Open your mind son
Clean out your ears son. It's not musical, it may be artsy or something, but it's not a song.
"Not Musical"? Eh? I'm going to have to once again respectfully disagree. I'll give it to you that "Revolution 9" non-melodic, dissonant, and seemingly unstructured, but by your reckoning, ambient, tape-collage and musique concrète should be considered "non-musical." "Revolution 9", as well as works by Negativland, Faust, the Tape-Beatles, Fripp & Eno, and John Cage (4′33″ being a well-known example) all use nonstandard instrumentation or recording techniques and the result is often surprising and discordant (or, in the case of 4'33", almost completely silent), but the works are ultimately unified and illuminating. To me, saying a work like "Revolution 9" isn't musical is like saying birdsong isn't musical, or speech isn't musical, or the outside world isn't musical, and a multitude of musical composers, artists and sound-samplers remind us time and again that that is not the case.
With regards to my claim that "Revolution 9" should be considered a song, I will elaborate:
(1) It is music (by my reckoning above),
(2) It is relatively short (and while it is long by the standards of the Beatles and of the period's popular music in general, it is a pretty standard length for psychedelic and experimental rock music groups),
(3) It is identified in context as a song (ie, it's on an experimental pop record with a bunch of other songs, appears before and after other songs, and is identified on equal terms with other songs)
(4) It really isn't all that "out-there" by any standards of the time except pop music standards
(5) It is convenient to call every Beatles track a "song", as they were by-and-large a song-based pop group
You may disagree with the veracity or relevance of any of these claims, but I claim that any counter-argument that you can give against at least loosely calling "Revolution 9" a song is a matter of semantics-- rather limiting semantics, in my opinion.
