- 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
Proponents of the theory that Paul McCartney died and was replaced argue that the surviving Beatles signalled the fact in their album artwork and lyrics, and they assemble a set of details they read as deliberate. Nothing has ever established that any of these details was intended as a clue, and each has ordinary explanations; the case rests entirely on the accumulation of readings offered by people who already accept the premise. On the Sergeant Pepper album cover, proponents point to a mysterious hand held over the head of McCartney, which they take to symbolise death, and to a left-handed guitar lying on the "grave" at the group's feet. On the back cover, they note, McCartney has his back to the camera while George Harrison's thumb points to the lyric "Wednesday morning at five o'clock", said to be the time he died. In the centre photo, they observe, Paul is wearing a black armband. The Abbey Road cover is read as an allegory of a funeral: on this account Billy, or Paul, is wearing no shoes because 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, LMW 28IF, is glossed as "Linda McCartney weeps", or Linda McCartney, widow, with 28IF read as twenty-eight if he had lived. Proponents add a lyric to the list as well: 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.