8 Hard Rock Songs Probably Written Out Of Spite

8. The Beatles - Yer Blues

Yer Blues is one of the heaviest songs ever written by the formerly Fab Four. Written in India during a spell of misery and despondency, John Lennon presented Yer Blues as a parody of the British Blues boom of the late '60s.

The song sends up white Englishmen portraying themselves as authentic blues men. As Beatles biographer Jonathan Gould put it, Yer Blues represents The Beatles’ acceptance that:

“except as a subject of self-parody, certain expressive modes of African-American music lay outside the realm of their experience and hence beyond their emotional range as singers.”

But something else is going on beneath the surface. John was poking fun at those British blues guys because he resented them. The genre exercise masks a certain bitterness at John’s own inability to express himself quite so sincerely.

John had been writing relatively revealing songs about himself since Help! earlier in the decade, but always sugar-coated the message with an upbeat musical backdrop.

Ironically, The White Album (on which Yer Blues was released) found John opening up and making some of his most revealing recordings to date on tracks like Julia.