the lester series: thinking the unthinkable about john lennon

the following is an article written by legendary rock-writer Lester Bangs about the death of john lennon. this is part one in a series i intend to do showing some of my personal favorites of lester's work. if you enjoy it, please support his estate and encourage the publishing of future reprints of his work by picking up a copy of one of his books at a local bookstore or online somewhere. and now, without further stall tactics: here is the peice he wrote for john lennon: agree or disagree with it, here it is to chew on.

You always wonder how you will react to these things, but i cna't say i was all that surprised when NBC broke into "the tonight show" to say that john lennon was dead. i always thought he would be the first of the beatles to die, because he was always the one who lived the most on the existential edge, whether by diving knees first into left-wing adventurism or just by shutting up for five years when he decided he didn't have anything much to say; but i had always figured it owuld be by his own hand. that he was merely the latest celebrity to be gunned down by a probably psychotic only underscores the banality sorroudning his death.

look: i don't think i'm insensitive or a curmudgeon. in 1965 john lennon was one of the most important people in the world. it's just that today i feel deeply alienated from rock n roll and what it has meant or could mean, alienated from my fellow men and women and their dreams or aspirations.

i don't know which is more pathetic, the people of my generation who refuse to let their 1960s adolescence die a natuarl death, or the younger ones who will snatcha nd gobble any shred, any scrap of a dream that someone declared over ten years ago. perhaps the younger ones are sadder, because at least my peers have some nostalgic memory of the long-cold embers they're kneeling to blow upon, wheras the kids who have to make do with theings like the beatlemania show are being sold a bill of goods.

i can't mourn john lennon. i didn't know the guy. but i do know that when all is said and done, that's all he was- a guy. the refusal of his fans to ever let him just be that was finally almost as lethal as his "assassin" (and please, let's have no more tlak of this being a "political killing" and don't call him a "rock n roll martyr"). did you watch the tv specials on tuesday night? did you see all those people standing in the street in front of the dakota apartment where lennon lived singing "hey jude"? what do you think the real - cynical, sneeringly sarcastic, witheringly witty and iconoclastic- john lennon would have said about that?

john lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once you've made your mark on history those who can't will be so grateful they'll turn it into a cage for you. those who choose to falsify their memories- to pine for a neverland 1960s that never really happened that way in the first place- insult the retroactive eden they enshrine.

so in this time of gut-curdling sactimonies about ultimate icons, i hope you will bear with my own pontifications long enough to let me say that the beatles were certainly far more than a group of four talented musicians who might even have been the best of their generation. the beatles were most of all a moment. but their generation was not the only generation in history, and to keep turning the gutted lantern of those dreams this way and that in hopes the flame will somehow flicker up again in the eighties is as futile a pursuit as trying to turn lenno's lyrics into poetry. it is for teh moment -not for john lennon the man -that you are mourning, if you are mourning. ultimatley, you are mourning for yourself.

remember that other guy, the old friend of theirs, who once said "don't follow leaders."? well, he was rgiht. but teh very people who took those words and made them into banners were violating the slogan they carried. and they're still doing it today. the beatles did lead but they led with a link. they may have been more popular than jesus, but i don't think they wanted to be the world's religion. that would have cheapened and rendered tawdry what was special and wonderful about them. john lennon didn't want that, or he woudln't have retired for teh last half of the seventies. what happened monday night was only the most extreme extension of all the forces that led him to do so int eh first place.

in some of his last interviews before he died, he said, "what i realized during teh five years away was that when i said the dream is over, i had made a physical break from the beatles, but mentally there is still this big thing on my back about what people expected of me." and: "we were the hip ones of the sixties. but the world is not like the sixties. the whole world has changed." and: "produce your own dream. it's quite possible to do anything...the unknown is what it is. and to be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying about chasing dreams, illusions."

good-bye, baby, and amen.

-lester bangs, los angeles times, 11 december 1980

2004-05-23 | 6:13 p.m.
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