Imagine That

Because of my ongoing commentary on the election campaign, I'm a little late in commenting on the seventieth anniversary of the birth of John Lennon. While I did comment on Ringo Starr on the day he turned seventy, I did not comment on John Lennon on the day he would have turned seventy. I think those operative words - "would have" - were the earlier reason for my negligence. The fact is, celebrating John Lennon's life while knowing it was cut short is kind of depressing.

There is a lot to celebrate, though. As both the most socially aware and most socially introverted of the Beatles, John Lennon saw things in ways others couldn't fathom. He had grown up alienated from a mother he knew as a friend and raised by his aunt, while he never knew his father. He developed a healthy skepticism toward fame and celebrity, yet took advantage of his own fame to advance his artistic visions and promote different ways of thinking about social issues. Much to his own surprise, John Lennon came to symbolize all of the positive aspects of his generation. He stood for hope, life, brotherhood, and understanding, and it was reflected in his music, from early Beatles singles to later Beatles tunes such as "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "All You Need Is Love" to his solo hits, such as "Imagine."

Sadly, a lot of what Lennon stood for is in short supply these days, and Western civilization has been in this interminable funk for quite some time. The sense of possibility Lennon espoused has long since diminished, and the continuing rise of sociopolitical conservatism in America only underscores that fact. It makes sense that no one has been able to project a positive message the way Lennon and the Beatles did through music, as popular music has grown cynical with each passing year. The rise of MTV in the eighties and its value of style over substance had a lot do with that, coupled with record company and broadcasting company mergers, the co-opting and neutralizing of progressive influences by the mainstream (which led to Kurt Cobain's suicide), and the fragmentation of pop along lines of race and class. And that's not to mention the manufactured pop acts designed for easy profit. N'Sync was the most popular group of the late nineties, but really, does anyone listen to N'Sync anymore? And does Justin Timberlake, as a solo artist, speak for a generation?

Well, people still listen to the Beatles, and even N'Sync faced competition from the Beatles when the Fab Four's 1 album of number-one hits was released in 2000. It pleases and saddens me that people still listen to the Beatles as if they were still a working band. It shows how relevant their message is - Paul McCartney pointed out that their songs never told anyone to leave their parents or cause trouble - but it also shows how no one has been able to come up with a new and equally hopeful message. Pop divas are too busy serving up slutty showmanship. Rappers seem to thrive on everything being in a state of decline. Some performers have tried to co-opt Lennon's legacy by advocating sociopolitically liberal causes, but their schtick does not ring true. They go after relatively safe causes that sound like they've been focus-group tested. And if any performers have a genuinely Lennonesque or Beatlesque message, they're not going to get airplay on corporate radio stations - either because they're demographically irrelevant or their ideas are too offensive to the big media establishments who run the airwaves today. Queen's Freddie Mercury, pointing to the unintelligible banality of pop radio, once famously declared that all we heard was Radio Gaga. Now all we hear is Lady Gaga.

Even if we had a music scene and a sense cultural possibility in 2010 like we had in 1964, the Beatles would still be relevant, as their music transcended the sixties. The fact that we're still upholding the Beatles with so much relevance and reverence in an age when the quality of popular music is so diminished - at a time when it seems that all we need is fear - also illustrates quite clearly how much our culture has not changed since John Lennon last walked among us in 1980.

Time magazine, in eulogizing Lennon that December, declared that a bright dream had faded. To which I would add, it's unlikely to shine again.