- Question
- Is Paul McCartney dead?
- Position1 of 3›
- Yes, Paul is dead
Affected by grief and guilt, the remaining Beatles left multiple cryptic clues in their music and album artwork to hint at the truth of what had happened.
The argument
The clues include: On the Sergeant Pepper Album cover: • a mysterious hand is held over the head of McCartney, which symbolises death. • A left-handed guitar lies on the "grave" at the group's feet. • On the back cover of McCartney has his back to the camera and George Harrison's thumb is pointing to the lyric "Wednesday morning at five o'clock" the time he died. • On the centre photo Paul is wearing a black armband. On the cover of the Abbey Road album: • The photo is an allegory of a funeral. Billy/Paul is wearing no shoes as he represents the corpse, Ringo represents an undertaker, John, wearing white, represents God, and George a gravedigger. • The number plate of the Volkswagen Beetle in the photo s LMW 28IF. LMW stands for Linda McCartney weeps or Linda McCartney, widow, and 28IF, 28 if he had lived. In the 1968 song "Glass Onion," Lennon sings "here's another clue for you all - the walrus was Paul.”
Premises
Counter-arguments
Analysing lyrics and album covers for hidden meaning and symbolic interpretation became popular in the 1960’s. Each ‘clue’ can be refuted with facts. For instance, the black armband Billy/Paul is wearing on the Sergeant Pepper cover which supposedly said OPD, meaning Officially Pronounced Dead actually was an Ontario Provincial Police badge. When John Lennon supposedly sang “I buried Paul" at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever, he actually says "cranberry sauce." As for the number plate that declared that Paul would have been 28 if he had lived – Paul would only have been 27 at the time of the photo.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] These 'clues' are easily refutable.