Yoko Ono on the song that proved John Lennon was “before his time”
At this point, calling any member of The Beatles ahead of their time feels redundant—especially John Lennon. The sheer number of things they did first is staggering, regardless of taste. Don’t like the music? That’s fine; plenty of people are wrong every day. But even if it’s not for you, their albums still deserve acknowledgement for what they represented: an artistic statement, pop musicians writing their own material, and the elevation of pop music into a serious art form. That’s not opinion—it’s fact.
Still, no matter how forward-thinking they were, in the early 1960s, they were the mainstream. That is until a conceptual artist by the name of Yoko Ono stepped into their lives.
Now, as an artist, Yoko was legit. Boundary pushing barely covers it; she had made a name for herself in the New York experimental art scene of the late 1950s and early ‘60s. By the time she met John Lennon in 1966, she was just as much a toast of the art world as he was in music, with successful exhibitions of her work running in galleries on both sides of the Atlantic.
In fact, it was a work of her art that first made Lennon interested in her. On the day they were introduced, Ono was putting the finishing touches on the installation piece Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting. To an outsider, it looked merely like a ladder painted white with a magnifying glass on the top. Once it was ready, Ono asked Lennon to climb the ladder and look through the glass. When he did, he found that painted on the ceiling was the word “yes”.
Lennon was hooked. Finally, he found a piece of art with a positive message in an art world that he deemed “anti-everything”. Their relationship began soon after, which people seem to forget wasn’t just romantic but collaborative, too. Lennon was on record as saying that ‘Imagine’ should have been credited as a Lennon/Ono song, and Ono very much drove the “bed-ins” they staged as anti-war protests.
All this to say that if Yoko Ono deems your work to be before its time, she speaks as a woman who knows what she’s talking about. So, when in 2010, Rolling Stone tasked her with making a playlist of her favourite songs by her late husband, there was one track that stood out. Not just for being a good pop song – Lennon could always write those in his sleep – but for being something genuinely artistic and genuinely daring.
The song she speaks of is his venomous 1971 protest anthem, ‘Gimme Some Truth’. Of it, she says, “’Gimme Some Truth’ is so appropriate for now. He was before his time, in a way. There’s an edge to the music too – that kind of song didn’t exist too much in those days.” She’s bang on the money. Songs that were this explicitly political, this raw and angry weren’t being released by his rarified level of artist. There’s an argument to be made that they wouldn’t until decades after his passing.
More proof, as if it was needed, that the two of them were genuine kindred spirits. On a romantic, spiritual and artistic level.
