You Can’t Do That

In ‘You Can’t Do That’, we encounter the couple of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ a little further down the line. The woman has fallen foul of the man’s strict boundaries, as, one senses, she was bound to do, and the man’s possessiveness, which was dormant in the latter song, is now on the surface, causing a strain on the relationship. The song opens with: “I’ve got something to say that might cause you pain.” Even more unequivocally than in the opening line of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, we feel, mainly through the use of the word ‘pain’, that the woman is about to receive a black eye, rather than a mere telling-off.

The woman has transgressed: she has let go of her man’s hand (broken the chain) and gone to talk to another man. She knew it was against the rules: “Because I told you before, you can’t do that,” and it is, in any case, already the second time it has happened: “Well, it’s the second time I caught you talking to him.” The black eye from the first time will no doubt barely have healed. The line: “I think I’ll let you down and leave you flat,” despite indicating the man’s intention to escape, has distinctly hostile and aggressive undertones. Personally, I am always tempted to sing: “I think I’ll beat you down and lay you flat.” In any case, it sounds to me more like a threat than an admission of defeat.

We might naturally assume that the man has sought to create a kind of safe haven for himself and his woman, where the two of them can exist without too much undue influence from the outside world and its mundane concerns, but is thwarted in his attempts by a fickle and inconstant woman. We may even have some hope that the act of holding hands in ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ was meant to symbolise a mystical bond: a band of gold, so to speak. However, the man goes on to sing: “Everybody’s green ‘cause I’m the one who won your love. But if they’d seen you talking that way, they’d laugh in my face.” We instantly realise that it was his concern with the world’s perception of him that persuaded him to pursue this particular woman (who is undeniably a catch: “Everybody’s green,”) and the world’s perception of his failure to keep her from roaming that is now making his life unbearable, not the fact that he might lose her: he is even considering dumping her (pre-emptively, one would gather,) before she can do any more damage to his public image and, by extension, his self-esteem.

We are dealing here with a man whose vanity has lead him to make an inappropriate and unsustainable choice of partner. We realise now that it was only for cosmetic reasons that he wanted to hold her hand; in one sense as a boast to the world: look what a hot babe I’ve got on the leash, and in another sense to warn off suitors.

In John’s early song’s we often find him naively asking us to empathise with what cannot be described as anything other than repugnant behaviour, as in ‘I’ll Cry Instead’: “I’ve got every reason on earth to be mad, ‘cause I’ve just lost the only girl I had,” which begs the question: how many girls does he require in order to feel cheerful? In this case, as well as many other early cases, I truly think John is being naive rather than deliberately exposing his weakness of character. However, I also think that his growing awareness of that weakness over the course of the Sixties persuaded him to obscure meaning in his lyrics and made him receptive to Yoko Ono’s softening Oriental influence. John was not enough of a decadent to risk alienating himself to any great degree. Before everything else, he wanted to be one of the lads, and of course: the British Lad is the world’s most repulsive good guy.

John’s early love songs are generally about possession. For a simple, working-class lad such as him, it must have been confusing to discover the decay of the ancient precondition of marriage (woman as property of the man,) so far advanced. By the early Sixties there was very little left in the way of social structure on which an old-fashioned man could still safely build a life.