Do You Recall What was Revealed?
Considered to be the most ambiguous line of the song, “Do you recall what was revealed?” has been subject to many interpretations over the years. One of the most common suggestions is that it refers to “Unfinished Music No. 1 – Two Virgins,” an album released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1968, where they appear naked on the cover. Another interpretation says that the line refers to the Chicago Police Department’s brutality in the context of the 1968 riots at the Democratic National Convention.
Beatle John Lennon (1940 – 1980) and his wife of a week Yoko Ono in their bed in the Presidential Suite of the Hilton Hotel, Amsterdam, 25th March 1969. The couple are staging a ‘bed-in for peace’ and intend to stay in bed for seven days ‘as a protest against war and violence in the world’. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Moreover, in the fall of 1968, the first protest in the Miss America contest history occurred. As the pageant was held in Atlantic City New Jersey, the woman’s liberation movement, which was critical of the Miss America contest’s stereotyping of women as sex symbols, gathered outside the convention center in which the event was held and used a “Freedom Trash Can” to pass wigs, high heels, false eyelashes, and bras to symbolically free women of these sexual stereotypes. With the media mostly paying attention to the discarded bras, the line “Do you recall what was revealed?” may be a reference to these braless protesters, in another rejection of the old attitudes of 1950s America.