The 1972 album John Lennon worried had “ruined” his legacy
For the most successful man in music history, John Lennon certainly did a lot to derail his own career. In fact, he made willful self-sabotage a curious key facet of his artistry.
From quipping that his band were bigger than Jesus Christ, god’s very own son no less, to drunken skirmishes, dissing Beatles fans and run-ins with the press, he certainly didn’t operate like a man with a polished PR team. That enigmatic duality, chequered humanity, and lager-than-life sentiment, in part, made him the artist he was.
He once said that “reality leaves a lot to the imagination”. He fittingly lingers somewhere between the two. In some ways, that also made him bigger than his art. He towers above pop culture in a way that ‘Steel and Glass’ never could. At least that sentiment is certainly true when it comes to his solo work.
Following the break-up of The Beatles, if anything, we retrospectively view him as a more gargantuan godhead than he was during his days with the biggest band in history, which is odd considering that he only scored one number-one in his lifetime as a solo artist. Yet, when you picture him in the 21st century, it’s those days in white shawls and little round spectacles that spring to mind most readily.
Beyond a lack of commercial success, there are, in fact, plenty of potholes to be found in his long and winding solo journey, but standing alongside the likes of ‘Woman’ and ‘Jealous Guy’, these blemishes barely do anything to deride his artistry. In a strange way, they might even galvanise it. We certainly don’t look at something shoddy like Some Time In New York City these days and think, ‘Well, he evened out at a B, really’.
His reverence is not at its lofty apex because we view him as holier than thou or even an absolute musical genius; it is because he changed the world by never being anything other than himself, whoever that is. As Yoko Ono conveniently proclaimed: “You change the world by being yourself.” Lennon was somehow a paradigm of that, and yet the ‘self’ in question is a complex web unfathomable from the outside. So, his pitfalls are subsumed by the wider curiosity with which we view his character.
However, in the eye of the storm, there were moments when the man himself had worries. Some Time In New York City was slammed as vapid sloganeering upon release. Some tracks were patently offensive, and others were so simplistic that they were offensive by virtue of patronising the very people they reported to support.
In effect, Steely Dan suddenly seemed right when they quipped:
“You do his nine to five
Drag yourself home half alive
And there on the screen
A man with a dream I heard it was you
Talking ’bout a world where all is free
It just couldn’t be
And only a fool would say that…”
That was the issue for Lennon; he might have been nettlesome, hit-and-miss and hard to pin down throughout his career, but he had always been deemed a figure with worthy things to say and a unique way of saying them. In a world of fools, he was a sage. But with Some Time In New York City, the centre was struggling to hold, and even Lennon himself thought the tide might have been turning in a way that it hadn’t before.
The record was deemed an act of simply jumping on bandwagons without too much sincerity. He later lamented how it had an adverse impact on his writing and career, commenting, “It almost ruined it. It became journalism and not poetry.”
He thought he had sold himself short with a rushed, punky effort. At a time when the hits were nowhere to be found in his solo work, this record curtailed any critical praise offered in lieu of commercialism, too. He was drifting. And this drift had him questioning who he was as an artist.
“I basically feel that I’m a poet,” he later reflected. “Then I began to take it seriously on another level, saying, ‘Well, I am reflecting what is going on, right?'”
However, the backlash almost became the making of his second chapter. He endeavoured to return to a more poetic and individualistic vantage point with Mind Games, an entirely non-commercial album that almost favourably flopped for Lennon. He reinstated his level of mystery and found fresh depth beneath its shallow predecessor.
