Love is all you need: A song of hope.

All You Need is Love, by The Beatles, is for me, the best love song ever.
Not because it's a romantic song, but because it has a message of universal love. The video swirls around The Beatles and there love message. This was the time of Vietnam's War, and very close from the 6-Day War between Israel and the Arab. So let's have this in mind when analyzing the video.
It was written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and released in 1967. It belongs to a branch of rock music called psycodelic rock.

The opening is really interesting: The song starts with The Marseillaise, France's Hymn. There's this historical relation between England and France, this rivalry they've had for years, back to the the beginning of their history. So opening a song about love, playing your "enemies'" hymn, states that love is for everyone, beyond any differences.

The video starts in black and white, panning from the musicians in the orchestra to The Beatles, who are in the middle of all of them. It moves like surrounding them, showing this stage full of people, until the camera focuses on Lennon, and then, when he starts singing, colour fills the screen, from his face, out.

The setting is full of people, other than the musicians. There are also flowers, balloons, and some people have signs about love in different languages. The Beatles themselves are very colorful, in contrast with the other musicians who wear the regular clothes the other musicians from the orchestra are wearing.

At the end, it's like a party where everybody choruses The Beatles and there is more colour, balloons and the people marching around them with happiness. Something else that is really amazing is that those people sitting there with them, singing the chorus, were people from the studio, and friends, including Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Keith Moon (who also played the drums), Graham Nash and Eric Clapton. 

Part from the studio. Love is everywhere, literally.

It's also interesting to point out that at the song's ending we can listen to pieces of other famous songs like: a part from Johannes Sebastian Bach's Invention nº8, Greensleeves, In the Mood by Glenn Miller (the sax), She Loves You (The Beatles), Yesterday (just the word, spoken by Lennon), and the March of Denmark's Prince. It's amazing how they could mix all these elements, all this music and make it into such an incredible work of art.

This song could have many readings because one can understand it from love as a romantic feeling, and also as this powerful message that love is all we need to live in harmony, to make our world a better place to live.
It's not that hard to make things right, starting from us, and then the world. In Lennon's words: It's easy!

I think this song, and well mostly every piece of music about peace & love from The Beatles and John Lennon, is still current because the world hasn't changed that much since. We actually have more tools to make a change, to know what is actually happening at other places, but most people won't do more than sharing a picture on Facebook, which doesn't change things either.