You want to know an overrated record? I’ll show you an overrated record – John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, an embarrassing forty-minute therapy session paid for first of all by the mugs at his record company and secondly by punters forever after. Little John has a good old whinge about his Mam, his old band, his background, his fans, religion, you bloody name it, all over self-consciously ‘raw’ and ‘stark’ (i.e. ‘boring’) guitar ditties – it really makes me laugh when baby boomer scum rant on about how today’s rock stars are a load of whining pussies who can’t take their fame. Sorry dudes, you can’t blame the younger generation for being a bit fretful when they’ve seen the kind of acclaim Saint John got for his lump of soul-baring.
Lennon knew his audience, alright – like a Star Trek writer who drops a couple of mentions of Mr. Spock into some crappy spin-off to keep the fans drooling and guessing, John peppers his solo stuff with coy Beatles references, Easter Eggs for the ‘real fans’, ego-tripping for anyone else. So you get “God”, a sixth-form rant about all the things he doesn’t believe in any more which culminates in “I don’t believe in Beatles”. So. The. Fuck. What. If you care about this kind of thing, go and read OK magazine.
Buy hey, wait, aren’t I dismissing some really profound stuff here? Um, no. At the end of Lennon’s spiritual search comes “Love”. Okay, that’s good, a bit of hard-won closure – what does John have to tell us. “Love is real. Real is love.”. Like, whoa, that’s deep.
Yeah, Plastic Ono Band is honest in its pain, so what? It’s still a mid-price holiday in someone else’s misery, a drab, ugly record which no fucker would like if John Lennon hadn’t been in the most famous band in the world. POB is the rock equivalent of Princess Diana’s big interview, and thirty years on we’re all still gawping at how damn brave he was to sing this stuff. That’s not art, it’s voyeurism.