The one song John Lennon said “nobody” understood
The John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album arrived amidst a period of intense reflection. Released in the December of 1970, the LP bares the emotional mark of the Primal Scream therapy Lennon underwent the previous summer. These experimental therapy sessions, during which John Lennon was required to re-experience childhood pain as a way of relieving suppressed trauma, blended with a burgeoning emphasis on left-wing political messaging to breed a collection of songs that are at once introspective and socially conscious. Perhaps the finest and most nuanced example is ‘Working Class Hero’, a song Lennon frequently argued had been misunderstood by his listeners.
To be fair to the fans, ‘Working Class Hero’ is a very layered piece of songwriting. Initially, it shows Lennon attacking the conformity of his childhood days: the parents and teachers who “hurt you at home and they hit you at school”. At this point, Lennon appears to be reaching back into his childhood and attempting to pinpoint the cause of his revolutionary fire, one that eventually gave birth to tracks like ‘Imagine’, ‘Power To The People’ and ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’.
“I think it’s a revolutionary song,” Lennon told Jann Wenner in 1970, “It’s really just revolutionary. I just think its concept is revolutionary. I hope it’s for workers and not for tarts and fags. I hope it’s about what ‘Give Peace A Chance’ was about. But I don’t know – on the other hand, it might just be ignored. I think it’s for the people like me who are working class, who are supposed to be processed into the middle classes, or into the machinery. It’s my experience, and I hope it’s just a warning to people, ‘Working Class Hero’.”
Comments such as these have led many Lennon fans to assume that ‘Working Class Hero’ carries a socialist message. In a way, it does. Throughout the song, Lennon identifies numerous ways in which working-class people are tricked into believing that being “processed into the middle classes” will free them of their pain, a pain Lennon seems to regard as being specific to the working classes. “As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small,” he sings. In Lennon’s eyes, working-class shame is there from the very beginning and will endure until the very end.
However, Lennon would later explain that many fans had failed to appreciate the ironic message at the heart of ‘Working Class Hero’, the one marked by the refrain “If you want to be a hero, well, just follow me”. What many regarded as a call to arms by a revolutionary leader was, according to Lennon, an attempt to highlight the fundamental inescapability of class. After all, even Lennon, a man who had transformed himself into a millionaire with his music, was still, at this time, battling against feelings of guilt and shame.
“The thing about the ‘Working Class Hero’ song that nobody ever got right was that it was supposed to be sardonic,” he told Rolling Stone. “It had nothing to do with socialism, 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,’” Lennon added. “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. But what Yoko’s taught me is what the real success is – the success of my personality, the success of my relationship with her and the child, my relationship with the world… and to be happy when I wake up. It has nothing to do with rock machinery or not rock machinery.”
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