Addition by Omission

Listen closely to the classic Beatles song “Hey Jude” right around the 2:58 mark and you’ll hear what I believe is the only instance of the group dropping an F-bomb on an officially released track, not to mention an epic seven-minute¹ worldwide chart-topper that spent a whopping nine weeks at Number 1 in the U.S. — an all-time record when the song was released in 1968.²

Did you spot it? It’s easy to miss, even if you know what to listen for. But there it is, buried beneath multiple layers of other tracks, Paul McCartney swearing “fucking hell” over a botched piano chord. As John Lennon recalled: “Paul hit a clunker on the piano and said a naughty word […] but I insisted we leave it in buried just low enough so that it can barely be heard. Most people won’t ever spot it … but we’ll know it’s there.”³

The Beatles tried something similar, albeit, more intentional during the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band sessions when Lennon asked for a high-pitch tone placed at the end of the record that only dogs and cats could hear.⁴

But it’s the intentional omission of editing out the unintentional addition of profanity that sticks with me. It’s an imperfection that would never make it into today’s slick, glossy pop productions. It’s too easy to remove it with modern tools to the extent that feigning ignorance is not only improbable but likely punishable.

Now it’s a historical artifact if not some saucy cocktail chatter to keep in your back pocket. It’s the sort of thing that adds value to the song that we never would have gotten, had someone simply treated it as a mistake that needed fixing. It’s not quite like an Easter egg, such as a song hidden from the track list or Pixar movies referencing upcoming Pixar movies. It’s the best kind of hidden gem.

Not every mistake is a net negative. In some cases, omitting perfection begets it.

Footnotes

¹ Seven minutes was an audacious length for radio programming that was accustomed to tightly packaged rock and pop tunes that typically clocked in at 2-3 minutes, making it even more audacious to include profanity. ⤴️

² “US single release: Hey Jude” (July 11, 2024). The Beatles Bible. Accessed January 6, 2025. ⤴️

³ Emerick, Geoff. Here, There and Everywhere (Page 262). 2006. Penguin Random House. ⤴️

⁴ Emerick, Geoff. Here, There and Everywhere (Page 188). The funny thing is that record players were incapable of reproducing the frequency when the album was initially released and it wasn’t until the album was re-released as a CD in 1995 when our four-legged friends got to enjoy the joke. ⤴️