216. John Lennon - Imagine (1971)
















Track Listing

1. Imagine
2. Crippled Inside
3. Jealous Guy
4. It's So Hard
5. I Don't Want To Be A Soldier
6. Give Me Some Truth
7. Oh My Love
8. How Do You Sleep
9. How
10. Oh Yoko!

Review

Artists who die young like Jimmy Hendrix or Nick Drake become incredible legends, the same case happened with John Lennon's solo carrer after he died. Imagine has become the best known album of any of the solo Beatles but in a way it is overrated. This is not to say it is not a good album, it is, but the one with the Plastic Ono Band was actually better alll-round.

Imagine, the track, has become impossible to listen to today with a clear mind, it has been so overused and so misused that it has become the kind of Fluffy Bunny Anthem for Teenagers (FBAT) that gets on my tits majorly. Of course very few of these people have actually listened to the lyrics which show a very particular kind of Utopia, where same kids would have no iPods to listen to their illegally procured Imagine.

Other than that there are some really good tracks here, Jealous guy is nice, although , but Oh Yoko! and Oh My Love are particularly good. What works in this album are the love songs, Lennon has lost a bit of his edge. There is no Working Class Hero here, there is a dig at McCartney and some half-arsed anti-war songs but nothing interesting. Also, this album ends up consisting of the Oasis songbook, from the opening strains of Imagine onwards this was the beast that spawned them, even more directly than The Beatles, so boo! Get it at Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. Oh Yoko!
2. Oh My Love
3. How Can You Sleep
4. Jealous Guy

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia article about Imagine:

The song has also received a number of criticisms due to what some have seen as practiced hypocrisy. Journalist and broadcaster Robert Elms said "Imagine" was written by a "multi-millionaire with one temperature-controlled room in his Manhattan mansion just to store his fur coats." Elvis Costello commented satirically on the song in "The Other Side of Summer," wherein he asks the question, "Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine no possessions'?"

Radio stations in America allegedly have been known to edit the song to remove or obscure the line "and no religion too". One station even went as far as to change the line to "and one religion too"

When the Liverpool airport was named after Lennon, a phrase from the song, "above us only sky", was painted on the ceiling of the terminal. When commenting on this, the panel of Have I Got News for You joked that the baggage handlers' motto was taken from the same song: "Imagine no possessions".

In the Iranian left movement, the song usually relates to Mansoor Hekmat and his party, the Worker-Communist Party of Iran. The WPI plays the song in all of its meetings and demonstrations, and in its TV channel. Within Iran, the song is sometimes sung in protests and symbolizes the left movement, especially the WPI.

John Lennon, Yoko, Chuck Berry and some crazy hippie woman prepare macrobiotic food: