10 songs that reveal the true John Lennon
When The Beatles got off the plane in America, they did so without knowing just how big their impact on music would be. No British band had ever broken America. Sure, there had been some one-hit wonders, but no other British act had longevity in the States yet. It took John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr to show onlookers how a British band could effectively market themselves in America.
So, what was the secret? If you were to ask someone like John Lennon, he would likely say something along the lines of “compromise”. The truth is, the Beatles had to change a fair bit about themselves when they went to the States in order to market themselves effectively to an American audience.
“We weren’t as open and as truthful when we didn’t have the power to be. We had to take it easy. We had to shorten our hair to leave Liverpool. We had to wear suits to get on TV. We had to compromise,” said Lennon, “We had to get hooked to get in, and then get a bit of power and say, ‘This is what we’re like’.”
Compromise is something that seemed to plague John Lennon throughout his career. He wanted to write songs that were an honest reflection of himself, but because of label interference and the fact that he was in a band, he could not do this for much of his career.
That being said, there were some instances throughout John Lennon’s career when his honesty seeped through, whether intentional or not. This occurred a lot during his solo career, but occasionally with The Beatles as well. Here, we will discuss ten of the quintessential songs that reveal the true John Lennon.
The songs that reveal the true John Lennon:
‘Revolution 9’
We could talk for hours about why The Beatles eventually broke up; however, one of the band’s most fundamental problems was evidently creative differences. While Paul McCartney was happy writing pop songs fit for the charts, Lennon wanted to explore much more vulnerable sides to himself. ‘Revolution 9’ is Lennon’s honest jab at pop music, as the experimental nature of this track lacks melody or structure. It merely exists.
“All the thing was made with loops, I had about thirty loops going, fed them onto one basic track,” explained Lennon, “I was getting classical tapes, going upstairs and chopping them up, making it backwards and things like that, to get the sound effects.”
‘How Do You Sleep?’
After the split of the Beatles, things got nasty. The collapse of the connection between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, a connection that had not only changed the music world but had seen them through their entire adult lives so far, was hugely impactful. It wasn’t just a personal blow-up, leaving both parties reeling. It wasn’t even just a professional one, as the band collapsed. It seemed like a complete rapture that found its way into both their music.
There was a back-and-forth war of words for a while, but John Lennon’s ‘How Do You Sleep’ has to be the harshest. “Those freaks was right when they said you was dead,” Lennon sings, using the conspiracy theory that McCartney died years back to declare him dead to the singer. But things get nasty when Lennon brough his ex-bandmate’s late mother into it, singing, “Jump when your momma tell you anything / The only thing you done was yesterday / And since you’re gone you’re just another day,” in reference to the track ‘Yesterday’, one that McCartney thought he mother delivered to him in a dream. It’s a nasty piece of work, but in that era, it was a true reflection of Lennon and his feelings towards his old friend.
‘Beautiful Boy’
In 1975, Lennon and Ono welcomed their first and only child together: Sean Ono Lennon. The couple were overjoyed and absolutely blissful about the expansion of their family and the ultimate collaborative project made between the two artistic lovers. Five years later, ‘Beautiful Boy’ was released as a tender track, for and about his young child.
This isn’t the first song written for one of his kids, however. During The Beatles, there were a few songs written for his eldest child, Julian, but not always by Lennon. Their relationship was more complex, becoming almost estranged as Lennon split from Julian’s mother and then went off to live in New York. So while ‘Beautiful Boy’ isn’t quite fully representative of the man as a parent, it’s another one that captures an era as the singer was settling into a more domestic life. It’s also the song that both McCartney and Ono pick out as a favourite of theirs, holding a special place in so many hearts.
‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’
Both together and apart, Lennon and Ono wrote song after song after song about their love. It was a connection that made them prolific, pushing both of them into new and exciting places in their artistry and leading to some incredible collaborations between the two.
But this one, released by The Beatles as a standalone single in 1969, is the most comprehensive as it literally chronicles their relationship but especially their issues with the press and the fact that the duo were completely and utterly hounded. The fact it was released by and made with the Beatles as well goes some way to dispel the enduring rumours that it was Ono who broke up the band simply by being around.
But beyond the context of the track, it’s also one that speaks to Lennon’s rebellious streak as many stations refused to play the song due to the lyric “they’re gonna crucify me”, harking back to his infamous comment about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus.
‘Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox)’
Often in retellings of Lennon’s life and artistry, a certain section is lost; The Lost Weekend. The title assigned to it doesn’t do it justice. This wasn’t a weekend. This was an 18 month period where the artist left Ono and ran off with May Pang, a figure who helped the musician reignite his passion for his own art and even heal connections with his old bandmates and family. For a period often brushed off, it feels truly vital.
‘Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox)’ sums it all up. “Well I was wondering how long this could go on, on and on / Well I thought I could never be surprised,” Lennon sings about this new connection and this new period as he shook his own life up and basked in the new fizz of excitement and creativity it caused.
‘Give Peace A Chance’
Especially towards the end of The Beatles and after their split, Lennon was almost just as much of an activist as he was a musician. He seemed fully locked in, paying attention to everything that was happening around him. He wanted to be clued in and involved, and he very clearly wanted to use his platform and influence for something more than just writing songs and getting them in the charts.
‘Give Peace A Chance’ is perhaps the more visceral and outright example of this. There are plenty of politically charged Lennon songs, especially the ones he wrote during his early years in New York or even earlier Beatles tracks like ‘Revolution’. But on ‘Give Peace A Chance’, it feels more like Lennon was simply writing a protest chant. Sung over and over again by different crowds of friends and protest figures during Ono and Lennon’s bed-in, but still sung today at protests worldwide, this song has a legacy that lies almost outside of Lennon’s own, being adopted into the wider world of political songs.
‘Help!’
When John Lennon was asked what his favourite Beatles songs were, he named those which he felt were the most honest reflections of him. The Beatles had to compromise a great deal at the beginning of their career, including how they dressed and the length of their hair, in a bid to be more palatable for an American audience in the ‘60s. Subsequently, John Lennon felt closest to the songs when he felt he didn’t need to compromise.
One of the songs in particular that he felt was a true reflection of himself and his state of being was ‘Help!’. “Because I meant it, it’s real. The lyric is as good now as it was then, it’s no different, you know,” he said, “It was just me singing ‘help’, and I meant it, you know. I don’t like the recording that much, the song I like. We did it too fast to try and be commercial.”
‘Mother’
While John Lennon was able to write some honest songs during his time in The Beatles, he could show his true self a lot more freely when he started making music as a solo artist. This meant not only making music where he was a lot more upfront with his lyrics, but also writing songs that oftentimes made his fans uncomfortable. ‘Mother’ is a great example of this.
“Many, many people will not like ‘Mother’; it hurts them,” said Lennon, “The first thing that happens to you when you get the album is you can’t take it. Everybody reacted exactly the same. They think, ‘fuck!’ That’s how everybody is. And the second time, they start saying, ‘Oh, well, there’s a little…’ So I can’t lay ‘Mother’ on them. It confirms the suspicions that something nasty’s going on with that John Lennon and his broad again.”
‘Working Class Hero’
This was a track that caused a great deal of controversy amongst fans as they were quick to point out that while Lennon might come from relatively humble origins, he was by no means working class. People brought up the fact that he was raised in a middle-class household and therefore didn’t have any right to call himself working class. Lennon clapped back at the criticism and said the song has nothing to do with his societal status and is instead a song about how, despite experiencing periods of success and anonymity, he has been both sad and happy during these periods. In other words, Lennon was trying to say that fame and riches aren’t everything (however, that’s very easy for a rich, famous person to say).
“The thing about the ‘Working Class Hero’ song that nobody ever got right was that it was supposed to be sardonic – it had nothing to do with socialism,” said Lennon, “It had to do with ‘If you want to go through that trip, you’ll get up to where I am, and this is what you’ll be’. Because I’ve been successful as an artist, and have been happy and unhappy, and I’ve been unknown in Liverpool or Hamburg and been happy and unhappy.”
‘Jealous Guy’
On this track, John Lennon confronts the profound jealousy that plagued him, particularly throughout his relationship with Yoko Ono. Lennon shared his thoughts on love, saying that when you are wholeheartedly in love with someone, you want to “Own them and possess them 100 per cent.”
Ono once spoke about the song and said she didn’t believe the jealousy Lennon spoke about was overtly sexual, and instead had much more spiritual connotations. “He was jealous about the fact that I had another language in my head, you know, Japanese, that he can’t share with me,” she said. “It was almost on a very conceptual, spiritual level. It wasn’t on a level of physical or anything ’cause I just would never give him a reason for that.”
