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Comment by TheSpiceIsLife | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, they did publish a song about LSD, a drug that had only recently become popular, as I understand it.

If you mean Lucy in the sky with diamonds, Lennon wrote it after a picture his son Julian drew about his classmate named Lucy (who sadly passed away a few years ago). The drug connotation was applied to the song afterwards, not before; the same acronym was coincidental, while the lyrics being inspired from Alice and Wonderland was applied later to the drug movement, not the other way around (the song became an anthem for the drug, it wasn’t written that way and many of the similarities we see today are because of its adoption).

Lennon & the band did insist this was the reason, but c'mon... You can hear the psychedelia dripping from every chord! They knew exactly what they were doing. Reminds one of how Scully & Sand's legal team insisted Orange Sunshine was ALD-52 (LSD's legal cousin) to try and avoid prosecution!

That is post facto association. We only think that because the song became associated with LSD, if you heard the song in 1967 when it just came out, you wouldn’t have made the connection because the association didn’t exist yet.

Two counterpoints:

A) Lennon discovered and got very deep into LSD in 1966, mere months before Lucy in the Sky was written. He had a powerful ego death experience [1].

B) Admitting to the public that one of their hit songs was about a controversial drug was an obvious PR no-no.

I guess there's no way to know for certain either way, though.

[1] "When McCartney and Lennon visited the newly opened Indica bookshop, Lennon had been looking for a copy of The Portable Nietzsche but found a copy of The Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner, adapted from the translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Walter Evans-Wentz, which was introduced to Leary by Aldous Huxley. Lennon bought the book, went home and followed the instructions exactly as stated in the book. It discussed an “ego death” experienced under the influence of LSD and other psychedelic drugs, supposedly essentially similar to the dying process, and requiring similar guidance."

https://books.google.com/books?id=FQSLCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA240

This reminds me very strongly of another extraordinarily implausible denial, that from 2001 A Space Odyssey, in which both Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke have sworn blue streaks that "HAL" is in no way, and least of all a one-letter caesar cipher shift, related to "IBM". This where in the infamous "Open the pod bay doors, please, HAL" line the letters "IBM" are being projected onto astronaut Dave Bowman's face.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/the-l...

https://youtu.be/dSIKBliboIo?t=25

(There's another YouTube video, which isn't turning up presently in search, that explores this concept far more deeply, including noting the IBM logos on certain equipment still visible, including Bowman's newspad, a pre-imagining of today's iPad and Android tablets.)

Hrm: it's been removed. Though there's a mention of it (and an IBM logo on one of the Discovery space suits) here:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/01/07/hal_9000_ibm_...

The (former) video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1r5dOwUS6Y

Rob Ager's channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/robag555/videos

Much of the analysis (and more film stills) here:

http://www.collativelearning.com/2001%20chapter%208.html

Trigger warning: TV Tropes:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImplausibleDeniab...

> This reminds me very strongly of another extraordinarily implausible denial

There are lots of coincidences like that, for example, Windows NT (WNT) being a one letter shift of VMS. I'm inclined to believe what people say they meant and put everything else in the conspiracy theory bin of plausible truth.

"Conspiracy theory" was itself ... if you believe the conspiracy theory ... promoted as a disparaging term by the C.I.A., based on CIA Document 1035-960:

https://projectunspeakable.com/conspiracy-theory-invention-o...

Though that theory has ... its own critics:

https://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/nope_it_was_alwa...

Usage of the phrase began rising sharply in the 1950s:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=conspiracy+the...

As for the VMS -> WNT shift, I'd considered mentioning it above.

I'm something of a fan of the multiple-explanations model. There are connections which may have multiple explanations. The IBM->HAL ties are too obviously deliberate in the film to be simple coincidence -- one does not project the letters "IBM" by accident, and certainly not in such a pivotal scene. I've also been part of far too many group / organisational discussions in which claims at deniability were made, clearly without substance.

As for the ability for some within a project to be working toward goals unknown to others, even at large scale, I'm reminded of the Glomar Explorer mission in which a large, secondary, scientific mission was presented as cover and for which many members of that cover mission didn't learn the truth of the primary objective until the story broke in newspapers.

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds?

I saw that refuted in a documentary quite recently...

Backed up by Snopes too : https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lucy-in-the-sky-with-diamo...

Good point. Come to think of it the article perhaps ought to have mentioned their drug-taking (since it may bear on their creativity).

>only recently become popular

only recently was discovered even

Beatles would not have become popular if they had not incorporated themes of drugs, sex, etc.

Not sure... The Beach Boys seemed squeaky clean at the beginning of their recording career. By the time Smile and Pet Sounds came out, I think people knew about their drug taking (great albums!!!) but many who know their early work have never heard "Our Prayer" for example. I think they got their fame on the G-rated stuff and were able to push genre boundaries later. I think it's the same with The Beatles, although I'm not positive- hard to imagine a time when people were not familiar with Sgt Pepper and The White Album...

What are you talking about? They were wildly popular long before they started singing anything edgy. If anything, their popularity is what allowed some of their more unusual ideas to enter the mainstream and be accepted.

What? Early Beatles is all about falling in love and being in love. There are sexual undertones, sure, but your statement seems like pure trolling.

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