ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which the Beatles use accidentals in Revolver. In its general meaning, 'accidents' are precisely the opposite to the essences of Enlightenment modernity: it is what the Enlightenment wants to forget, or at least to absorb within a system that accounts for them as essential to one extent or another. In important ways, the Beatles in Revolver are without irony, or at least without the very quick assumption of mode into meaning that is the hallmark gesture of 'high' modernism. The accidents of musical line, musical structure, and lyric call attention to themselves in Revolver and energize rather than temper its powerful sound. The guitars and drums of the Beatles are without material keys and, instead, present the modification of keys – one might call the guitar fret a modified or 'accidental' key, so to speak – is interesting especially in the context of the double meaning of 'fret' itself.
