“Want to own them”: The song John Lennon wrote about wanting to “possess” Yoko Ono
When each member of The Beatles went solo, it unveiled several varying secrets about them as people. Arguably, the most startling among these was John Lennon, whose music suddenly felt like walls broken down, free from the shackles of having to keep up the appearances that made them the biggest band in the world. As soon as he released his own material, everything changed.
According to George Harrison, this wasn’t entirely true. Well, not as drastically as it appeared to the outsider. According to his former bandmate, Lennon had been trying to open up artistically for a long time, fighting against the push and pull of right and wrong, or whatever that meant for someone in a band like The Beatles. In other words, Lennon’s life had become a binary, largely marked by sobriety and drugs.
Sober, Lennon was a more considered soul, thoughtful in his own presence, charismatically so. Under the influence, he became a swirling concoction of everything that troubled him, like his absent parents, his past experiences, and his inability to maintain control during life’s hardships. Harrison and many others noticed this sharp distinction, but not as much as when he released his first solo record, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.
“As a kid, I didn’t think, ‘Oh well, it’s because his dad left home and his mother died,’ which in reality probably did leave an incredible scar,” Harrison once recalled. Describing how the record made everything click into place, he added: “It wasn’t until he made that album about Janov, primal screaming, that I realised he was even more screwed up than I thought.”
“Screwed up” might be a little uncalled for, especially as Lennon was genuinely going through significant personal changes, all while trying to navigate all the elements of trauma he previously left untouched. However, with the following record, he executed more of the same, only this time, he explored more facets of life’s ambiguities, like love and romance, and how this often bled into pure fixation.
The nature of Lennon and Yoko Ono’s adoration for each other was never a secret, but Imagine revealed several truths about their relationship—mostly through the song ‘Jealous Guy’. From the title alone, it’s easy to guess where Lennon was going with the track, but a closer analysis shows he was expressing just how deeply he felt about his other half, even if those feelings could sometimes come across as dark.
In fact, this track wasn’t trying to avoid this at all, and actually leaned into it in an effort to be honest about the parts of himself no one else really knew that much about. As he explained after the song was released: “When you’re in love with somebody, you tend to be jealous, and want to own them and possess them 100 per cent, which I do.”
That said, he was also clear about that not being a literal facet of his feelings toward Ono, admitting that he is “intellectual” and doesn’t agree with the prospect of “owning” someone. However, in loving Ono, he realised just how much he finally had, how much there was to gain for a heart that always had nothing. “You have so little as a child, I think once you find it, you want to hang onto it,” he said. “You grab it so much, you tend to kill it.”
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