Penny Lane, Immortalized in Beatles Song, May Have Name Changed Due to Slavery Claim

Statue of Thomas Jefferson was torn down at Jefferson High School here in town last night.

A couple of statues of "pioneers" got torn down at U of O last week.

What?  

When visiting Liverpool you go to Penny Lane.

thought it was a love song about a girl named penny

More a love song to a neighborhood where Paul hung out as a kid.   Here is the Beatles video for the song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-rB0pHI9fU

Lennon's additions to the song writing are about masturbation. "He likes to keep his fire engine clean." "It's a clean machine" Pretty funny. The song is just pure garbage. George Martin just using the Beatles to try and make himself look good on the trumpet. It was just all horrible. Good thing The Band came out with music from big pink and the Beatles figured out what good music was again. In fairness, Lennon has some good tunes on mystery tour but he also wrote some garbage on their as well.

Joe Scarborough is a big Beatles fan.

(oops. double post)

Haven't heard multiple Beatles songs referred to as garbage lately. Seems a bit overstated.

I just played the song backwards, it clearly says "I enslaved Paul"...

Fun review of the Mop Tops.

For the next review, how about the Rolling Stones.  

Or perhaps Sly & the Family Stone.  

Feel free to review anyone else.

Hopefully someone some out here know.

I imagine some folks had a hard time with the changes that came with the end of slavery too.

Live by the zeitgeist; die by the zeitgeist.

>>>I imagine some folks had a hard time with the changes that came with the end of slavery too.

Speaking of the English slave trade, when Britain finally outlawed slavery in the1830s, they paid reparations - to the slave owners for each slave freed.  The fact that most of the British slaves were in the newly formed United States and in various far flung colonies, and not in Britain proper, allowed them to walk away wiping their hands clean of the whole sordid system.  

Of course the Brits went on to take over much of Africa and Asia by the late 1800s which didn't involve slavery per se, but still a markedly exploitive and racist imperial domination.   That's why they have Churchill's statute near Parliament under tight security.  He was an unabashed champion of Pax Britanica.  Cecil Rhodes' statutes are also on the short list.

This has become a global movement.

This is historical revisionism run amok.  Pretty much every civilization known to man practiced slavery at some point, including the indigenous people in Africa, North America and Central America:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery

Should we blow up the Great Pyramids?

Erasing history is a slippery slope.  Better to study it, learn from it, and use it as a basis for how not to repeat it's errors.

To wit, until this became a trending news item, how many here had ever thought of the Beatles' "Penny Lane" as anything more than a pop song about some street in Liverpool that Lennon and McCartney inhabited?  No one ever associated it with slavery.  It may have been named after someone involved in that business, but it's name has become associated with other things and been transformed through time.  That's how history works. 
 

> No one ever associated it with slavery.

That's a false statement. The article linked by OP associated it with slavery, and I'm guessing there were some people back in Penny's time who knew of the association too.

That said, I agree with your statement about erasing history being a slippery slope, Dave. Recontextualizing history seems like a better way to go.

Let the name of trump be stricken from every book and tablet, stricken from all pylons and obelisks, stricken from every monument of America. Let the name of trump be unheard and unspoken, erased from the memory of men for all time.

To be clear, Mike, when I said no one, I was talking about the members of this forum.

> Let the name of trump be stricken

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
————————————————————— George Santayana

Thanks for the clarification, Dave. Your comments are usually pretty reasonable, so I was kind of surprised by the overreach. 

https://stores.jcpenney.com/index.html

There are still 846 stores open,  including 71 in California and 82 in Texas.
I thought they had closed and gone bankrupt,  but their website paints a different picture.

https://jobs.jcp.com/

^ And they are hiring !!

This is not the face of racism.

^ is that the girl from the Blind Faith LP?

ha...

Speaking of Blind Faith and British racism, EC some some really racist stuff back in the 1970s which if he said today would get him immediately canceled.