Watch Neil Young cover of ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon
Following the terrible events of September 11th, 2001, the music world came together to raise money for the victims and their families. America: A Tribute to Heroes saw touching performances from the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, U2, Tom Petty, Paul Simon, Sheryl Crow, Dixie Chicks, Billy Joel and, of course, Neil Young, who performed this moving cover of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’.
‘Imagine’ is not an easy song to get right. Countless artists have tried, but this much-covered anti-materialist hymn tends to rub people up the wrong way. Young’s version captures the fragile beauty of the original, a song that was perhaps not intended to be quite so didactic.
An anti-establishment anthem coated in a thick layer of sugar, ‘Imagine’ was inspired by a concept in Yoko Ono’s 1964 book Grapefruit, a collection of “instructions and drawings” intended to help artists. One exercise requires readers to “Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in,” Ono writes. “Imagine myself crying and using my tears to make myself stronger.” Lennon took these instructions and used them as the foundation for his lyrics.
‘Imagine’ was written and recorded at John and Yoko’s Tittenhurst Park Estate, a detail that many of Lennon’s contemporaries found troubling when they realised the musicians was advocating the abandonment of material wealth from a multi-million-pound mansion in the English countryside. It is this fundamental hypocrisy that Steely Dan would later use to mock Lennon in their song ‘Only A Fool Would Say’.
Neil Young’s cover was perhaps the most prescient of all the tracks performed at the America: A Tribute to Heroes telethon. The September 2001 attacks prompted a wave of patriotic nationalism, and Young appears to have seen the effects of that nationalism coming, which is perhaps why he chose to remind the people of America, deep in their grief, to imagine a world without borders and religious divisions.
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