"You've Got To Hide Your Love Away" by The Beatles
No one wants to.
“Here I stand, head in hand / Turn my face to the wall / If she's gone, I can't go on / Feeling two-foot small”
My sister and I watched “Help!” on VHS approximately 872 times as kids. I remember very little of the movie. As I recall, it’s just a bunch of scenes with the Beatles getting chased around, interspersed with scenes of them singing. This song is in one of the singing scenes, they’re in a swank living room somewhere and Ringo is sitting in a kind of sunken bed in the floor, hitting a tambourine. He has the most detached look on his face. There is a beautiful woman sitting in the room listening to them.
“Everywhere people stare / Each and every day / I can see them laugh at me / And I hear them say…”
Short gems like this one are something of an endangered art nowadays. The internet has done away with the need for songs to be short. You used to have to keep your song under three minutes to fit on radio playlists. Airtime was scarce and your song had to compete for it, measured against ads, DJ banter, news, station IDs and the like.
Short songs are light on their feet.
Now that the bandwidth is wider, attention spans are shorter but songs are somehow longer. More demanding. Memes are super short, though. Your new ticket to fame is a viral video, no one cares if you took the time to condense an essential slice of the human experience into a vivid lyric.
“Hey, you've got to hide your love away / Hey, you've got to hide your love away”
Lennon’s lyric states a simple fact about life. I don’t want it to be true, it sounds like he’s saying you must hold love back, not express it. That you literally must keep your most precious feeling, your most valuable and essential gift, away from those who might benefit the most from it. It’s counterintuitive and also totally the opposite of what Mr. Rogers might advise. But he means it. And it’s true.
How dare you, John?
He’s challenging us with a grown up fact, stating it in language a child might understand. It has more to do with boring stuff - laws of physics, resource management, energy currents, supply and demand - than romantic feelings. You tell me.
The way I understand it, after a lifetime of emotional mismanagement, is that if you love someone (in a beautiful way!) and truly desire for them to share in it, then you have a responsibility not to simply reveal this to them like a pop-up ad or dump it on their doorstep like an Amazon package. If it’s uninvited, then it will be wasted. And then nobody can benefit from it. You least of all.
If you want your “love” to find any kind of fulfillment with the intended recipient, you have a responsibility to prepare the ground. Find a way to get the person’s attention, their curiosity. Investigate the (potential!) connection in other ways than simply thrusting your gift upon them. Gather evidence that your feelings are in fact true and that the match has a chance to be viable. Before acting.
No one wants to do this. It requires discipline, emotional hygiene, impulse control. Sometimes it feels like trying to hold in diarrhea. Of course there are other ways, but in case after case, experience has taught us that Hiding Our Love Away™ is a pretty reliable method for protecting it from a costly and painful mis-allocation.
Your mileage may vary, but gather ‘round, all you clowns. This guy did it wrong, and he lost the girl to someone else:
“How can I even try? I can never win / Hearing them, seeing them / In the state I'm in / How could she say to me "Love will find a way"? / Gather 'round, all you clowns / Let me hear you say…”
At some point in the 90s, songs stopped mentoring us. We started getting tunes like “Creep”, “You Outta Know”, “Lithium” and “Teenage Dirtbag”, which tend to label and validate the feelings of disaffected kids with broken hearts who can’t get a romantic break. It’s a form of pandering, like giving a kid candy and calling it food.
But my generation’s songs had the opposite problem. The songs I remember from my school days in the 80s, like “Message in a Bottle”, “When Doves Cry”, “Time After Time”, “Here Comes The Rain Again”, “Love Is A Battlefield” and “Billie Jean” are full of dark, complex, grown up emotions that seemed overwhelming, beyond the reach of a kid like me just trying to get his bearings in middle school.
For me, the aspirant who wore my heart on my sleeve, it was all too much. I had no impulse control and made a lifetime’s worth of wrong moves. But I could have taken a cue from this song, it was hiding in plain sight.
“Hey, you've got to hide your love away”
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These Stacks are like poetry my friend. Beautifully written… and played.
Bravo