A charge frequently levelled against popular music is that its trite and meaningless, something vacuous and ephemeral designed to provide a quick fix but of no lasting value. In some cases it's guilty as charged, but I've always found such a view rather one eyed, missing the point and downright pompous - does a piece of music need to be some academically based Harry Partch type microtonal affair to have any inherent value? Nah, of course it doesn't. No brain simplicity can have its virtues too - take (for one example) the opening der der DER riff from 'Smoke On The Water'. Idiot proof simple, it's one of the first things any aspiring guitar player learns to play because it only takes ten minutes to master, even by someone playing wearing boxing gloves. Does this lessen it's value? I think not - it takes a guitarist of no small talent and confidence to crank out a riff like that to power a six minute rock song. A lesser player would have filled in the gaps with all manner of widdly widdly business to show off their chops, but it would have ruined the effect. By hammering it out straight with no bullshit, Ritchie Blackmore laid down one of the most famous openings in rock music, no more and no less.
Which brings me to 'She Loves You'; "She loves you, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!"; well how bonehead simple is that for a chorus? It's not hard to picture the po of faced pop haters of 1963 smirking "Tch, they don't even bother rhyming it with anything, and those 'yeah's' are not proper English either". And those critics did exist. But there's a yawning chasm between such a mindset and what the song sets out to do that could never be filled with a hundred years worth of "but that's the point" explanations. So why bother trying?
In its simplicity, 'She Loves You' presents itself as an explosive jetpack roar of energy that shreds The Beatles' coattail hanging rivals in its afterburn with a force that's embedded itself in the DNA of popular music to the point that the title can now barely be spoken in any context without following it up with those 'Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!'s'. And it's those cries that effectively peg 'She Loves You' as a young man's song - anybody under the age of....ooooh, 25......trying them on with the same level of enthusiasm would be like a dad in a disco wearing too tight jeans trying to replicate them, and that's before they even got to the 'wooos'. Which may be why, just like other famous, era defining songs (see also 'Like A Rolling Stone', 'Heartbreak Hotel', 'Anarchy In The UK etc), cover versions have been few - what each of these songs possess is a hardwired ability to fix a time and place that has become just as much part of the song as the words and music so any attempt to replicate is always going to come up short.
Not that its never been covered, and at least one of these versions proved crucial to my appreciation of the song; for my own part, I grew up with 'She Loves You' and I'd always heard it as Lennon and McCartney screaming their joy to let the world know they were in love, but it took Ted Chippington's 1986 loungecore version for me to hear the lyrics properly for the first time and to understand the implications of them singing that she loves 'you', not she loves 'me'. Because it begs the question as to why should they care about this unnamed third party so much? Maybe John and Paul have got the hots for their mate's girlfriend too - it's obvious that they're close enough already for her to confide in them ("She said you hurt her so, she almost lost her mind. She said to let you know, you're not the hurting kind. She says she loves you").
Those conversational 'she said''s paint the breathless rush of emotion as clearly as lines from a John Osborne kitchen sink drama, conveying the message as the go-between between her and her ex to confirm that she still loves him and ending with the warning "And with a love like that. you know you should be glad." You can see the subtext of 'because if you don't shape up, treat her right and "apologise to her" then I'm going to make a move myself'. Which gives the urgency of the vocal a status quo maintaining subtext - if he doesn't sort himself out and get back with her then more than one friendship could be heading for the rocks.
But that's enough pseudo analysing - if you've never heard the song, go and listen to it now. If you have, listen to it again. It will only take you 2:17 minutes of simplistic yelling, but it comes with more excitement than a day out at a theme park and with more depth than all four sides of a double album by Yes. Remarkable. Quite remarkable.
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