Creativity Quote by George Harrison

A bitter little reversal hides inside Harrison's line: the Beatles weren’t the cause of the 60s cracking open, they were the permission slip. “The world used us” turns mass adoration into something colder and more transactional. Fans, media, even institutions didn’t just chase the band; they grabbed the band’s image as a social alibi, a way to justify behavior that already wanted to erupt. “As an excuse” is the key phrase, stripping the romance out of cultural revolution. It implies preexisting pressure - boredom, postwar conformity, consumer hunger - that needed a glamorous scapegoat to look inevitable rather than chosen.

“Go mad” lands with Harrison’s particular weariness: not psychedelic wonder, but hysteria, projection, and the scary speed at which a symbol stops belonging to the people who made it. In the Beatlemania era, crowds screamed like the band had detonated something in them; by the later 60s, the public demanded not songs but salvation, ideology, drugs, transcendence. The Beatles became a screen onto which everyone could throw their desires and then claim they were being swept along by History.

Harrison’s subtext is self-defense and indictment at once. He’s rejecting the simplistic narrative that pop stars “changed the world” through sheer charisma, while also accusing the world of refusing accountability. The line reads like a survivor’s summary of celebrity: you’re celebrated as a catalyst until it’s time to pay the bill, and then you’re blamed for the chaos you merely made easier to perform.