The Beatles Counterculture Revolution

The Beatles embarked on a highly publicised trip to the region of Rishikesh in Northern India in February of 1968. The reason for their joint venture was, principally, to attend a transcendental meditation course taught by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose exclusive seminars they had previously attended in London and Wales. The images of the four men and their wives at the train station leaving Britain for India made headlines all over the international press, and greatly spread the idea of stepping out of traditional Western values and lifestyle in favour of a spiritual awakening road by introducing oneself and merging with other religious cultures and philosophical paths. The Beatles, as the highest cultural icons of the time and with their …show more content…
The utopian idea of building a new society based only on freedom and love was greatly diffused across the world through music and television, planting the idea in every viewer’s head of the possibility of change. Revolution taps into this idea of personal revolt with the listener-addressed line: “You say you got a real solution”. By the time the song comes out, Lennon had witnessed and been inspired by the May ’68 Paris student riots, in addition to the presence of extremely violent images on TV covering the shameful disaster taking place in Vietnam. The Beatles support social change, but not when the means to get it are violent (“But when you talk about destruction/Don’t you know that you can count me