Debating John Lennon’s Legacy
Years ending in '0 are always big ones for John Lennon fans, as they mark both the anniversary of his birth and that of his death. Two months ago Lennon would have turned 70, and next week it will have been 30 years since his untimely murder in New York. This Newsweek piece talks about why Lennon still matters, and for an odd few paragraphs links him to contemporary reality TV stars:
Lennon was hardly the Paris Hilton of his era, but by showing that stars could mine their fame for inspiration and bend it to their will, he may have helped, in some small way, to make Paris Hilton possible. When he and Yoko posed nude on the cover of Two Virgins, or released Film No. 5, a 52-minute slow-motion shot of Lennon’s face, or held a press conference in Vienna concealed inside a large bag, they were basically doing what Hilton did on The Simple Life: co-opting their renown as both a promotional tool and a topic of their work. Their savviest stunt—inviting a bunch of salivating reporters into their honeymoon suites in Amsterdam and Montreal, where they did nothing but talk about peace for two weeks—instantly set the standard for celebrity activism in the mass-media age. “We knew our honeymoon was going to be public anyway, so we decided to use it to make a statement,” Lennon said in 1980. When Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt lured the paparazzi to Namibia for the birth of their daughter Shiloh, then donated the proceeds from the sale of her baby pictures to a local charity, they were pulling a John and Yoko.
The author's point is that Lennon's celebrity entwined with his musical output- he was the first person to use his celebrity consciously rather than simply embrace or evade it. The comparison between Lennon and Jolie/Pitt is somewhat apt, but I don't buy the connection to Paris Hilton or to the stars of The Hills (whom the author alludes to earlier). The latter category have fame without any commensurate accomplishment- they are simply famous because somebody decided to make them famous. Paris Hilton is famous because at some point a television executive thought people would be amused to follow around a ditzy rich girl who partied a lot and occasionally did something naughty. Fifty years from now, nobody will be listening to her music or watch her movies and she will essentially disappear like trinkets in a time capsule.
I think critics often exaggerate the extent of Lennon's activist celebrity era- this period really only lasted a few years, from say the bed-ins with Yoko to the release of Imagine. As the Newsweek piece notes Lennon retreated to an extraordinary degree in the mid to late 70s, living an almost mundane, ordinary life in New York. Lennon's accessibility during this time unfortunately enabled his assassination.
There's a tendency for people to judge the Beatles by their iconography rather than their musical and cultural output- every sentient creature in the Western world is familiar with their smiling early appearances on TV even if they aren't familiar with most of the Beatles' music. Yet the Beatles were such a good band due to the years they toiled in obscurity, playing all-night saloons in Hamburg's red-light district or in musty little clubs in Liverpool. The real cousin to Hilton and the rest would be the Monkees, not the Beatles.
Lennon's actual legacy is his music. When I listen to the White Album on my Ipod, sitting in my apartment in New York and reading the newspaper, it feels as fresh and timeless as any great work of art. To me, listening to the Beatles is akin to reading great literature or gazing at a great painting- it is an endlessly enriching experience. To others, the Beatles doesn't do it for them, but to argue that the key legacy of Lennon is his relationship to fame misses the point.
