“The worst of all worlds”: How John Lennon defended one of his most controversial songs
The floor is lava when you’re a self-identified revolutionary speaking truth to power. People will admire your willingness to make a leap in the name of a worthy cause, but if you miss your landing, those same people will rarely line up to lend you a hand.
This is doubly true when you’re an entertainer, as you will inevitably find more and more of your audience pleading with you to just stick to the music, or the sports, or the acting, etc. etc.
John Lennon spent a good portion of his public life in hot water of one form or another, as the same brashness and rebelliousness that was essential to his success as a songwriter and performer also led to an almost constant parade of ruffled feathers in his wake. Whether it was the “we’re bigger than Jesus” remark, his self-indulgent “lost weekend”, or his arguably hypocritical publicity stunts and severed relationship with his son Julian, it wasn’t hard to take Lennon down a peg when he got sanctimonious.
Occasionally, this carried over directly into his songcraft, as well, with many fans understandably rolling their eyes at the pettiness of his bitter takedown of Paul McCartney – ‘How Do You Sleep?’- or the even perceived tone deafness of a millionaire singing ‘Imagine.’ One of Lennon’s most controversial songs, though, and probably his most offensive by modern standards, actually had a very progressive and potentially important message at its core. It was just an all-time bad choice of a metaphor and song title that turned it into one of the major missteps of Lennon’s career.
‘Woman is the N****er of the World’ was a quote and concept that Yoko Ono had actually devised and first started using in the late 1960s, but it sparked much greater controversy when Lennon used it as the title for the first track on the 1972 Plastic Ono Band record, Sometime in New York City. The song, simply put, is a feminist statement, trying to frame the second class status of women in the Western world as something that should be regarded on a par with the concurrent racist treatment and abuse of people of colour.
“We make her paint her face and dance / If she won’t be a slave, we say that she don’t love us / If she’s real, we say she’s tryna be a man / While putting her down, we pretend that she’s above us.”
To be fair, most listeners understood the point; many just weren’t willing to forgive the word choice and clumsy framing. For his part, Lennon defended the song with conviction, taking a feminist position that would be bold for 2025, and looks downright remarkable for the early 1970s.
“I agree that a lot of people, black and white, are slaves in the world,” Lennon told KDAY News Radio in 1972, “But each of them has his own slave, and that’s usually his wife. If a man is brutalised, he brutalises his wife. Being from the working class, I know what that’s about. A man comes home from work, sick to death of the whole business, he doesn’t know how to express it any other way than to take it out on the woman. And that’s what happens”.
He added, “Anyone who denies the fact that women are having the worst of all worlds is obviously not seeing things clearly.”
Lennon, who has far from a clean slate when it comes to his own track record respecting women, is again on shaky ground as the messenger here, and may be painting with a brush about ten sizes too big. Still, had he written this song and put the spotlight squarely on domestic abuse – a topic very rarely dealt with seriously in popular music at the time – without the comparison to race and the inclusion of the worst of the racial slurs, he might have found more success in reaching a wider audience with the message. Instead, radio ignored the song in its own time, and modern audiences tend to give it a miss entirely.
