The Beatles
Yesterday

In 1965, the Beatles released "Help!", a beautiful album from their early days, full of famous singles including "Ticket To Ride", "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away", "Help!", and...the most beautiful song of all time "Yesterday".

Two minutes and three seconds of pure masterpiece.

It might be redundant to talk about this song considering the Fab 4's repertoire, but the fame of this song is not only due to the immense notoriety of the group but also to its unparalleled beauty.

And I emphasize UNPARALLELED.

In my opinion, in the years following the release of this song, everyone has tried at least once to imitate its musical and lyrical structure, but nothing came close; this is a masterpiece of rock, pop, and the music of the last century; something with which we former inhabitants of the 1900s could go back in time and not feel inferior to anyone who heard the GREAT classical works firsthand.

I'm not saying that Yesterday is on par with the masterpieces of classical music, but if we consider rock as the music of the masses before the 1900s, we have this song before anyone else; our Symphony No. 9.

Paul McCartney, besides having written a masterpiece melody, minimized the concept of rock by turning pure simplicity into a masterpiece. All it took was a guitar arpeggio, some background strings, and a clean and clear vocal like his, along with that bold yet nostalgic English accent that, in just under two minutes, teaches everyone that many times there is no need to go overboard with instruments and structures to write the song of a lifetime.

That's enough if the core idea is brilliant.

To reduce "Yesterday" to just a beautiful song is to misunderstand its historical importance. Even though the lyrics are purely banal and overused, this piece is the synthesis of the universality of melody and shows us how the latter, even if it's the most catchy part of any composition, is subject to experimentation and can become so beautiful that it elevates to a work of art. Here, with this song, a certain tendency to snub immediacy is denied since, at the time, its acoustic structure with strings was defined as a revolution.

A first form of a stadium anthem in the lyrics with the smart choice of reducing the title to a very common word and using catchy phrases even for those who do not have a good command of English.

This is a piece that mocks all the suites of the seventies, which, although they are masterpieces both technically and melodically speaking, have never managed to reach the beauty of these two minutes. It might be bold to say, but today's commercial pop in its catchy mathematics for profit unconsciously refers back to a song that was written by a twenty-year-old by chance one morning with the fear of having copied it.

McCartney himself at the time realized that the melody was too beautiful to be just his own.

And yet, forty years later, nothing has ever come close to this small symphony. Perhaps Lennon, with "Imagine", almost succeeded, but I always imagined old John sitting at the piano the day he wrote his masterpiece with the intention of matching his friend Paul and his "yesterday".

A few years earlier, he had pulled a real trick on him and all the musicians of the world: "my dear ones, no one will ever surpass this song!"