensive. More than anything it represents the nadir of a once very respectable rock act, and yes, it’s funny that they sing about having built this city on “rock and roll” while playing what is absolutely the least rocking shit imaginable—but how much worse is it than some of what their contemporaries were doing at the time? I’d much rather listen to “We Built This City” than anything off of Santana’s Shangó. “We Built This City” as a single doesn’t even come close to the unlistenable garbage that is the hookless and cacophonous “Heartache All Over The World” by Elton John, or the misguided New Wave misadventure “Shiny Toys” by Joni Mitchell, or “American Dream” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young which I think was just an attempt by David Crosby (CIA agent) to improve on the groundwork laid by Chinese water torture.

2. This is from one of my absolute favourite Bangs pieces, “Dandelions in Still Air,” which I recommend reading in its blistering entirety but will nevertheless quote lengthily here from the sections concerning the aforementioned withering of The Beatles’ image in the 70s:

Name me one Sixties superstar who hasn’t become a zombie… the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that the four splintered Beatles may well have weathered the pall and decay of the Seventies the worst. […]

So the moptops have ended up mopping the floor of the supermarket, which is keeping them from bankruptcy and no doubt reassuring them that they still Matter on some level, but they do not and never will again give off a glint of the magic they used to radiate with such seeming effortlessness. That magic is currently one of the hottest items in the Woolworths where Sixties nostalgia is peddled like bric-a-brac—in spite of the Sgt. Pepper Broadway bomb. […]

I am constantly hearing people say, with minor perplexity, that they can still play early Stones albums, but old Beatle records (like old Dylan records), and particularly Sgt. Pepper, gather dust on the shelves. As with Dylan singing about Hattie Carroll, the Beatles celebrating the explosion of Love as a Way of Life amounts now to an artifact, just as today's Heavy Statements will prove to be just about as ephemeral.

3. On this subject I highly recommend the book Killing for Krishna by Henry Doktorski.