Even if your existence isn't mean, it can still be meaningless. Britain's dilletante nobles and the others who still take their tea quietly at four sit in their gardens maintaining their fortunes (luck and/or money). And because their lives are irrelevant to anything or anybody, the Beatles tell us, they are left alone (like Eleanor Rigby) standing in the rain.
The really puzzling point of interpretation is the quote from King Lear, which floats through the end of the song. Why Lear? Well, it's a play about madness, and everybody's going mad. But why the death of Oswald? The recording did come out on the anniversary of the weekend when Lee Harvey Oswald killed a great ruler and then died himself. Maybe the Beatles are ironically saying that degraded, crazy Oswalds can change the course of the world. And maybe the Lear allusion explains that most men no matter what staggeringly infamous deeds they perform, will die insignificant deaths.
I am the Walrus is ambiguous enough to keep you wondering how serious the Beatles really are. Richard Poirier, the reigning Beatles explicateur, said last month in the Partisan Review that "the Beatles' most talented member, John Lennon, has written two books of Joycean verbal play that suggest why no one is ever in danger of reading too much into the lyrics of their songs." So don't sell the allusions short.
At the same time the song doesn't make it as one of the all time great sounds. Rock, like blues, is the art of emotional music--basic music, which, although it is often electric and artificial, is always simple. The sounds in I am the Walrus are designed too often to transmit literal ideas instead of feelings. For instance, there is a screen of static between the singer and the listener, the sound that a weak radio makes late at night. This is apparently to indicate that the Beatles are having a hard time getting through to their audience through all the haze of mass media. The music sets the tone for the lyrics by sounding like a dirge. With all its intriguing esoterica the Walrus forfeits a lot of the basic appeal of rock.
It's the second song that's the hit.
Hello Goodbye is a beautiful song that rolls up and down in simple, glorious repetition. Doing it on the Ed Sullivan Show, they winked, laughed, showed us it was a recording by not playing their instruments, and hoohaed the prime time audience into the ground. Once more the Beatles are making the music mean as much as the text and more.
The words are almost entirely variations on "You say yes-I say no-You say goodbye-I say hello". Serious fans read into this a put-down of the hippies' offhand and mindless acceptance of everything and everybody. They're pretty much right. But it doesn't matter: the song is quite catholic and can readily mean anything you feel like when you say hello.
In addition to being more intellectually egalitarian, Hello Goodbye brings the sound all back home to the sense. The whole great thing about rock, and the Beatles, isn't listening to someone play a guitar: it's hearing the simultaneous and integrated sound pouring out of the amplifiers, virtually giving life.