[essay:] John Lennon, Tweatle

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Essay - Dr L.P.Nicolas

ABOUT THE SONG

My cantankerous half-brother E.P. Nicolas went on record on this site two weeks ago disapproving of what he sees as the grandiose inflating of trivial personal events by Lennon in his song "The Ballad of John and Yoko," so I am pleased to be able to redress the balance—and continue a lifelong competition with that pedantic windbag with whom I regrettably share a quarter of my genes-- to discuss the irreproachably great piece by Lennon presented on this site this week.

One of my earliest memories is watching John singing "All You Need Is Love" while chewing gum and singing at the same time. I have not undertaken detailed research but believe the vocal on "All You Need Is Love" is the greatest to have been performed while chewing gum.

The song stands in a tradition of works intended explicitly as propaganda but which, due to the irrepressibly creative mental habits of the artist, wind up as bona fide works of art despite arguably shallow intentions.

My favorite example is "The Possessed" (sometimes rendered as "The Devils" in English), undertaken by Dostoevsky as a piece of Slavophile propaganda warning Russian readers of the dangers of the proto-Bolshevik movement developing amongst some members of the urban intelligentsia in the 1860s and ‘70's.

Being Dostoevsky, he couldn't help himself… before long, purely good and purely evil symbolic characters got complicated, psychologically plausible human ambiguities came increasingly into play, and a magnificent and complicated work of art emerged instead.

I'd nominate "The Star-Spangled Banner," Leni Riefenstahl's "Olympia," and W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939" in this tradition as well.

The American national anthem places the listener on the deck of a warship amid frightening naval battle imagery and begins and ends intriguingly with questions—‘can you see it?' and ‘does it yet wave'? Are we vanquished or triumphant? (And can we possibly sing those absurdly high "red glare" notes in the bridge?)

The notorious German filmmaker Riefenstahl had a brief, and a budget, explicitly for promoting the National Socialist agenda, and wound up changing the language of cinema forever, in a work as beautiful as it is appalling and contemptible.

And the Auden poem, which sets out to call European civilization on the carpet for producing Nazism, ends up so ambiguous in its preachiness that Auden himself sought to prevent it from being anthologized in its original version.

Lennon called himself "a revolutionary artist," maintaining that his songs "Power To the People," "Give Peace a Chance" and "All You Need Is Love" were intended as propaganda—‘message' tunes.

And all right, he scored high on the propaganda meter with "Power" and "Peace," but with "Love" his artistic nature triumphed in spite of himself.

Lennonesque wit begins before the lyric does, with an impudent quote from "La Marseillaise," perhaps the bloodiest of all national anthems. The verse, mainly in 7/4 time, presents a series of propositions that get odder the more you try to think them through. Lennon's debt here is more to Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear than to Maxim Gorky and Abbie Hoffman.

It does sort of make sense, there are plenty of things that I can do (that I am logistically able to do) which can't be done (are not permitted)

The structure of the song is complex. The main body (the verse) is in a 7/4 time signature with two measures of 7/4, one of 8/4, then back to 7/4 with the intro background vocals repeatedly singing "Love, love, love", over the top of which enter Lennon's lyrics:

By contrast, the chorus is simple: "All you need is love", in 4/4 time repeated against the horn response but, each chorus has only seven measures as opposed to the usual eight, and the seventh is 6/4, then back to the verse in 7/4.

When a hit song is in 7/4 you know something special is going on: "Money" by Pink Floyd, "Solsbury Hill" by Peter Gabriel, and "2+2=5" by Radiohead are on this very short list.

"All You Need Is Love" could not possibly have flowed from McCartney's pen. Paul told his friend and biographer Barry Miles that because of the relative security and warmth of his upbringing, he did not feel the need explicitly to shout slogans nor to air personal matters in his songs, preferring to disguise the original emotions with the sorts of artifice he prized in predecessors like Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart.

Whereas, Macca observed, John tended to treat his experiences of love and sadness as world-altering discoveries that needed to be broadcast in unalloyed advertisements: "Love is touch! Touch is love!" "I can't explain/ so much pain/ I could never show it/ My mummy's dead"- and so on.

And so when given the chance to perform a song on the first live global television link ("Our World," broadcast via satellite in June 1967), Lennon chose a sentiment as moving and universal as it is untrue: "All You Need Is Love." This is a sentiment fully dependent on an advanced civilization that enables its members to take basic needs of food and shelter for granted in order to be other than grimly, hilariously incorrect.

But then the magical power of art kicks in.

Because this song exists, even a hardened cynic like myself has a mental companion for life, melodiously reminding him— say, at the sight of his lovely child playing in a fountain, or at the deathbed of his father— that not only can you "learn to be you in time," but that "it's easy"— which is what that wonderful saxophone line seems to affirm, every time they sing the hook, and these old eyes well up once again.

As they do when I listen to the understated version by Nikki Gregoroff. The simple but moving ukulele part played by the legendary Ira Siegal begins with a quote from the anthem of Nikki's birthplace. The sloganeering melts away as she repeats the sentiment that we all wish to be true.

Essay - Dr. E.P.Nicolas

ABOUT THE TWEET

I'm not going to lie to you: I never cared for the glorified Tweet that was "The Ballad of John and Yoko." It was Dave's idea that I write about it.

Reluctantly I revisited this distastefully self-regarding diary-entry of a studio quickie, a tedious travelogue of the famous first-person narrator's real-life efforts to marry his current ladyfriend and then to pretend to find himself accidentally at the center of the resulting media event— and to be suffering— suffering!— in anticipation of being 'crucified' by all that publicity.

(So concerned with the threat of crucifixion was Lennon that he rushed Paul forthwith into the studio, Ringo and George being for the moment unavailable, to immortalize recent events in a 3-chord ditty apparently based on the riff from The Coasters' "Poison Ivy." And released it as a single.)

I endured once more the repetition of its insufficiently ironic chorus, which gives a shout-out to fellow-celebrity "Christ" not once but twice in the space of four lines.

Why does it merit discussion at all?

Because of the precedent it sets: the lyric sounds like a trivial blog entry— an over-sharing Tweet whose only claim to interestingness lies in the fame of its author.

The first 'did-you-mean-to-press-"reply all"?' in history.

Montaigne, grand patriarch of the essay form, tried to be interesting; posterity does not preserve his account of his honeymoon.

And Van Gogh, in his often soaringly illuminating letters to his brother, included a lot of prosaic detail ('running low on titanium white again'), but he wasn't writing that stuff to us.

Lennon himself— and this of course is why the "Ballad" is so disheartening— had already set the bar of pop-lyric interestingness quite high in scads of earlier songs that were framed as first-person accounts, but which quickly rise to the level of the well-worth-saying.

For instance, "Girl" (1966) which, beginning with "Is there anybody going to listen to my story, all about the girl who came to stay" rapidly becomes trenchant and universal.

"The smart one" seemed able to do that sort of thing as readily as rolling out of bed. More readily, in fact, in Lennon's case, as he was well known to roll only with great difficulty out of bed.

Why then was he, a plainly extraordinary artist, choosing to subject the world to this ballad? A 'ballad' in the early sense of the word: straight, allegedly factual narration of events. Most famous surviving ballads are accounts of dramatic, usually lethal, events in the lives of aristocrats, sung for the entertainment of commoners. And so "The B of J & Y" is firmly in that tradition, except that nothing dramatic happens.

What had happened to John's imagination, and to his wickedly canny sense of what was and was not interesting?

Well, some figures in history appear to be born bellwethers. Who, at the time of John and Yoko's media-event nuptials, could have predicted that the society of the future might come to suffer from mass confusion about the distinction between individual private lives and the realm of culture, news and art?

By the time of "The Ballad of John and Yoko" (1969), Lennon appears to have come to believe that it mattered to the world what he had had for lunch. And from the point of view of the gutter press, it did.

The lyric faithfully reports this: "the men from the press," earning their bread by pretending to be fascinated by the quotidiana of Beatledom so as to feed the new mass audience for celebrity gossip, dance a lopsided decathlon pas-de-deux with the coy, shrewd, and protesting-too-much rock star, who has become a master of getting himself photographed and scribbled about while complaining about it.

This is now an essential trait of the modern celebrity.

Lennon's actual celebrity made his every movement seem newsworthy, and today, vicarious and imaginary celebrity can make what YOU do seem worth telling the planet about.

You don't have to be a professional historian to know that hindsight is 20/20. With the help of hindsight's enhancing optical power I am routinely able to understand events— say,
a) an oil spill.
b) a church scandal.
or
c) the falling-out between Roger and Dave.

as having been, in effect, inevitable given preceding circumstances and conditions—
a) lax regulation, Dick Cheney, a petroleum-based society.
b) a history of papal secrecy, the doctrine of celibacy for clergy, the inherent mendacity of large religious institutions.
or
c) the combustible nature of affinities of genius.

Yet of course this is a notorious fallacy: in every case things could have turned out otherwise.

Still, some instances make you wonder.

The Beatles have often had ascribed to them various special anointings from Destiny. But of course this again is retroactive, '20/20,' faux wisdom. More ridiculous claims have been made for the Beatles than for the waters of Lourdes. But while a McCartney would in any age have been a reliable font of innovation, synthesis and delightfulness, Lennon is hard to resist as a figure of Fortune's favorite for his historical moment.

His "Beatles are more popular than Jesus" remark, to which the Christ business in "Ballad" elliptically refers, reported right round a quaintly scandalized world, seemed to have raced right out front of the Sixties' parade of cascading secularism and irreverence; similarly, the progression of his drug use seems now a microcosm of the adventurous-to-decadent trajectory of the whole Western history of "partying" from the Sixties to the Eighties.

Not for nothing did the original fame monster David Bowie exploit the totemic power of the sound of Lennon's voice in his hit song "Fame."

Pop music, like fascism (only nicer), couldn't have existed without technologies of mass communication, and it was through this newly near-global matrix of media that the Beatles' charming artistry propelled pop music from pastime to Culture. Unfortunately this left John, still after all a young man, with the mistaken impression that since he could say it and the world would listen, it followed that it was worth saying.

And so let it be a caution to all of us postmodern-day microcelebrities, each of us blasting and Tweeting and blogging away at the helms of our own little PR juggernaut machines, that the experience of actual celebrity ultimately persuaded Lennon— you can see it in his increasingly solipsistic work from "The Ballad of John and Yoko" onward — that innovation and imagination just weren't as important as what he called (in "God," from 'Plastic Ono Band') "reality," as in:

"I don't believe in Beatles / I just believe in me / Yoko and me / and that's reality."

I don't care who you are, that sort of reality just isn't as interesting as art.

Now will you all please go write a nice poem?

I'm delighted to have elicited the riposte below from the great singer/songwriter Jonathan Spottiswoode, my sometime neighbor in the East Village who wrote this from London:

…except for one thing: it's all about execution. i love that song! it's so catchy, off the cuff, unusual and brilliantly performed. the difference between a self-indulgent vanity project and something timeless (okay that may be a bit much) lies simply in execution. lennon gets away with it because he does it so well. in addition he genuinely was a bona fide cultural phenomenon not just a temporary celebrity. and there's still that self-mockery in it as well. won't convert you i know. we're on trickier ground with "don't believe in beatles," but then we're onto the debate about whether art is about romantic self-expression or about expressing something universal while being entertaining at the same time. i have it both ways. i am entertained by lennon making me feel that he's being honest, that he still doesn't really care about the audience but about expressing where he is on that day. this isn't masochism on my part. it's a deep pleasure in the face of honesty - in this case expressed less artfully but still somehow compellingly. one of my favorite of his earlier lines is "feel so suicidal even hate my rock and roll [from 'Yer Blues']" it remains one of the most reassuring lines i've ever heard. something to remind myself of when i'm down on my music.

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