Star Wars and Sgt. Pepper's indelibly altered the pop culture in which they emerged. Star Wars created both the modern blockbuster, becoming one of the most successful movies of all time, and the modern blockbuster era, while also beginning a media empire that is still going strong 40 years later (with a prequel out last year, and a sequel out later this year). Sgt. Pepper's was The Beatles' crowning achievement, the best-selling album of the 1960s, a masterpiece of sonic innovation and psychedelia. While Sgt. Pepper's may not have officially kicked off the "summer of love" or initiated the incredible creative output of 1967, it did define and reinforce the psychedelic aura of that year. Notwithstanding their medium-defining impacts, however, and the fact that they probably had many mutual fans, these two monumental products of popular culture had very little common.
Until now.
Our culture, and especially our popular culture, is, in many respects, caught in a nostalgia loop. What was cool decades ago is still cool, so long as the Baby Boomers maintain their vicelike grip on the commanding heights of our popular culture. There are many weird things about this trend (were kids in 1967 nostalgic for...1917?), and many bad things about it as well (at some point, the Baby Boomer grip has to break, otherwise our culture will stagnate). But, in the meantime, our cultural nostalgia loop, and a "remix" culture that likes to put two seemingly disparate things together, will produce some great things. And we have now officially seen the greatest remix of them all: a "mash-up" of Star Wars and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
What exactly does it mean to "mash up" an album and a movie? It's not like The Dark Side of the Rainbow, the famous urban legend about watching The Wizard of Oz with Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon as the soundtrack (or similar legends about Pink Floyd's song "Echoes" and the final part of 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Dark Side of the Moon and Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens). What the YouTube channel Palette-Swap Ninja has done, instead, is change the lyrics but not the music of Sgt. Pepper's to make it a concept album describing the plot of A New Hope, with cleverly cut scenes from the movie itself accompanying the appropriate songs as "music videos." There's no reason something this complex, a merging of two works of art so artistically singular and unique in such a fashion, should work. And it's not perfect; some of the lyrics scan awkwardly, and some of the songs don't really match the parts of the movie they're supposed to describe. But, on the whole, Princess Leia's Stolen Death Star Plans works way better than it should. It works so well, in fact, that I'm going to comment on each track of the album.
The original Sgt. Pepper's album opens with an emcee of sorts introducing the "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," the band The Beatles pretended to be as part of the concept album. And so, fittingly, Princess Leia's begins with an "introduction" that is also separate from the main body of the work, in the form of an altered Star Wars opening crawl musically identical to the Sgt. Pepper's original:
The only downside of this track is that "Empire" doesn't scan as the lyricists want it to. Naturally, the first syllable of "Empire" is stressed, and the second is unstressed; here, it is reversed, an awkwardness that persists on every subsequent usage. The rest of the "album" does this here and there; again, it is one of the work's few defects. But it is forgivable.
After the intro, "Princess Leia's" makes one of its few alterations of the actual music of Sgt. Pepper's. Where Sgt. Pepper's followed its intro with a horn intro and some crowd laughter, Princess Leia's splices in a segment of John Williams' Star Wars score--again, an appropriate change. The 2-minute song also introduce "Princess Leia's Stolen Death Star Plans" as the "theme" of the concept album, which works, not only because it scans, but because that's what the movie is also about. And, as we shall see later, the structure of Sgt. Pepper's allows Princess Leia's to return brilliantly to its "theme" at the end.
In the original Sgt. Pepper's, the first song of the album ends with the "introducer" bringing along a new "performer," "the only and only Billy Shears" (Ringo Starr). Princess Leia's ends its first track also by introducing a new "performer" (who makes his entry in the accompanying video at the same time) in Darth Vader (with "Vader's here" replacing "Billy Shears"). And while Billy Shears' playful melody remains, Princess Leia's juxtaposes that airy music with the dark threats of Lord Vader: "you're gonna die along with all of your friends." Billy Shears' song has a call-and-response format, which "With Illicit Help From Your Friends" keeps, turning it into the back-and-forth between Vader and Leia and Vader and his underlings. Whereas Billy Shears claims just "to want someone to love," Vader intones that he "wants those plans in my glove."
3) "Luke is in the Desert" ("Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds")
"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," the next song on "Sgt. Pepper's," combines a relatively simple structure with layers of psychedelic instrumentation and evocative lyrics to create a soaring vision through a crystalline world. "Luke is in the Desert," again, keeps the same music, and introduces a new world, but changes the lyrics to make it mostly about someone (Luke) complaining about how boring his life is. To extent there is a "Lucy" figure guiding him through this world, it's the mysterious Leia, "a hologram woman/now there's a surprise." But, for the most part, we have another instance of smart contrast: Lucy and her world were magical (eliciting an "ahhh" in the refrain); Luke's world is boring, and he's whining (hence the "whaaaa").
4) "Never Better" ("Getting Better")
On Sgt. Pepper's, "Getting Better" is a budding optimist's acceptance of the possibility of life's improvement. On Princess Leia's, the first half of "Never Better" continues Luke's whining from the "Luke is in the Desert." As a result, the entire first half of the song is negative, unlike the dawning optimism (with sardonic stoicism supplied by Lennon's "it can't get no worse") of "Getting Better." "Never Better" keeps the sitar-heavy mid-section that launches "Getting Better" into its final stretch, and smartly makes this the transition point for Luke's frame of mind (even keeping the spirit, if not the letter, of Lennon's sardonic refrain by remarking that "it only took one verse" for Luke to start feeling better about his situation). I would argue that "Never Better" even slightly improves on "Getting Better" by setting our first lyrics hinting about the mysticism of the Force over the Eastern, mystical tones supplied by the sitar.
5) "Imperial Holes" ("Fixing a Hole")
This is the first song on Princess Leia's in which the title does not appear. It's more a description of te state in which the upper-level Imperial bureaucracy finds itself: struggling on what to do next, now that the rebels have the Death Star plans, and the Senate is collapsing. Its analogue on Sgt. Pepper's is "Fixing A Hole," which I've always interpreted as being about someone who is tired of listening to doubters and critics and has finally decided to "fix" the holes in himself. If my interpretation is correct, then "Imperial Holes" is a great analogue, as it describes the Empire's attempt to deal with "holes" of its own. The guitar break also quotes the "Imperial March," which is a bit anachronistic (that theme does not appear until The Empire Strikes Back), but clever enough to forgive. My only complaint: I wish the title were better, and appeared as the song's refrain, as "Fixing A Hole" does on Sgt. Pepper's.
6) "He's Leaving Home" ("She's Leaving Home")
I shouldn't even have to explain that "He's Leaving Home" is Princess Leia's version of "She's Leaving Home." It's a very straightforward change, enabled by a similarity in narrative. "She's Leaving Home" is the story of a girl who runs away from a household headed by two well-meaning parents who don't understand why she would do such a thing. "He's Leaving Home," similarly, tells the story of Luke, finally leaving home, as he always wanted, but only because of the tragedy of his parents' murder. "She's Leaving Home" is told from the perspective of an omniscient, third-person narrator and of Luke's parents; "He's Leaving Home" is told from an omniscient perspective but almost exclusively follows Luke. The parents, in this case, are the main object of the tragedy, getting a flashback, earning ruminations on their simple, honest life. Forgiving another instance of awkward scanning ("Jawa sandcrawler") makes "He's Leaving Home," if anything, superior to "She's Leaving Home," at least in lyrical content and narrative purpose. It may be my favorite song on this "album."
7) "Being From the Spaceport of Mos Eisley" ("Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite")
This is yet another example of near perfect symmetry. John Lennon's inspiration for "Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite" was a Victorian-era circus poster he found at an antique store; the song's lyrics come from it almost verbatim, describing a veritable menagerie of bizarre and entertaining acts. And so Princess Leia's fills this same space of the album with "Being From the Spaceport of Mos Eisley," a recounting of the bizarre creatures and fraught perils contained within the Mos Eisley Cantina. The best symmetry: "And of course/my power source/comes from the Force" replacing "And of course/Henry the Horse/dances the waltz." There's also some clever musical alterations, most notably replacing the musique concrete tape loop of "Mr. Kite" with a snippet from the Mos Eisley cantina band. Chewbacca's roar also replaces Ringo's mid-song drum break, and Han, shooting first, ends the song with the noise of his blaster. Another great effort.
8) "The Force Within You" ("Within You Without You")
'Within You Without You," the song from Sgt. Pepper's on which this track from Princess Leia's is based, has always been one of my favorite tracks on that album. Other bands of the time had dabbled in Eastern musical styles; The Beatles themselves had done so as early as 1965 with Rubber Soul's "Norwegian Wood," and again with "Tomorrow Never Knows" on Revolver. And The Rolling Stones, for their part, had "Paint It Black." But "Within You Without You" embraced the sitar, Indian tones, and Hindu spirituality and mysticism more than any piece of popular Western music up to that time. Setting A New Hope's main interstitial ship-based sequence (the sort that appear in every Star Wars movie; with a method of faster-than-light travel that gets you anywhere, such trips only take as long as the plot demands them to) to this song works for at least two reasons. First, the effect of going into hyperspace, as Star Wars portrays it, has itself long had psychedelic implications (as humorously demonstrated in Spaceballs), and "Within You Without You" is one of the most psychedelic songs on Sgt. Pepper's. And second, the content of this scene matches well with the content of the original song as well. "The Force Within You" swaps out the Hindu mysticism of the original for the first major exposition on the Force from Obi-Wan that we receive in A New Hope (the training ball et al.), and it works perfectly. Bonus points for seemingly making Chewbacca's voice into a sitar, replacing the mid-song instrumental interlude with R2-D2 beeps, and having the last words we hear in the video be Han saying "this is ridiculous," a clear parallel to the laughter that closes "Within You Without You." This song and "He's Leaving Home" go back and forth in my mind for the best/closest musical analogues.
9) "AA Twenty-Three" ("When I'm Sixty-Four")
The most impressive aspects of "AA-23," the replacement for "When I'm Sixty-Four," come in its syncing to footage from A New Hope: At the beginning, when the stormtroopers march and stop in sync to the song, and at the end, when the last note plays exactly as Han, Luke, Leia, and Chewie land in the dumpster. The playful melody of "When I'm Sixty-Four" also reinforces how downright funny the action sequence of Luke, Han, and Chewie rescuing Leia is. Other than that, though, there's no real compelling reason, other than an admittedly clever structuring of the song around the location of Leia's prison cell as the refrain, that this song had to be where it was. And "trooper" doesn't really scan how they want it to. Still an acceptable track, however.
10) "Dianoga ("Lovely Rita")
The main thing that "Dianoga" has going for it is that it's about someone (or, rather, something). But unlike "Lovely Rita," its counterpart, "Dianoga" is about fear, not love. In that sense, it has the same sort of juxtapositional irony that "With Illicit Help From Your Friends" also displayed. Aside from that, the best parts of this song come, again, from clever syncing to the movie: the piano interlude comes as Luke struggles to escape the dumpster creature; and where "Lovely Rita" ended with the breathing and scatting of its singer, "Dianoga" ends with snippets of desperate dialogue from the movie while the music still plays. But "ricochet" does not scan like the writers want, and the song is otherwise not that special. At least I learned from this song that the dumpster creature in "A New Hope" actually has a name.
11) "Keep Moving Keep Moving" ("Good Morning Good Morning")
"Good Morning Good Morning" has always been my least favorite song on Sgt. Pepper's. Likewise, "Keep Moving Keep Moving" is my least favorite song on Princess Leia's. I've never understood what "Good Morning Good Morning" was supposed to be about (Lennon said a box of cereal inspired it). And so, in this sense, "Keep Moving Keep Moving" actually improves on it somewhat. It describes how Han, Luke, Leia, and Chewie escape the Death Star using an admittedly clever and concise scheme of self-contained rhyming verses. The action is largely transitional, which is always how "Good Morning Good Morning" felt to me: the prelude to something better. But "Keep Moving Keep Moving" pulls the movie splice trick to great effect, swapping out the animal noises of "Good Morning Good Morning" for some of the most famous dialogue and sounds from A New Hope. Other than that, though...it's just okay. Though, to be fair, it could never be much better than the song on which it is based, which I've always considered the weakest song on Sgt. Pepper's.
12/13) "Princess Leia's Stolen Death Star Plans (Reprise)"/"A Day in the Life of Red Five" ("Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band [reprise]/"A Day in the Life")
Remember when I said that "Good Morning Good Morning" has always felt like a prelude to me, and that "Keep Moving Keep Moving" took on some of that character? Well, both Sgt. Pepper's and Princess Leia's sure know how to end. The cleverness of Princess Leia's final track begins with its countdown: What was "1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4" on "Sgt. Pepper's (reprise) becomes "1, 2, Yavin IV" on "Princess Leia's (reprise)," helpfully informing us where in the galaxy we are. "Sgt. Pepper's (reprise)" is meant to convey the impression that it is being performed live; "Princess Leia's" mimics that by describing the meeting before the Death Star trench run, in which the Rebel high command gives attack instructions to the fleet. But the most impressive thing about this track is something over which this album's "creators" had no control, but perhaps inspired them to make it in the first place: in both the original Sgt. Pepper's and A New Hope, there is a "reprise" of sorts. The first act of A New Hope focuses on the stolen Death Star plans, and they retreat to the background for most of the movie until the final act. Likewise, Sgt. Pepper's merely provides a bookend to create the concept album of its titular band performing the album. Combining these two is the masterstroke of the album, highlighting the bookending nature of both the album and the movie.
"A Day in the Life of Red Five" is impressive, though not quite as much as this. There isn't much of a reason for the tonal shifts that we see in "A Day in the Life," or the abiding sadness of its first and third parts. "Obi-Wan spoke and I went into a dream," however, is brilliant, as is replacing the famous final note of "A Day in the Life" with the explosion of the Death Star. If these guys were really clever, though, they would have done something short with the secret message at the very end of Sgt. Pepper's, though I am impressed enough with this project as it is.
I can't emphasize enough how much of a creative wonder this is. I myself am fond of rewriting lyrics for different purposes (see, e.g., my rewriting of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" to make it about the 2016 election), but this outdoes anything I've ever attempted. I'm not exactly sure why this had to be done, or how anyone thought to do it, but boy am I glad someone did. It's a fitting way to honor the 40th anniversary of one of the most important movies ever released, and the 50th anniversary of one of the most important albums ever released. They both changed our popular culture forever, and this video is proof that their legacies, now intertwined by this project, live on.
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