Roundabout and the Uroboros Motif

Yes is a musical supernova. For more than forty years the British progressive rock stars that constitute Yes have brightened the musical horizons with their eclectic compositions. Yes music can be explosive, heavenly, really far-out, but Yes music is also like the North Star which guides wayward travelers home.

Why rhapsodize about Yes music? Compositions like Close to the Edge, Ritual, Machine Messiah, The Gates of Delirium, Fly From Here, and Roundabout are ambitious pieces of music which exhibit “structure and vision” in the words of the philosopher Bill Martin.

Martin was the first philosopher to grapple with Yes music in a serious way. He recognized what many fans intuited; namely, that Yes music deals with some weighty issues, often in a profound way.

Yes’ lyrics are renowned for being cryptic and mystical, which has led many critics to dismiss the band’s work as pretentious and rationally unintelligible. What exactly is a Roundabout, after all?

Anderson has claimed that lyrics to the band’s signature track were inspired by a traffic roundabout he encountered on the way the recording studio. But Jon is too much of a poet for this rather pedestrian interpretation to suffice. As it happens, there is a lot going on in the song to suggest that the term “roundabout” refers to a cosmic process symbolized by the mythical Uroboros, the snake that consumes its own tail.

The Uroboros is one of the most potent images in the mythic imagination. Artwork and jewelry depicting the Uroboros date to earliest antiquity. Descriptions of the Uroboros appear in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Plato’s philosophy, and in the Hindu Upanishads. The Uroboros was a frequently used motif in alchemy; the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung believed the Uroboros symbolically represented the psyche; and the chemist Kekule dreamt of a Uroboros shortly before discovering that the structure of the benzene molecule resembled a snake eating its own tail!

Yes fans, of course, are familiar with the Uroboros motif; Roger Dean’s Yes logo endlessly feeds into itself just as the mythical Uroboros does. You can see this most explicitly with Dean’s Yes logo on the inner booklet on the Fly From Here album, where the Yes logo is depicted as a snake consuming itself. But the motif actually crops up a lot in Yes’ work. For instance, Chris Squire’s phase-delayed bass in Roundabout seems to double back on itself, like a snake eating it own tail. And Roundabout is a song that explicitly comes full circle: the ending recapitulates with the same acoustic guitar motif that began the song.

What is the significance of the Uroboros motif and the song Roundabout? To learn more check out my e-book “Yes and Philosophy: the Spiritual and Philosophical Dimensions of Yes Music.”