John Lennon and the song that highlighted the “real hypocrisy” of songwriting
There’s no arguing or denying – John Lennon is one of the best songwriters of all time. That’s not even an opinion; it’s a fact that, alongside Paul McCartney, The Beatles duo are the bestselling songwriters in music history and are among the most beloved and revered. So, when it comes to penning lyrics, Lennon knew a thing or two. However, that didn’t stop him from still being tripped up by what he considered to be the ultimate contradiction of the craft.
Though The Beatles weren’t actually a band for that long, they left a legacy that looms large and is still being unpacked and analysed today. Across 12 studio albums, fans can hear their talent develop in real-time. Especially in the case of Lennon and McCartney, each album saw a step up in their songwriting abilities from the straightforward rock and roll of their initial releases, which were packed full of hooky slogans to draw an audience in, through to the adventurous storytelling works of their later years.
With each album, they only got better as their skill was exercised and honed year after year. But even well into his career, after he’d left The Beatles and launched his solo career, Lennon was still getting caught up in what he saw as the true contradiction of songwriting and the complex line between saying what you want versus saying what an audience might want to hear.
It all came to a head on ‘Working Class Hero’, Lennon’s 1970 anthem that launched his solo career. After decades of being more careful with his lyrics, he decided to simply say what he wanted exactly how he wanted, allowing the profanity he’d use in his day to day speech to slip into his song.
Who knew the word “fucking” in a rock song would cause so much issue? However, it did as Lennon’s label put up a fight over his using the swear word twice in the song. For the songwriter, though, this was a perfect example of the contradiction in songwriting.
Being a lad from Liverpool, swearing had always been a part of Lennon’s vocabulary. “You do say ‘fucking crazy,’ don’t you? That’s how I speak,” he told Jann Wenner in 1970. For a song about his origins as a working-class boy looking at the class system from his own unique perspective, a track about his community felt as though it needed the style of speech he was raised in. He was simply trying to say it all how he felt it and explain his feelings as he saw them, but the debate of the language highlighted the strangeness in songwriting as a craft that both requires an honest voice and then also demands it to be altered.
In the past, Lennon would have bowed to what the song required, changing the way he wrote from the way he would speak. “I was very near to it many times in the past, but I would deliberately not put it in, which is the real hypocrisy, the real stupidity,” he explained, “I would deliberately not say things because it might upset somebody, or whatever I was frightened of.”
But as he broke out of The Beatles and relaunched his career as a solo artist, the inclusion of swear words in the track was a statement that Lennon would no longer alter his lyricism to suit. His voice in life and his voice in song would now be one and the same.
