Thoughts on John Lennon

You may or may not have seen in the media that last week marked what would have been John Lennon's 70th Birthday. Unless you are a total, utter monk then you'll know that John Lennon was of course one of The Beatles; the best selling group of all time, and undoubtedly the most influential. After revolutionising the way music worked, The Beatles broke up in 1970 and Lennon moved on to a rather successful solo career, working closely alongside his wife Yoko Ono.

There's a lot to be said about John Lennon. He's got one of the most recognisable visages in popular culture. He's a figure who's divisive, compelling mysterious and at times unapproachable. It's impossible to have a full picture of how modern music got to where it is without including Lennon. Modern music wouldn't even exist at all in the way it does without John Lennon. That is fact, inarguable as far as I am concerned. And the more I've learned about Lennon and The Beatles, the more my thoughts on the two have matured and developed, and there are a few key observations I've made.

First, his time in The Beatles. The Beatles are, without doubt, the greatest musical act in history. Whether you like them is irrelevant. No other group has been more influential in all areas of the music business than the Fab Four. You can cite the longevity and legacy of classical musicians like Beethoven, Mahler, Mozart, Rachmaninov etc as long as you want. Their influence is undoubtedly phenomenal, but none of them produced a worldwide hysteria that revolutionised (that word is bandied about so much in relation to musical acts, but this is one of the few times where it really is worthy of use!) the whole musical world over night. The Beatles, led by Lennon, marked the point in history where people started taking pop and rock music seriously. Sure you had huge selling acts like Elvis and Sinatra around beforehand (and Sinatra made some pretty big steps for the advancement of pop music) but they didn't have the effect that The Beatles did. When they released Rubber Soul in 1965, it was really the first time that a pop act had released an album that had some kind of overall unity. It was the sound of band who were in control of their sound and were striking out into new frontiers- new instruments, new lyrical ideas, the mixing of genres to create some stunning new pop-music hybrid. People were taken aback, but in love with this new kind of pop music. Pop music that had integrity, that was well thought out and clearly about the music, rather than just profit and mass appeal. With Lennon at the helm, The Beatles really made the concept of "being in a band" something more than four guys who wanted to play a few tunes. Lennon breathed heart and soul into pop music through his time in The Beatles.

So, that all sounds wonderful. And it is. Pretty much no music we know today would exist without the work of The Beatles. But the fairytale didn't have a happy ending. The Beatles split in 1970 in less than friendly circumstances. Lennon flew off to America with Yoko Ono never to return and began his solo career. Lots of people praise Lennon's solo work, but for me the last 10 years of his life, before he was gunned down in 1980, are deeply saddening to think about.

All of the qualities that Lennon exhibited in his youth and throughout his Beatles career seemed to grow and grow into some kind of gross caricature until he imploded. His dry wit, quick observations and progressive attitude toward music all resulted in a man who, in all interview footage I have ever seen, was a profoundly unlikable man. He claimed not to care what anyone else thought of him, singing in his song "God"- "I just believe in me, Yoko and me". When in real life people claim to not care about what others think, we call them selfish gits. When they do it in the realm of art, they're called visionaries. There shouldn't be a distinction. In the aforementioned song, Lennon listed over a dozen things and people that he denounced- Jesus, Hitler, Elvis, The Beatles- and ended saying that he only believed in himself and Yoko. How can that be a good thing? It is a tragedy that a man would denounce all his friends, family and work and try to live solely off of his own back, wrapped up in himself and his wife. There's nothing romantic about that. If someone you know did that to you, how would you feel? Whether they cared about it or did it in the name of love or art wouldn't make a blind bit of difference.

I'm sure you're familiar with Lennon's most famous song "Imagine". It's consistently rated as one of the greatest songs of all time. But for me, it's a tragic song that is devoid of any kind of hope. It opens with:

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

That can sound, on the surface, can sound inspiring and philosophical. But imagine a world with none of those things. No heaven, no hell, no spiritual side to life, no God, means a dark, dark world. No hell means no kind of retribution or punishment for atrocities and wars that break the hearts the whole human race. No heaven means that this brief life is all that there is, and that that nothing within it can have any real significance or beauty. Even if someone like Lennon were to say "well you have to create meaning", that means nothing either. If you say something has meaning, that doesn't mean it does. It just means that words have left your mouth.

John Lennon was a stunningly talented, visionary, captivating individual. But the route his life took was really a tragic, lonely, embittered one. He gave the world modern music. He was a revolutionary. But also painfully human. Tragically vulnerable. To me, his life testifies to the fact that you cannot live your life based on any kind of earthly philosophy, yourself or even the person you are in love with. It will all fade away in the end.