What was the message behind John Lennon’s ‘Mind Games’?
While John Lennon was a master of writing cryptic lyrics and liked to keep his cards close to his chest, artists aren’t obliged to reveal their full intent about what a song means every time they release something new. This lack of information obviously leaves things up to the listener’s interpretation, which can often be fun for the more inquisitive fans to figure out, but it’s not always necessary for the full details to be revealed.
If some of Lennon’s most lyrically obtuse tracks ever had their true meanings revealed, it would probably ruin the mystery that surrounds them, and the surreal imagery plastered all over the words to songs like ‘Glass Onion’ and ‘I Am The Walrus’ are perhaps better left as they are with Lennon claiming that they were deliberately nonsensical in order to poke fun at fan theories.
On the other hand, Lennon was also known for writing many overtly political songs where he would focus on social issues, with tracks like ‘Revolution’ and ‘Imagine’ being two of the most notable examples of this. While his status and importance as a revolutionary figure in popular culture was often questioned or even met with scorn by his peers, there are still a number of tracks of this nature in his catalogue that nobody can deny had a political intent behind them.
When Lennon released his third solo album, Mind Games, in 1973, he was going through a number of personal issues, such as a brief separation from his wife, Yoko Ono, and troubles with emigrating to the US, and he also wanted to begin distancing himself from writing in an overtly political style. Considering the lukewarm reception of the Plastic Ono Band’s Some Time in New York City, which directly addressed many of the social issues that Lennon always projected himself as a voice for change, it’s understandable that he wished to change this.
Speaking about the release of the record with Melody Maker, he was quick to label it as being “just an album” and didn’t seem to enjoy people speculating what his intentions behind the lyrics on the record were. While out in Los Angeles to work on some important promotional material for the record, he told the magazine: “It’s rock at different speeds. It’s not a political album or an introspective album. Someone told me it was like Imagine with balls, which I liked a lot.”
Expanding on the song of the same name and seemingly getting increasingly flustered about all of the probing questions about the meaning of the lyrics, he said, “There’s no deep message about it. I very rarely consciously sit down and write a song with a deep message.” Further expanding on his writing process and dismissing any notion that there were any political motives creeping into the album, Lennon stated that “whatever lyrics I write are about what I’ve been thinking over the past few months. I tend not to want to change an idea once it’s in my mind, even if I feel differently about it later.”
It could be argued that a lot of songwriters also use this technique, but it also feels like something of a cop-out considering that Lennon’s mind can’t have simply been a blank canvas waiting for a subject matter to come to him. Later in the interview, Lennon expanded on how his views were always subject to change and that this could have an effect on the meaning of a song over time. “If I stated in a song that water was the philosophy to life,” he said, “Then people would assume that was my philosophy for ever – but it’s not, it’s forever changing.”
As for what ‘Mind Games’ is actually about, it was written in response to Mind Games: The Guide to Inner Space, the self-help book by Robert Masters and Jean Houston that had been released in 1972. As a fan of the book and its guide to applying focus to certain aspects of your life, Lennon was inspired to write about the increasing trend of people turning to self-help guides in the early ‘70s while occasionally loosely tying it to some philosophical concepts. There is clearly a meaning to the song, but perhaps Lennon was playing some mind games of his own when he denied there was anything deeper behind the lyrics.
