 The commemorative events on the 30th anniversary of John Lennon’s death have been mixed, to put it politely. The image of the harmless icon of popular music, at best promoting an anodyne message of peace, has dominated. Frankly, a lot of it is a downright insult to his memory.
John Lennon was a person deeply marked by the hidden injuries of class, and deeply influenced by the worldwide radicalism of the 1960s and early 1970s into which he threw his energies for a whole period.
British leftist Tariq Ali, who knew Lennon in the 1970s, recalled one event that indicated this:
The events in Derry on Bloody Sunday [the massacre of unarmed Irish civil rights demonstrators by the British Army on 30 January 1972], angered him greatly and he subsequently suggested that he wished to march on the next Troops Out demonstration on Ireland, and did so, together with Yoko Ono, wearing Red Mole T-shirts and holding the [Trotskyist newspaper Red Mole] high. Its headline was: “For the IRA, Against British Imperialism.”
Along with “Imagine”, Lennon wrote some of the most famous songs of the anti-war movement: “Give Peace A Chance” and “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)”. He sang at political protests against the Vietnam War, and in support of other radical causes.
Lennon’s first book was called In His Own Write, and it’s appropriate to mark the anniversary of his untimely death with some of his own words. In 1971 Red Mole published a discussion between two of its leading members, Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Lennon sets a certain matter-of-fact working class tone from early on:
I’ve always been politically minded, you know, and against the status quo. It’s pretty basic when you’re brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere.
Lennon had a pretty shrewd appreciation of the meaning of the success that a working class lad from Liverpool had achieved:
I realise in retrospect that it’s the same phoney deal they gave the blacks, it was just like they allowed blacks to be runners or boxers or entertainers. That’s the choice they allow you – now the outlet is being a pop star, which is really what I’m saying on the album in “Working class hero”. As I told Rolling Stone, it’s the same people who have the power, the class system didn’t change one little bit.
Of course, there are a lot of people walking around with long hair now and some trendy middle class kids in pretty clothes. But nothing changed except that we all dressed up a bit, leaving the same bastards running everything…I found I was having continually to please the sort of people I’d always hated when I was a child. This began to bring me back to reality.
Indicating that his association with the anti-war cause was deliberate rather than accidental, he also said:
I was also pleased when the movement in America took up “Give peace a chance” because I had written it with that in mind really... I felt an obligation even then to write a song that people would sing in the pub or on a demonstration. That is why I would like to compose songs for the revolution now.
Much of the vitriol directed at Lennon for his politics came in the form of racist and sexist hostility to his partner, Yoko Ono. He had no time for these people: “Also when Yoko and I got married, we got terrible racialist letters – you know, warning me that she would slit my throat. Those mainly came from army people living in Aldershot. Officers.” Instead, he acknowledged the way in which Ono had influenced him as a very positive thing:
And the women are very important too, we can’t have a revolution that doesn’t involve and liberate women. It’s so subtle the way you’re taught male superiority. It took me quite a long time to realise that my maleness was cutting off certain areas for Yoko.
She’s a red hot liberationist and was quick to show me where I was going wrong, even though it seemed to me that I was just acting naturally. That’s why I’m always interested to know how people who claim to be radical treat women. Working Class HeroAs soon as you’re born they make you feel small,
By giving you no time instead of it all,
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be. They hurt you at home and they hit you at school,
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool,
Till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be. When they’ve tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career,
When you can’t really function you’re so full of fear,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be. Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free,
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be. There’s room at the top they are telling you still,
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folks on the hill,
A working class hero is something to be.
A working class hero is something to be.
If you want to be a hero well just follow me,
If you want to be a hero well just follow me. Diane Fieldes |
Home