Marxism Today January 1981 23

John Lennon by Simon Frith

'I read the news today, oh boy ...' 'The idea', as Lennon once told Red Mole, 'is his sense of loss. He rang off without an 'Death of a Hero' it said in big black letters not to comfort people, not to make them feel answer and I watched the television tributes across the front of the Daily Mirror, and if I better but to make them feel worse.' and tried to make sense of a sadness that was hadn't known already I'd have expected a comfort people, not to make them feel better real enough but according to the politics of story about a policeman or soldier in but to make them feel worse.' culture I usually pursue seemed somehow Northern Ireland. The media response to The Mirror, its populist instincts currently shameful and self-indulgent. Why should I John Lennon's death was overwhelming as sharpened by Thatcherism, got the mood feel this way about a pop star? what began as a series of private griefs was most right. John Lennon was certainly the The answer began to push through the orchestrated by disc jockeys and sub-editors nearest thing to a hero I've ever had, but obituaries. John Lennon was a hero because into a national event, but it was difficult to though I knew what this meant in fan terms he fought the usual meanings of pop stardom, decide what all this mourning meant. The (buying Beatles records at the moment of because he resisted the usual easy media themselves seemed less slick than release, dreaming about my own Lennon manipulations, and in the newspaper usual, more ragged in their attempts to friendship — 'I'll never meet him now,' said editorials, the radio interviews, the specially respond to a genuinely popular shock. What one friend when she heard the news) I'd illustrated supplements with full colour came through was not just Beatle-nostalgia never really stopped to think what the souvenir portrait, the struggle continued — but a specific sadness at the loss of John pleasure I got from Lennon's music had to do everyone was still claiming John Lennon as Lennon's Beatle qualities — qualities that with heroism. 'What does it mean?' called their friend, their cultural symbol. As Bryan never did fit easily into Fleet Street ideology. another long-ago friend who knew I'd share McAllister put it in his Guardian cartoon, 24 January 1981 Marxism Today

'One has only to look at the people who claim as Ray Gosling puts it, were 'tidied up into claimed American music for themselves, and to have known John Lennon to understand teenagers. The youngsters sang one good the most striking sign of this confidence was perfectly why he went to live in America.' As rock song and the next moment they were in John Lennon's voice. The Beatles sang John Lennon put it himself in 1971, 'One had pantomime and all-round entertainment on American music in a Liverpool accent — to completely humiliate oneself to be what the pier.' Cliff Richard called his 1960 nasal rather than throaty, detached, passion the Beatles were, and that's what I resent. I autobiography It's Great To Be Young and by expressed with a conversational cynicism. didn't know, I didn't foresee. It happened bit then his way of being young seemed the by bit, gradually, until this complete 'natural' teenage way to be. Lennon's genius craziness is surrounding you, and you're John Lennon didn't have such a great Lennon's genius is usually described by doing exactly what you don't want to do with youth. For a start he lived in Liverpool, a reference to his song writing ability, but it people you can't stand — the people you cosmopolitian port with musical advantages was his voice that always cut through. He hated when you were ten.' conveyed a controlled, forthright intimacy The most repulsive of the Lennon friends that enabled him to rock out in early days ('I knew him quite well') was Harold Wilson with a barely suppressed fury and in later, who explained on The World At One that he post-Beatle days to express remorse and gave John an MBE 'because he got the kids optimism equally grippingly. Beatle fans off the streets.' 'But wasn't he a bad 'knew' Lennon above all through this singing example,' snapped Robin Day. 'Didn't he voice, and perhaps all his obituarists needed encourage youngsters to take drugs?' 'Ah to say was that he was the only rock singer yes,' agreed Wilson, 'he did go wrong, later.' who ever sang 'we' convincingly. Certainly, Lennon went wrong and it seemed then, when the Beatles finally had their and it still seems to me now, that a Beatle extraordinary success story, they were going wrong was an important political event different from other pop stars. Their qualities — John Lennon knew just what sort of hero were not those of showbiz — they came Harold Wilson wanted him to be: across as cynical, arrogant, restless. Beatle Keep you doped with religion and sex and trappings came to represent an attitude as TV well as the usual fan fervour, and the Beatles And you think you're so clever and classless appealed to a mass audience that had and free previously been uneasy in its relationship to But you're still fucking peasants as far as I (American R&B records could be heard in pop — sixth form, student youth. The can see Liverpool whatever the metropolitan pop Beatles were the first English pop group that A working class hero is something to be. industry's successes in cleaning up white rock didn't insult the intelligence. They made an 'n'roll) and unique material opportunities — 'underdog' sound (to use Hobsbawm's There's room at the top they are telling you Liverpool had clubs where groups were description), pilfered from black American still employed to play grown-up gutsy music. sources, and retained a grittiness, an But first you must learn how to smile as you There was a public night life, an aggressive awkwardness that couldn't quite be kill way of leisure that had survived television swallowed up in commercialism. If you want to be like the folks on the hill and the rise of family consumption. The John Lennon was, in this context, the most A working class hero is something to be. Beatles' first manager, Allan Williams, obviously gritty, intelligent Beatle — the one explains the Liverpool Sound in terms of with edge. He was street sharp as much by Yes, a working class hero is something to be gangs and fights and territorial claims — the choice as necessity. He was a grammar school If you want to be a hero just follow me Beatles always had to stand for something, boy who for all his rebelliousness drew on a If you want to be a hero well just follow me. and they learnt to 'entertain' in grammar school boy's intellectual arrogance; ('Working class hero': © Northern Songs Ltd) circumstances far removed from the London he was an art school student who retained an Palladium. Whether in Liverpool or art school student's radical cultural 'You know it ain't easy . ..' Hamburg, the music had to be loud and hard ambitions; he was a bohemian who had John Lennon was a 1950s not a 1960s — there was no space for subtlety or self-pity. learned to scoff at 'nowhere' people in teenager. He started playing rock'n'roll in Equipment was poor, songs were built round Hamburg's Reeperbahn. It was Lennon who 1956, the year of Suez, but the music fed his the combined beat of drums, bass and leapt more quickly (more desperately?) than sense of adult rottenness in a more personal rhythm guitar (Lennon's own pivotal role), the other Beatles at the unfolding possibilities way — rock'n'roll was a sound made to round the combined voices of Lennon and of 1960s rock and youth culture, and the accompany struggles at home and school, McCartney. The Liverpool noise was hoarse importance of the Beatles in 1966-8 was not struggles against the insinuating pull to a and harsh, an effect of night after night of that they led any movement, but that they career, to good marks and respectability. long, unrelieved sets. joined in. They became (John Lennon in John Lennon became a teddy boy and a While Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard particular) for all their established star status, musician as part of his erratic opposition to were becoming family entertainers, the comrades in the mid-sixties 'liberation' of the expected grateful conformities of a Beatles were learning street survival tactics, leisure and, what's more, Lennon confirmed working class grammar school boy. and when they hit showbiz their arrogance what I believed then and believe still — that it So did hundreds of other 1950s school boys (and their defences) were intact. As is not possible to separate the hippy aspects of — Lennon was 5 days older than Cliff Liverpool's now veteran musicians 1960s youth culture, the drugs and mind Richard — but they mostly lost their edge, remembered after Lennon's death, what was games and reconsiderations of sexuality, softened by showbiz's own notions of inspiring about the Beatles in their Cavern from the political process which fed the steadiness and respectability. 'Teddy boys,' days was the certainty with which they student movement, the anti-war movement, Marxism Today January 1981 25

May 68, the women's movement, gay commitment and by the mid-seventies, liberation. It was thanks to his hippy Lennon, like most of the original rock stars commitments, to his open response to Yoko (especially those isolated in international Ono's anti-pop ideas, that John Lennon stardom), had lost this sense of audience (it survived the Beatles experience to make his took the punks to revive it). Double Fantasy, most political music as the sixties came to an his comeback LP, reflected his withdrawal — end. comfortable and happy in its commitment to his wife and child and friends, it lacked the 'All I want is the truth . . .' political tension that had always come from The week John Lennon was shot the Clash Lennon's nervous need to account for his released a three record album called feelings publicly too. This was just a record to Sandinista! Infuriating, indulgent, exciting, be sold. There was nothing, apparently, to be touching, packed with slogans and said about marriage and fatherhood that simplicities, guns and liberation, images of mattered enough to make Lennon challenge struggle and doubt, it is a wonderful tribute his audience again. to Lennon's influence — a record that would have been impossible to imagine without 'You say you want a revolution ...' him. John Lennon understood the contradictions Lennon believed more intensely than any of capitalist music making, but he didn't other rock performer that rock and roll was a solve them, and he rarely pretended that he form of expression in which anything could be wasn't involved in a money-making process. said, but more importantly (in this sense he 'Imagine no possessions,' he sang, but I never was a 'proto-punk') he believed too that rock thought he could. There was a sloppyness to and roll was the only form of expression in John and Yoko's concept of peace and love which many things — to do with growing up and changing things by thinking them so, working class — could be said. His music that concealed what mattered more — the (like the Clash's) involves an urgent eagerness Lennons had an astute sense of the mass to be heard (an eagerness which often market and how it worked. Their happenings obscured what was actually being said). As a at the end of the 1960s drew not only on Yoko sixteen year-old, John Lennon heard in rock Ono's experience as a performance artist but 'n'roll an anti-authoritarian voice that also on John Lennon's own cynical everywhere else was silenced. This voice — appreciation of the peculiarities of the British essentially youthful — is still heard publicly popular press (Malcolm McClaren applied a only in rock music. Where else, for example, similar combination of cynicism and artiness is the young's own experience of youth to his manipuilation of the media with the Sex unemployment expressed or dealt with Pistols in 1977). 'Thank you very much for except in the music of local bands, on the talking to us,' murmered Andy Peebles occasional independent record on John Peel's humbly at the end of Radio l's final Lennon show? interview. 'Well,' said John, 'We've got a Much of Lennon's musical life was about new record out and I needed to talk to people keeping this voice heard, keeping its edge in Britain.' cutting through the ideological trappings of The central contradiction of John pop, the commercial packaging of the Lennon's artistic life (of any attempt to Beatles, the ceaseless labels of the exploiters. make mass music in a capitalist society) lay in In coping with the trivialising tricks of the the uneasy enthusiasm with which he pop medium, John Lennon faced many of the packaged and sold his dreams. The problem issues addressed later by the punks. Yoko for the working class, he told Red Mole in Ono's position was particularly important in 1971 is that 'they're dreaming someone else's making the problems of Lennon's star dream, it's not even their own.' The problem position explicit. She confronted him with for a working class hero is that he too is the taken-for-granted masculinity of the rock defined in other people's dreams. John 'n'roll voice, she asked questions about Lennon was murdered by a fan, by someone musical meaning itself (particularly about the who pushed the fantasies that pop stardom is rock conventions of spontaneity and realism, 'responsibility' to his audience (in a way that designed to evoke into the appalling stupidity about the 'truth' of the singing voice), she Bob Dylan, for example, did not). This was of a madness. The problem is that the grief focused the problem of the rock relationship apparent not just in collective songs like 'All that the rest of us Beatle fans then felt drew between the public and the private. You Need Is Love' and 'Give Peace A on similar fantasies, and the bitter irony is The energy of Lennon's music had always Chance' but also in Lennon's continuing that John Lennon, whose heroism lay in his come from this tension — between the attempts in the early 1970s to use his song struggle against being a commodity, whose private use of song (as a way of handling writing skills to illuminate everything that was achievement was to express the human origins emotion, a celebration of personal powers) happening around him. of pop ideas, should be trapped, finally, by a and a sense of public duty. Lennon was Public music depends on a material desperate, inhuman, nightmarish version of committed to public music, accepted his community as well as an abstract the pop fan's need to be a star. •