JOHN LENNON – “Imagine”
“John Lennon’s life was no longer a debate” – in a song which has a good claim to be the stupidest lyric ever recorded, this is a glimpse of insight. Lennon’s murder didn’t turn him into an icon – he was one anyway – but it froze his iconicity into a certain pattern: troubled genius, artist, lover and man of peace. The perfect demonstration of this was the release of Albert Goldman’s Lennon biography, which aroused raving outrage simply by detailing the numerous ways in which Lennon was a perfectly typical 60s and 70s rock star. There was more to him than that, but there’s more to him than “Imagine” too.
Not that you’d know it sometimes. In yesterday’s Guardian Yoko Ono delighted us with some ‘celebrity wrapping paper’ – a sheet of newspaper on which she’d had printed the words “IMAGINE PEACE”, translated into the languages of many nations. What it instantly reminded me of were the ads produced by big global companies – like BA and McDonalds – in which their taglines appear in a similar polyglot style. It helped make concrete what Lennon has become, if not the walking foaming debate he’d sometimes been when alive: a brand. Ono’s directive Fluxus pieces still seem sharp and ahead of their time because they’ve come to look like a prior response to the aphoristic emptiness of the business advice and self-help industries: most of the stuff in Grapefruit would fit nicely on Twitter. But as the wrap demonstrates, she’s since met those trends more than halfway. And what are the Lennon Brand’s values, its products, its mission statement? “Imagine Peace”. “Imagine”. Peace. (The former has generally been a bigger seller than the latter).
Lennon hasn’t had it all his own way critically: I am hardly the first writer to dislike “Imagine”. In fact the laurels on the comment thread are likely to go to anyone who can make a really good case for its beauty, wisdom or excellence. But in general – to Sir Macca’s increasingly public dudgeon – he’s been ensconced as the Beatle Who Mattered; the artist, the poet, the rocker, the experimenter. And the public popularity of this song at least is truly unshakable – in any poll of the top number ones, or the top songs ever, there it is.
“Imagine” is a Fluxus piece for primary schools – “it’s easy if you try” says Teacher John, as if he’s telling us how to make a potato print. Presumably its profundity and simplicity are a big reason for its popularity, but there’s a My First Koan feel to the lyrics and performance which turns these qualities into dodges: if you think too hard about the words you’re not doing it right. And in a way it does feel cheap to pick “Imagine” apart, as despite all appearances I’m not sure it’s meant as a philosophical statement – though again, since December 1980, that’s what it’s become.
So what is good about it? It’s instantly memorable and sincerely performed, and if you’re charitable you can see slyness in a song that begins “Imagine there’s no heaven” but is so obviously trying for hymnal qualities. But that doesn’t get past how grimly tedious it is to listen to, or excuse the infuriating sanctimony in Lennon’s voice when he sings “I wonder if you can”. That line’s a tell if ever I heard one: Lennon can’t quite shake off his competitive streak, his acerbic edge. The song isn’t a program, it’s a fantasy of all Lennon’s personal sources of conflict – religion, money, national borders – being magically removed. It is – and sounds – a really supine, passive song: peace is a function of obstacles being waved away, making the singer a better person.
In 1971 it shared album space with the vastly more entertaining intra-Beatle bitchfest “How Do You Sleep?”, a sign that Lennon was either a colossal hypocrite or that he was well aware that “Imagine” was one dream-version of his cantankerous self. On that record it’s still not good, but it is what it is – another facet or mood of its writer. Taken to represent the whole of him, it’s a fraud. Taken to represent the whole of Pop – well, you might as well list the Top 100 Jokes Of All Time and put “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” at the summit.
2
yeah lennon is pretty much the posterchild for fakeout authenticity-outflanking moves — cf rosie’s point above about “working class hero” — AND someone who (when in a world-famous pop group) took more subtle care with lyrics that was then the norm, and would have LOVED non-real-world over-analysis, even as he pulled all kinds of stunts to mock it (tho actually i think post-beatles post-paul-as-co-author opted for a more bash-it-out deliberately less subtle approach) AND someone who genuinely cared about whether or not he was an Important Artist (even when constantly changing his mind about which he was, yes or no!)
the LP before imagine isn’t just radically and self-consciously autobiographical, it actually consists of his therapy* sessions turned into songs!! (i like it more than tom does, but it set a pretty dreadful precedent in rock
*type of therapy = primal scream = uh oh x one trillion
i hadn’t thought of “yoko wrote these words”; but her naivety is a high-art top-down move if ever there was one — which she sometimes pulls off
in fact, to go a bit further, there’s a case for the argument that lennon’s famous very long* postbeatles interview with jan wenner in rolling stone in (i think) 1970 pretty much laid the ground-rules for what would (a lot later) come to be called rockism — rock-writing was still relatively new and unformed in the US (didn’t exist barely at all in the UK outside places like Oz magazine), and Lennon was able to set up a canon of past pop quality and a canon of value, as part of his escape project from the already burdensome legacy of the group he’d been in, which not that many people thought to challenge for quite a long time
I’d rate this slightly above ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, slightly more above ‘Stairway To Heaven’, and a smidgen even more above ‘Baker Street’.
That’s right, isn’t it?
BUT SERIOUSLY, it’s one o’ them innit? One for the canon, which is exactly what erodes any affection you may have had for the song in the first place. I mean, it’s very immediate and simple to get a handle on – those are pluses – but mawkish and, ultimately, empty. I prefer his next No.1, which probably makes me Sean Rowley.
I like Plastic Ono and “Mother” is one of my favourite songs of his – although I can easily see how one might hate it. Yes, the precedent-setting soul-baring album etc., but is that soul-baring really such a play for authenticity, or just another move… after all, as someone mentioned above, he told Elton that Imagine was “just a song”. I think what’s going on with Plastic Ono, and Lennon in general, is quite ambiguous in that regard. On the one hand, his angst is real, on the other hand, it’s also an art-rock pose. He’s oscillating between the two positions without really putting his foot in either camp. (Maybe that’s why Bowie was so attracted to him.)
i’m not clear the distinction you’re making, h — yes it’s “another move”, and yes it’s an outflanking play for authenticity: does he believe in authenticity of the authenticity himself? yes, some of the time he does
(one of the arguments that ian macdonald makes is that this was risky and toxic stuff to be playing with, this far out into global mass popularity — and while i don’t think macdonald’s overall political-philosophical analysis is either insightful or interesting, there is the fact that lennon was assassinated by a confused and disappointed fan: if you played these same kinds of is-it-isn’t-it games with a child’s or a lover’s affections, you’d rightly i think be called a manipulative and abusive jerk) (which doesn’t make him any less intersting and complex as an overall figure)
Yes, I’ll go along with Lennon being manipulative and a jerk, and yet still a fascinating artist!
I guess the point I was trying to make was in response to Tom@74, who intimated that it was OK to call Lennon out on his phoniness because he more or less invented the soul-baring rock album genre. And I just wanted to say that Plastic One is not really straighforward soul-baring, that Lennon is still striking a pose even as he is supposedly baring his soul, and that’s an ambiguity I kind of like…
Re 74: “Lennon is a slightly special case in that he pretty much laid the marker down for lyrics-as-soul-baring-art”.
Plastic Ono Band is far too much “hear my pain” for me to take seriously, and my favourite albums have a high proportion of breakdowns and comedowns (Pet Sounds, Big Star’s Sister Lovers, Velvet Underground’s 3rd, Pet Shop Boys’ Behaviour, Britney’s Blackout). Which leads me to think of POB, as it doesn’t touch me at all, as entirely phoney and show-off. Ditto Lou Reed’s Berlin.
A girl once told me that living without me was like a George Harrison solo record, fine but not enough. It was maybe the greatest compliment I’ve ever been paid. But if she’d said life without me was like Plastic Ono Band, I’d have yawned.
i guess the point is that to explore the ambiguity properly, you have to have a handle on how it would work if it WEREN’T merely pose — in other words you have to take the authenticity move seriously before you can pick it apart (properly) as an art move
#82 Fair enough – I think in the actual review I do make it clear that “Imagine” in Imagine context – as one of Lennon’s many angles on himself (posed or otherwise) – isn’t as bad as “Imagine” in this context, where its seriousness is kind of assumed.
I am actually a big ‘lyrics person’ – I don’t always notice them but I do a lot, probably because I tend to zero in so much on the voice and performance when I’m listening to a song. I’m in the poptimist wing that says “good lyrics means ‘No Limits’ as well as ‘Like A Rolling Stone’” not “lyrics don’t matter”.
Re #83
At least she didn’t say that life with you was like the Plastic Ono Band album.
John Cooper Clarke: “Life with you is like a fairytale… Grimm.”
83, brilliant, but she can’t have been referring to “All Things Must pass” which is more than enough already
59, an arpeggio could be 3 or 4 notes (or more), its the individual notes forming the chord which are played in sequence, so rather than strumming a chord on the guitar you pluck the individual strings – say the coda on I want you she’so heavy (since we’re talking lennon).
I often don’t go too heavily into lyrical analysis, partly because I often find following the lyric gets in the way of the overall effect of hearing the song.
also, because so many lyrics are arrived in a roundabout, contrived way to scan or fit a rhyme (shake and cough as someone pointed out on the sting/don’t stand so close to me discussion – there is no way Sting set out to wrote ‘cough’ until he had his nabakov moment)
i do however really appreciate reading some of the analysis and interpretation of the lyrics on here…and it’s great to get new perspectives on songs you’ve heard many times before
Re 89: By instinct I’m not so into lyrics, not least because I struggle to make them out, which surprises lazy people who go “you read lots of books, you also really like music, therefore you must spend lots of time analysing lyrics”*. But I don’t think you can truly avoid them with a big statement song and this is undoubtedly a BIG STATEMENT SONG.
*I have, however, encountered a improbable number of Dylan/Costello/Magnetic Fields fans who really do treat rock as a literary form.
Imagine = Anarchy , def : A theoretical social state in which there is no governing person or body of persons, but each individual has absolute liberty (without the implication of disorder).”[2]
Plastic Ono Band is the one Lennon solo thing to which I always come back – the sound of bridges being burned (“The dream is over”) is rather thrilling when the singer built those bridges in the first place (“Don’t believe in Beatles”).
I have a theory that whenever artists release these kind of weight off chest songs, where as much soul as they are prepared to expose to us is revealed, then everything that they release subsequently tends to feel like an appendix. Cases in point other than Plastic Ono Band;
Pet Shop Boys: Very
Morrissey: Vauxhall & I
The Divine Comedy: Too Young To Die
There are probably others to support this theory.
Re 92: How intreeging. I always think of Very as a panicked, commercially-slanted appendix to the reflective but low-selling Behaviour. Which possibly means I haven’t listened too closely to the lyrics on Very.
But, yes. Alex Chilton’s career after Sister Lovers has been one long, rambling afterthought. Some might say the same about Pet Sounds (which is, generally, Brian Wilson’s bridge-burning exercise, away from the other Beach Boys and their musical past).
Imagine (the album) doesn’t feel like an appendix to me – as Lord Tarkus says Oh My Love is incandescently gorgeous, and most of the album easily trumps POB’s cold turkey. I’d say it relates to Plastic Ono Band much as Ram relates to McCartney (the album): got that bunch of demos and “this is the real me and I really don’t need the others!” stuff off my chest, now for a proper album.
Still, when it comes to solo Beatle statements of independence, I’d rather hear Maybe I’m Amazed and Every Night than God or My Mummy’s Dead any day of the week.
It’s the Mike Yarwood moment in every pop career – ‘and this is me..’. Not a card to be played lightly. What do you do when you’ve revealed everything?
As for Imagine, even in 1981 I found it deathly dull to listen to. In 2008 overfamiliarity has drained it of any residual meaning or importance it might have once held.
Thanks for linking to those lyrics, btw – at last a song that makes you think almost as much as Imagine does.
But “Very” also happens to be a, um, very good album in it’s own right.
My feeling about ‘Very’ – and the Pet Shop Boys’ number 1 days were already behind them by the 1990s so this won’t worry the spoiler bunny – is that the first four albums were preoccupied with a sense of isolation and melancholy through intimate songs about being habitually single, while the joy of ‘Very’ is that its an album about finally being in love at last very late in the day, well into middle age (see, especially, ‘Liberation’). It was hard to know where to go from that moment on (for me as a listener, anyway, if not for Neil Tennant as a songwriter).
It’s still a rather sad (Dreaming of The Queen, Go West) and at times even angry (Can You Forgive Her? The Theatre) record.
I remember reading an interview with Lennon where he said the lyrics weren’t intended to mean that all it takes to change the world is to imagine changing the world. Instead, he meant them to serve as a response to people who argue that any fundamental, profound change in the world is impossible: that is, if one accepts that change is impossible, then change will be impossible, for the simple reason that no attempt will even be made to affect change. If, on the other hand, one at least allows for the possibility that change can be made to happen, then perhaps the thought and effort neended to make change will occur. Heard that way, the lyrics don’t bother me nearly as much as if I hear them as rich, smug rock star dropping pearls of wisdom at the feet of poor, simple me.
Musically, the melody to the verses is tedious. And, the one thing I haven’t seen from any other poster here, Alan White’s drumming is awful: clumsy, intrusive, and – almost too ironical – unimaginative. Also, I agree with the poster who said that Lennon’s singing voice was never enjoyable when treated by Spector.
As far as political thinking goes, Lennon’s most trenchant and convincing came with his vocal on “Money.” The way he sings, “I wanna be free!!” carries much more truth than “Imagine.”
mark g, the phrase you’re referring to — i think — isn’t really an arpeggio, and here’s for why (in my opinion)
arpeggio is the italian for “play like a harp” (or some such): harps are tuned chordally , which is why they’re so good at playing those great sweepy chordal effects, chords not as clawed chunks but as swoops up and down the staircase of the notes
this is a run — a semitone run, if i’m hearing it right — and runs on a harp require pedal shifts; hence adjacent semitones usually can’t be played simultaneously on a harp; since you couldn’t play this as an “unarpeggiated” chord on a harp then (being hyperpedantic)* you can’t really arpeggiate it…
anyway that may not be the official reasoning, but arpeggios need spaces between the tones, i would say — they need to be broken chords, not necessarily simple triads but not plain runs
you’re right about the aural illusion, i think — it makes you think another note is sounding when actually it isn’t (not a bad trick for a song called “imagine”) (i have the sheet music for this somewhere — i will look it out)
*it’s my job! i can keep it up all week!
Thanks for that.
I would be very interested. I’m sure there’s some cover versions that add that extra note, but is it really there? hmmmmmm….
could not find the music on first search — it and the lp were my sister’s i think, so it may still be at my parents’ house
“The song was included in the list of songs deemed inappropriate by Clear Channel following the September 11, 2001 attacks.” This and many other strange facts at wiki are enough to make me think this song is, to paraphrase the recently Vatican-pardoned Lennon, bigger than the man himself.
Does anyone know why it was released as a single first in the US?
I think it was to make people buy the album to get the song.
(At that time, singles were getting a bit ‘sniffed at’ and LPs were the ‘serious’ format, which continued until Punk happened. Also, the companies like selling albums more, profits etc were bigger)
When I bought LPs rather than singles in the late 60s/early 70s, it wasn’t because singles were to be sniffed at, it was because you got so much more for your money.
It was pretty standard practise for Beatle-related albums in Britain (until ’73-ish) not to be plundered for singles. McCartney, Plastic Ono Band, and Ringo’s Sentimental Journey were stand-alone albums, though Every Night or Maybe I’m Amazed from the former could have easily been a no.1.
So if Lennon later claimed that Imagine was too controversial to be released as a single in the UK (haven’t seen that quote myself), it was poppycock. The single preceding Imagine in Britain was Power To The People – a tad more controversial than “I hope some day you’ll join us and the world will be as one”.
yes they may have “invented” the concept album (and “rock”) w. peppper, but the beatles were (if anything) ideologically pro-singles — they were adepts of the charts and chart placing as a conversation-stroke-stylebattle (some of lennon-ono’s early singles were recorded and releasede very swiftly, to be politically tpoicakl, no?)
(tho come to think of it at least one of the L-O LPs made a noise about super-swift over-the-weekend recording-and-release: i’m at work so can’t look this up — roy carr is very snarky about it in his illustrated guide, and, iirc, quotes mccartney being acidly tongue-in-cheek)
er that wd be “topical”
Lennon ‘imagined’ that the reason Imagine wasn’t a single was etc.
I dislike this song also, but I once read a clever semi-defense of it claiming that the emphasis was on the possessions verse – that people will sell out religion and patriotism pretty easily (“It’s easy if you try” and “It isn’t hard to do”), but will never give up material wealth (“I wonder if you can”). Even in this theory, a lot depends on whether Lennon was aiming the lyrics at himself – if not, this only increases the probability that the line is a sneer.
there’s a Top of the Pops 2 Lennon Special here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00747qb/TOTP2_John_Lennon_Special/
Why haven’t I commented on this so far? Here’s why: http://nobilliards.blogspot.com/2010/08/john-lennon-and-plastic-ono-band-with.html