Here, I would like to vent my spleen about John Lennon.
Yes. That John Lennon. The idealist, the rebel, the genius, the Voice of a Generation ™, the iconoclast, the Messiah, the poet, the artist, the philosopher, the astronaut, the horse-whisperer, the Klingon and whatever else you’re having. That John Lennon.
The Beatles are a sort of conundrum. They were a boy band. Examine any of their song titles or lyrics, and that fact becomes abundantly clear. Yet the same critics and music obsessives who never miss an opportunity to tear strips off the likes of N*Sync, Boyzone, Take That and all the others will go weak at the knees upon hearing a Beatles tune. Why? Well, the main reason seems to be that they were the first to do it, and for that they are afforded a kind of respect. But at the end of the day, they were still a bloody boy band, despite all their later protests to the contrary.
Ringo Starr is the only Beatle deserving of any kudos in this regard – he knew that the whole enterprise was little more than stupid, fluffy fun for teenagers with a disposable income, and the songs he wrote reflect this understanding. While Paul McCartney was writing painfully earnest shite such as “Let It Be,” George Harrison was indulging in Indian mysticism and Lennon was enthralling the gullible with his fiery intellect, Ringo Starr was creating innocent, catchy pap such as “Yellow Submarine,” not suffering from any of the delusions his bandmates were labouring under.
The Indian mysticism has often been interpreted as a reaction against Western capitalism, the Beatles enacting their generation’s search for some transcendent truth. Looked at objectively, however, their spiritual awakening was no more genuine than the celebrity Kabbala craze that took hold a number of years ago, and it was just as insulting.
Following the break-up of the Beatles, Lennon realised that being remembered as a Beatle for all time was pretty fucking embarrassing. This, combined with his growing anger at the others for not accepting Yoko Ono into their circle, seems to have driven him to construct his solo identity in terms of extreme opposition to all he was before.
Except he didn’t. Listen to “Imagine,” and you’ll hear the same airy-fairy boy band nonsense dressed up in playschool-level socialist rhetoric. Lennon was the kind of ‘activist’ for whom it is more important to be seen to be an activist, and to have others believe that you hold radical beliefs, than to actually do anything constructive. For example, take the “bed-ins,” where John and Yoko stayed in bed for seven days for peace.
If you seriously believe that Lennon and Yoko were intelligent people, then the only way to interpret this 1969 episode is as a bad joke. Reading interviews with Lennon from the time, however, one is struck by the sincerity of his belief that by staying in bed, they would change the world.
Lennon the Activist had obviously never heard the maxim that ‘pacifism is not the same as doing nothing.’ It takes a sizeable amount of arrogance to not only do nothing, but to parade your inactivity before the world. Remember, 1969 was the year of the Tate-LaBianca murders and the violence at Altamont, the year that marked the end of the utopian hippy dream with bloodshed and madness. A more honest response from Lennon and Yoko would have been to hide under that fucking bed, not lie in it.
Then of course, there’s other things about the Great One that are irritating in the extreme. Take “Come Together,” the tune that Electronic Arts used to advertise the Beatles: Rock Band game. It was ripped off of Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me.” And no, it wasn’t an innocent mistake, either. When confronted on the issue by a music journo, Lennon responded by saying, “We resurrected him!” The kind of lame excuse you might expect from a child caught red-handed with his hand in the cookie jar.
It’s obvious, too, what he meant when he sang, “Woman Is the Nigger of the World.” It makes a forceful point, except that the dude who wrote and sang it was a white man. Lennon comes across like the male feminists you overhear in Bohemian cafes, beaming as they tell their understandably nonplussed female comrades, “I believe in total liberation for women! It’s time that women had an equal share in the world! Now, what you gals should do is…” His pseudo-feminism is all the more laughable considering the resurgence of his old boy-band drivel in ditties like “Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him,” and “Jealous Guy” – the anthem of creepy, self-important teenage stalkers everywhere. His actual opinion of women is on display in “Woman,” where he praises them for their role as long-suffering mothers for ‘the child inside of man.’
This ties into another one of his singles, “Mother.” The song is transparently about the pain he felt about being ‘abandoned’ by his mother (fact: she was actually killed by a drunk driver) and his father walking out on the family. The end refrain goes, “Mama don’t go; Daddy come home.” He recorded this song seven years after the birth of his son Julian, about whom Lennon the man-child once said, “He came out of a whiskey bottle on a Saturday night.” At this point, Lennon obviously wasn’t prepared to give up being a child in order to be a father.
I’m going to lay off here. I would say I could go on forever about this, but I can’t. The longer I spend talking about this tissue-paper damagogue, the sicker I feel. Suffice it to say I’m not partial to the man’s music, and I remain unconvinced of his status as a witty, spiritual, “Working Class Hero.”
