{"id":1047,"date":"2019-03-11T15:32:18","date_gmt":"2019-03-11T15:32:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsm.prolerat.org\/?page_id=1047"},"modified":"2019-10-21T16:05:16","modified_gmt":"2019-10-21T15:05:16","slug":"imagine-by-john-lennon","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/imagine-by-john-lennon\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Imagine’ by John Lennon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
March 2002, U.S.A.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
 Many members of the World Socialist Movement have considered John  Lennon\u2019s song Imagine an anthem of universal hope.  In few other songs,  and perhaps in no song that reached as wide an audience as that one, is  the socialist vision so accurately and movingly conveyed.  It was  originally featured on the 1971 album \u201cImagine,\u201d and made the top of the  charts in England no less than 3 times (its first release as a single,  1975; in 1981 following Lennon\u2019s death in 1980 (when it shot up to  number 1 for several weeks); and again during the Christmas season in  1999, after it had been voted the nation\u2019s favorite song lyric and  second favorite all-time song in a large best-music-of-the-millennium  poll.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Imagine is a humanistic song par excellence, denying humans the place\n they often accord themselves in the spiritual universe, and instead \nrelegating them to their material and exquisitely beautiful home of \nEarth.  This Lennon does to urge his fellow men and women to unite in \ncreating a world fit to live upon, one without countries, war, religion,\n or private property.  Sharing this world together as a true \n\u201cbrotherhood of man,\u201d some in the World Socialist Movement have wondered\n if he wrote this song after reading a copy of the Socialist Standard, \nwhich is not impossible considering his extensive reading of radical \njournals following the demise of the Beatles, although it is not known \nif he actually read the Standard, a journal that has also been \nadvocating a nationless, classless, moneyless society of common \nownership since 1904. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Beatles, a band he not only founded (along with Paul McCartney) \nbut also named, was a group whose fame and meaning he often felt \nuncomfortable about.  It was after all Lennon who also brought the \nBeatles to a close by telling the other members he was planning to \nleave, prior to the release of his \u201cInstant Karma\u201d single.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The story of John Lennon is one much closer in spirit to what would \nbe termed punk rock than to traditional pop.  First of all, the way John\n Lennon and thousands of other youth embraced skiffle in England, is \nreminiscent of the way punk bands exploded in the 1970s often similarly \nwithout knowing how to play an instrument!  Secondly, John Lennon\u2019s \nfamous antics on the stage while the Beatles played in Germany included \nmocking the Nazis\u2019 salute and wearing a toilet seat around his neck.  \nSuch attempts to shock are often associated with the later punk era.  \nIndeed, one of John Lennon\u2019s youthful pranks had been to urinate from \nthe rooftop of a Liverpool church upon nuns passing below.  Thirdly, the\n early Beatles\u2019 scruffy Teddy Boy leather and T-shirt look was also much\n closer to the attire of the rebellious and radical punk musicians of \nthe 1970s than their later cleaner moptop image dressed in capitalist \nbusiness attire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
 John Lennon\u2019s anger and sense of the absurd was of course expressed \nin his acerbic lyrics.  Interestingly, his later political self only \nappears as a logical extension of his former pre-Beatles and early \nBeatles self if we do not consider his brief 9 years as a famous Beatle.\n  It is true that traces of his rebelliousness were often found in his \nBeatles interviews, and his statement that the Beatles had become more \nfamous than Christ was a rare albeit unwitting use of his fame to upset \nthe status quo that would probably not be rivaled until the Sex Pistols \nstarting swearing on British national television a dozen years later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One could argue, then, rather successfully, that John Lennon\u2019s \nBeatles spell, while it of course contributed enormously in melody and \nmarketing to pop music in the 20th Century, was a sort of \u201cselling out\u201d \nand a turning away from his enormously creative potential and in \nparticular from his genuine, political and critical nature.  Beatles \nfans might take exception to that statement.  But imagine if a \ncontemporary grunge band like Nirvana of the 1990s for example had \nabandoned their aggressive look and musical style in favor of suits and \nshort hair and singing pretty love songs guaranteed to win them a larger\n if not international audience, as well as to earn them favor with the \nroyal family, in short, a similar \u201ccuddly\u201d look as the Beatles opted for\n in 1962?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first time you hear John Lennon on a Beatles album (\u201cPlease \nPlease Me,\u201d their first) in 1963 is interestingly titled \u201cMisery,\u201d and \nbegins \u201cThe world is treating me bad.\u201d  Indeed, Lennon often threw these\n little lyrical bombs from his true self into otherwise pop-perfect gems\n that echoed the musical sensibilities of American pop (Beach Boys, \nBuddy Holly, Motown).  Perhaps Lennon enjoyed using his songs, as he had\n the world around him, as an opportunity to put a foot in, or, as a \ntitle of a book he was to write a few years later suggests, a spanner in\n the works (in a pun that ended up actually being \u201cSpaniard In The \nWorks\u201d). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those lyrical contributions contrasted sharply with the oftentimes \ndrippier McCartney lyrics, in which love songs (as the Beatles mostly \nsung) were more banal expositions of the heart.  While all Beatles songs\n were attributed to the Lennon-McCartney partnership, such a thesis is \nsupported by how after the Beatles split, the Lennon songs immediately \n(beginning that very year of 1970) began exploring profoundly political,\n psychological and existential themes, while McCartney\u2019s solo work has \nmainly continued to delve into the nostalgic and romantic, and is for \nthe most part either far less interesting to analyze and far too boring \nto listen to, with the possible exceptions of such few lone political \nstatements as \u201cGive Ireland Back To The Irish.\u201d  On the LP \u201cPlease \nPlease Me,\u201d \u201cMisery\u201d contrasted with \u201cLove Me Do\u201d and \u201cP.S. I Love You\u201d \non the very same album.   Even on the more traditional love song, \u201cAsk \nMe Why,\u201d Lennon sings: \u201cIf I cry, it\u2019s not because I\u2019m sad, but you\u2019re \nthe only love I\u2019ve ever had.  I can\u2019t believe it\u2019s happened to me, I \ncan\u2019t conceive of any more misery.\u201d  Thus even on that song in which the\n object of his affection has been won over, Lennon sings from his dark \nside as the Everyman who is amazed that he found love, or is himself \nloved, while an uncertain cloud of doubt and pain hangs over the lover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The common perception that Lennon sang the more biting lyrics is \ngenerally borne out by analyzing them, and since it is apparently true \nthat McCartney and Lennon each tended to sing the songs they contributed\n to the most as writers, one can only assume that Lennon\u2019s struggling \nspirit was largely responsible for investing that struggle and \ndiscomfort more profusely into his own lyrical creations, and hence into\n the Beatles repertoire itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The songs Lennon crafted for \u201cWith The Beatles\u201d (1963) were all love \nsongs, and this was generally true on all the early LPs.  In the 1964 \nalbum \u201cHard Days Night,\u201d (hands down the classic early Beatles album) \nJohn states in the title song that he has been \u201cworking like a dog,\u201d an \nall too brief reference in a Beatles song to our working lives, although\n in this song the woman\u2019s love makes him \u201cfeel okay.\u201d  In the song \n\u201cHelp!\u201d from the 1965 album of the same name, John appears to be \ndescribing his own pain in the Beatles, with his independence lost and \nhis insecurity mounting, and his need for someone to soothe him and \npoint him in a different direction (interestingly, as Yoko Ono was \napparently to have precisely that positive effect he was seeking in a \nrelationship).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNowhere Man\u201d on \u201cRubber Soul\u201d (1965) is similarly a song about \nalienation, although it does not place it in the world of work or power,\n yet admonishes those who allow themselves to be so invisible for losing\n themselves thus and for their passivity, and urges them (and indeed all\n of us, \u201cisn\u2019t he a lot like you and me?\u201d) to take more control of the \nworld around them.  In \u201cI\u2019m Only Sleeping\u201d from \u201cRevolver\u201d (1966), \nLennon again discusses our rushed lives and his unashamed laziness (and \nsocialists do promote the \u201cright to be lazy,\u201d in contradistinction with \nthe capitalist \u201cright to work\u201d).   On the albums \u201cSgt. Pepper\u201d and \n\u201cMagical Mystery Tour\u201d (both 1967), John Lennon\u2019s lyrics began to turn \nincreasingly surreal (\u201cI Am The Walrus\u201d), as they are influenced by \ndrugs, Eastern culture, and an obvious personal liberation reflected in \nthe liberation of his artistic expression.  \u201cRevolution\u201d on the \u201cWhite \nAlbum\u201d (1968) is the first overtly political Lennon song, often \nmisunderstood as being either apolitical or conservative, but rather a \ncritique of the especially Maoist and other fringe leftist groups of his\n time who advocated a revolution that only \u201ctalks about destruction.\u201d  \nSuccessful revolution, after all, is not only about destroying an old \norder, but also about building a new one.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Already, Yoko Ono\u2019s influence is felt in his music and in his \nactions.  While Yoko Ono is often portrayed as a negative influence upon\n his life, a study of that period would seem to suggest the opposite, \nthat indeed she provided the intellectual, political and aesthetic \ninfluence and permission he needed to flower to the fullness of his \ncreative potential.  After he met her, his songs began to really take on\n the inner world of his painful feelings that he endured as a child who \nlost his mother, and as a genius perhaps hampered by the Beatles, and \nthe outer world we must all endure.  Indeed, even while the Beatles were\n still together, he had released with Yoko Ono three experimental albums\n (the two \u201cUnfinished Music\u201d albums, and the \u201cWedding Album,\u201d all from \n1968 and 1969).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As soon as the Beatles were history, John Lennon began to make \nhistory with his painfully honest and political songs.  The 1970 \u201cJohn \nLennon\/Plastic Ono Band\u201d album was a case in point.  Besides the two \nsongs exploring the loss of his mother, and one of the two most \nbeautiful melodies to be found on any Beatles or non-Beatles record, \n\u201cLove\u201d (the other was \u201cOh My Love\u201d on \u201cImagine\u201d), this album began to \nexplore humanistic and political themes big time.  Lennon\u2019s \nunderstanding that he dwells in a godless universe is revealed in \ndifferent places.  For example, in \u201cI Found Out,\u201d he stated: \u201cThere \nain’t no Jesus gonna come from the sky,\u201d and in the song \u201cGod\u201d he goes \none further: \u201cGod is a concept by which we measure our pain,\u201d a \nFeuerbachian and Marxian rooting of God in human psychology and material\n culture.  The song \u201cWorking Class Hero\u201d is a classic exposition of the \nhumiliation of being a worker in such settings as home, school, and \nwork.  John Lennon, though himself a millionaire many times over, has \nnonetheless here identified with the plight of working masses and \nhimself arrived at full class consciousness when he sings that:  \n\u201cThere’s room at the top they are telling you still, but first you must \nlearn how to smile as you kill, if you want to be like the folks on the \nhill.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was the \u201cImagine\u201d album from 1971 that contained the title song, \nselected by Citizens of the World as its official anthem.  Other \npolitical songs of note were \u201cI Don\u2019t Want To Be A Soldier\u201d (\u201cI don\u2019t \nwanna die\u201d), and \u201cGive Me Some Truth\u201d (\u201cI’ve had enough of reading \nthings by neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians, all I want is the\n truth now\u201d). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
John Lennon\u2019s most overtly political album was side one of the 1972 \n\u201cSome Time In New York City\u201d (side two was extracts from a concert with \nFrank Zappa).  On this album, John penned the famous feminist statement \n\u201cWoman Is The Nigger Of The World\u201d (\u201cWe make her bear and raise our \nchildren, and then we leave her flat for being a fat old mother hen.  We\n tell her home is the only place she should be, then we complain that \nshe’s too unworldly to be our friend\u201d).  Lennon asks us to \u201cthink about \nit, do something about it.\u201d  The next song \u201cSisters O Sisters\u201d by Yoko \nOno is another feminist song calling on her human sisters to build a new\n world because \u201cwe lost our green land, we lost our clean air.\u201d  Song \nthree, \u201cAttica State,\u201d is an anti-prison, pro-freedom song urging us to \n\u201cfree the prisoners, jail the judges, free all prisoners everywhere, all\n they want is truth and justice, all they need is love and care.\u201d  \n\u201cSunday Bloody Sunday\u201d and \u201cThe Luck Of The Irish\u201d deride British rule \n(\u201cYou should have the luck of the Irish, and you’d wish you was English \ninstead!\u201d).  Finally, John and Yoko both contributed songs about \nprisoners John Sinclair (sentenced to 10 years for selling marijuana to \nan undercover police officer) and Angela Davis, black activist.  This \nwas not a musically strong album for the man who had once penned the \nmelody of \u201cStrawberry Fields Forever,\u201d but it allowed Lennon to devote \nan album to the news of the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Speculations have abounded as to why John Lennon was assassinated.  \nKlint Finley (as reported on the website www.technocult.net in February \n2002) quoted Lennon\u2019s son Sean as stating: \u201cAnybody who thinks that Mark\n Chapman was just some crazy guy who killed my dad for his personal \ninterests, is insane. Or very naive. Or hasn’t thought about it clearly.\n It was in the best interests of the United States to have my dad \nkilled. Definitely.”  Several conspiracy as well as \u201clone nut\u201d theories \nare advanced.  The conspiracy theories advance the hypotheses that John \nLennon was viewed as a national security threat on several occasions, \nfor Nixon and later for the new president Reagan.  Several documented \nFBI instances of surveillance of John Lennon and trumped up arrests in \nthe 1970s are used to back up the theory.  It is of course true that \nJohn Lennon was a major national figure who was involved publically in \ndiverse radical political causes, including supporting the IRA, a \nTrotskyist group, and the causes of various prisoners, at different \ntimes.  There is also considerable support for the \u201clone nut\u201d theory as \nMark Chapman had been receiving treatment for paranoid schizophrenia for\n his entire life since childhood, as well as had entertained numerous \ndelusions about John Lennon and Todd Rundgren as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So what if Mark Chapman had not actually been a \u201cManchurian \nCandidate\u201d for a secret group of governmental officials?  The greater \nlikelihood is that John Lennon and the other Beatles came on the heels \nof the post-war and Cold War spectacle begun by Kennedy of Camelot, in \nwhich Americans stood unified behind a President mystically and \nmythically conceived as from the ranks, facing the glorious future he \npromised rife with social programs.  The Beatles arrived as the nation \nwas mourning the loss of more than a man but of his and now their \ndreams, and indeed one might say helped to soothe their loss, divert \nfrom them as only the power of the Spectacle can.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Following Kennedy\u2019s assassination, it was John Lennon in particular \nwho stood as the most visible and most vocal opponent of this unified \nland.  He had been the archangel of the new society and now had become \nthe archenemy, whose records were being burned by Christians for his \nstatement about Christ and later who supported the various forces of \nopposition and apparent destruction.  For a young man (Chapman) already \nsuffering from paranoid delusions, John Lennon may have presented \nhimself as the obvious symbol of the historical split within his world, \nand of course it may be that all paranoid delusions represent \nprojections of the split within the sufferer\u2019s mind, projections of \nanger about vulnerability that is externalized upon evil others, and so \nkept from personal accountability. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is truth in all paranoid delusions.  For example, John Lennon \nwas in fact both the prime creator of pop music and its greatest critic.\n  He elevated it to dimensions that even dwarfed Elvis and helped to \ntear it apart.  He became a public figure with whom millions identified,\n yet he also alienated millions.  He turned the rock star into a figure \nthat expressed the words and feelings of a generation and so became at \nonce its figurehead and target, its liberator and its curse.  Once he \nhad entered into the homes of a hundred million young people, as the \nvery symbol of the spectacle of the new media, he also dragged in with \nhim in the parents\u2019 heretofore safe houses the generation gap, the \nantiwar movement, and the \u201ccommunist menace.\u201d  John Lennon embodied more\n than anybody the very dialectic of the 1960s \u2013 the tension between \nliberalism and freedom to exploit on the one hand, and anti-capitalism \nand freedom from exploitation on the other, between America\u2019s pleasure \nprinciple (exemplified by the Beatles) and its reality principle (the \nworld of false information, impossible wealth, and even more impossible \npower), between music as entertainment and music as the chorus for the \nrevolution. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is surely no coincidence that at the advent of the Reagan era, \nthat was perhaps more than any other to silence its massacres abroad and\n its perceived aesthetic and political excesses at home, liberties were \nto be taken with the hand that had helped to send its house of cards \ntumbling down.  It often takes the mad to see the madness around them \nwith acute hypervigilance.  Yes, Mark Chapman was most probably mad, but\n his assassination of John Lennon expressed unwittingly a social wish \nfor the assassination of others like Lennon (some successful, others \nonly in fantasy).  It is therefore easy to fall prey to a (often false) \nconspiracy theory these days, as the ruling class conspires daily to \nprotect its domain, and the working class does not yet conspire in \nnumbers greater than a few thousands here and there to undermine it.  \nJohn Lennon was the perfect target, in many ways, even if his murder was\n not a concerted effort by the powers to be to be rid of him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What he left behind was the utopian imagination we all share that still exists in a million brains refusing to be silenced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cImagine,\u201d the song, was unquestionably Lennon\u2019s finest moment.  Its \nlyrical and conceptual clarity shone sunlight of vision upon our dark \nand violent world.  It urged us to imagine a world without property, \nwithout religion, without nations, living in peace.  It postulated an \neconomic order in which both greed and hunger would be impossible.  \nSocialists also share this vision.  They support the cause that \napproaches humanity towards the goal of a classless economic order in \nwhich wage labor, money and buying and selling have been replaced by \nfree people working together to meet their needs without the constraints\n imposed by the market system, in short a world of peace, equality, \nabundance and ecological sustainability.  You may think that we are \ndreamers, but we are not the only ones.  I hope some day you\u2019ll join us.\n  And the world will live as one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
Back to the Society and Culture index<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
March 2002, U.S.A. Many members of the World Socialist Movement have considered John Lennon\u2019s song Imagine an anthem of universal hope. In few other songs, and perhaps in no song that reached as wide an audience as that one, is the socialist vision so accurately and movingly conveyed. It was originally featured on the 1971…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2088,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"magazine_newspaper_sidebar_layout":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1047","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1047"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2688,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1047\/revisions\/2688"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}