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If John Lennon had merely been one of the four members of the Beatles, his artistic immortality would already have been assured. The so-called smart Beatles, he had a penetrating intelligence and a stinging wit both to the bands music and himself presentation. But in some songs as “Strawberry Fields Forever, Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) Rain and. In My Life, he also marshaled gorgeous melodies to evoke a sophisticated, dreamlike world-weariness well beyond his years. Such work suggested not merely a profound musical and literary sensibility a genius, in short but a vision of life that was simultaneously reflective, utopian and poignantly realistic.
While in the Beatles, Lennon displayed an outspokenness that immersed the band in controversy and helped redefine the rules of acceptable behavior for rock stars. He famously remarked in 1965 that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, a statement that was more an observation than a boast, but that resulted in the band records being burned and removed from radio station play lists in the U.S. He criticized America involvement in Vietnam, and, as the Sixties progressed, he became an increasingly important symbol of the burgeoning counterculture.
But it was only after the breakup of the Beatles in 1970 that the figure the world now recognizes as John Lennon truly came into being. Whether he was engaging in social activism; giving long, passionate interviews that, once again, broadened the nature of public discourse for artists; defining a new life as a self-described househusband or writing and recording songs, Lennon came to view his life as a work of art in which every act shimmered with potential meaning for the world at large. It was a Messianic attitude, to be sure, but one that was tempered by an innate inclusiveness and generosity. If he saw himself as larger than life, he also yearned for a world in which his ego managed at once to absorb everyone else and dissolve all differences among people, leaving a Zen-like tranquility and calm. You may say “I ma dreamer, but I am not the only one” he sang in Imagine, which has become his best-known song and an international anthem of peace. I hope someday you will join us, and the world will live as one.
Such imagery, coupled with the tragedy of his murder in 1980, has often led to Lennon being sentimentalized as a gentle prince of peace gazing off into the distance at an Eden only he could see. In fact, he was a far more complex and difficult person, which, in part, accounts for the world endless fascination with him. Plastic Ono Band (1970), the first solo album he made after leaving the Beatles, alternates songs that are so emotionally raw that to this day they are difficult to listen to with songs of extraordinary beauty and simplicity. Gripped by his immersion in primal-scream therapy, which encouraged its practitioners to re-experience their most profound psychic injuries, Lennon sought in such songs as Mother and God to confront and strip away the traumas that had afflicted his life since childhood.
And those traumas were considerable. Lennon mother, Julia, drifted in and out of his life during his childhood in Liverpool he was raised by Julia’ sister Mimi and Mimi husband, Georgen and then died in a car accident when Lennon was seventeen. His father was similarly absent, essentially walking out on the family when John was an infant. He disappeared for good when Lennon was five, only to return after his son had become famous as a member of the Beatles. Consequently, Lennon struggled with fears of abandonment his entire life. When he repeatedly cries, Mama, don’t go/Daddy come home, in Mother, it’s less a performance than a scarifying brand of therapeutic performance art. And in that regard, as well as many others, it revealed the influence of Yoko Ono, whom John Lennon had married in 1969, leaving his first wife, Cynthia, and their son Julian in order to do so.
sadiaaaahmed 