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Thursday, December 08, 2005

On not crying for John Lennon
Posted by Jill | 6:36 AM

Anyone who's feeling sad on this 25th anniversary of the murder of John Lennon might not want to read further.

Nostalgia for Lennon has been on the rise the last few weeks, with this milestone anniversary approaching. I suppose that any time a high-profile individual is murdered, this to be expected. But I think that if you're crying today over John Lennon, 25 years on, you need to look at exactly what you're crying about. I suspect it has less to do with grief than more to do with the recognition that those 25 years mean you are no longer young, as you were 25 years ago. And if you ARE still grieving for John Lennon, unless you knew him personally, may I suggest that perhaps it's time to get some help?

Perhaps I'm the wrong person to write about Lennon today, because John Lennon was never my Beatle of Choice. As a pre-adolescent in the mid-1960's, you could tell what kind of person a girl was by which Beatle she liked. The philosophical girls were George girls. The geeky girls were Ringo girls. The angry politicos-to-be were John girls. Me? I was all of the above, but I wanted to fit in, so I was a Paul girl -- Paul McCartney, he of the cute smile and the big round eyes and the puppyish demeanor -- which he retains to this day, even now that he is, as Anna Quindlen once dubbed him, the World's Oldest Living Cute boy.

I've always believed that Lennon-McCartney was greater than the sum of its parts. If you look at Paul McCartney's post-Beatles career, it's really quite undistinguished. And if you look at John Lennon's post-Beatles career, well, it's some of the most pretentious, self-important, self-indulgent horseshit ever recorded by someone not named "Patti Smith." John Lennon was the neurotic one, the one with the Oedipal complex, who only began working out his neurosis after he found the mother he'd missed so desperately in Yoko Ono -- and people paid for the privilege of listening.

McCartney's musical roots seem to come from the Edwardian dance hall. At best, he's a modern-day Tin Pan Alley tunesmith. Lennon's musical influence is the blues -- the mournful-but-angry music of emotional catharsis. Each of them served to tamp down the worst musical instincts of the other, and together they wrote some of the most durable songs of the late 20th century. Separately, much of their work is average at best.

As an activist, Lennon was only a performance artist. If you look at today's musical activists -- Willie Nelson putting together Farm Aid, or Bono working directly with the World Bank, John Lennon's lecturing to others while hardly leaving the house seems like the worst kind of posturing -- right up there with the preposterously wealthy Sting, with his six kids leaving their footprints on the planet, singing songs that tell us to "learn to be happy with less". Lennon wasn't an activist, he was an armchair quarterback. Writing the songs that make the whole world march doesn't make you a leader. Just because you sing the anthems may make you an inspiration -- but it doesn't make you a leader.

It's ironic that the song you're going to hear most today is Imagine -- the song for which Lennon is best remembered, and one of the least cynical efforts by this most cynical of artists.

The murder in cold blood of a person in front of his wife and child is appalling no matter when it occurs. And the image of John Lennon bleeding to death in a police car is sickening to this day. 25 years ago people grieved for the loss of the dream that someday the Beatles might reunite and once again create the magic they did in their heyday. Some grieved for a man whose work resonated with them. And we all were horrified that life could be so random -- even for John Lennon.

25 years later, most of us who remember that day can no longer delude ourselves that we're still young. And in all the remembrances of John Lennon today, what few people will admit is that it's no longer John Lennon for whom we grieve, it's the loss of that youth -- the only thing we know how to be -- that we mourn.
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