Change My Mind: John Lennon

Today’s Take: The 40th anniversary of his murder is the perfect time to remember John Lennon was a thieving, over-rated piece of shit as a musician, and was an even worse human being who got what he deserved.

The Argument: Today marks the 40th anniversary of the murder of John Lennon. If I had my way, Mark David Chapman, the man who killed him, would be on a postage stamp. Just think about the decades of whiny, hypocritical psychobabble he saved us from. The downside of that day in December 1980 when Chapman put several .38-caliber slugs into the ex-Beatle was it turbo-charged the misguided hero worship of that fraudulent British shit-loaf.

I never understood the level of hero worship this guy got until I took a hard look at the worshippers. You would be hard-pressed to find a bigger collection of unwashed, brain-dead dipshits. I understand people will deify just about any asshole, but nothing infuriates me more than the Lennon-o-philes who ignore such blatantly obvious facts about the guy simply to keep pushing the idea he was some sort of savior. The best part is the Lennon apologists make him out to be some modern-day Jesus, but offer a blanket excuse for all the shit I’m about to point out…”Well, he was only human.”

There’s a special dichotomy in that level of stupidity, but it runs rampant in the mentality of the filthy-ass hippie-types that love this jerk-off. My favorite example is every long-haired dim-bulb on earth who made Lennon out to be the patron saint of the “Peace” movement completely ignored the fact he was a seriously violent guy who is arguably responsible for the deaths of two people. Lennon even admitted to his own violent tendencies, yet he’s still the “poster-child” of the “peace and love” crowd. Take the following line in the Beatles’ song “Getting Better” for example:

“I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved . . .”

~John Lennon

That line came from “Mr. Peace and Love” himself, and he expanded on that in a magazine interview just before his death.

“It is a diary form of writing. All that “I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved” was me. I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically — any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn’t express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women.”

– John Lennon from a 1980 Playboy Interview.

That’s not all. Author Larry Kane wrote a book called Ticket to Ride in which he tells a tale from 1964 when Lennon took exception to a question asked by a journalist and slapped her straight across the face. The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein had to call in a ton of favors to keep that story out of the press.

But like the late-night info-mercials say…just wait, there’s more! Albert Goldman wrote another book called The Lives of John Lennon in which he alleges Lennon caused the death of an unborn baby he’d conceived with Yoko Ono when he kicked her in the belly during an argument in 1968.

That story becomes easier to believe once you consider that in the very same book, Lennon admits to suffering from extreme guilt when his friend and original Beatles’ bassist Stu Sutcliffe died of a brain hemorrhage. Lennon always blamed himself for Sutcliffe’s death because two weeks prior, Sutcliffe and Lennon got into a fight which resulted in Lennon repeatedly kicking Sutcliffe in the head with a steel-toed boot.

It’s pretty hard to sell “Give Peace a Chance” when you have a penchant for kicking people to death. It’s even harder when you love to show the world what a complete hypocrite you are.

John Lennon loved to let the world believe that either Paul McCartney or Yoko Ono was responsible for the break-up of The Beatles, when in fact it was Lennon who announced he was laving the band in September 1969. On top of that, he blamed McCartney for the split, saying he had “taken on an increasingly dominant role.” In actuality, the culprit was Lennon’s increasingly debilitating addiction to heroin, which ultimately led to McCartney’s “dominant role.”

That brings us to a key point here; I’ll come back to the hypocrisy later.. Even before he was a strung-out junk-bag, John Lennon was a piss-poor excuse for a musician. Actually, he was pretty fucking terrible. If you take The Beatles from the beginning, it’s pretty easy to see Lennon is clearly the least important of the group.

Frankly, George was the most important, because with out him the Beatles wouldn’t have a a kick-ass rock band. The guts of that discussion need to wait for another day; the crucial point here is that without George Harrison, the Beatles likely would have been more like a R&B/Pop…think a 60’s British version of Daryl Hall & John Oates.

And John Lennon was definitely “Oates.”

If you doubt that, point to any of those shredding John Lennon guitar solos. Wait…what? You can’t find one? That’s because there aren’t any. George Harrison and Paul McCartney did all the instrumental “heavy-lifting;” Lennon was relegated to playing the most basic rhythm parts. Other than the occasional interesting vocal, you could fill Wembley Stadium with guys who could have offered more musically.

Even worse, as a songwriter he was a thief because he possessed only moderate talent. It doesn’t take long listening to his early work to realize most of it is a straight-up rip-off of Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly. Later, he tried cribbing Bob Dylan’s song-writing stylings into what The Beatles were doing, but being instrumentally challenged, he found that an exercise in “square peg/round hole.” Not to mention, he suffered from a complete absence of Dylan’s mastery of the unique form of poetry that is writing lyrics. That gets incrementally worse by the “Sgt. Pepper” days, when Lennon’s lyrics become little more than typical hippie bullshit; an exercise in drug-fueled babble because his main creative force was shooting smack with his even more multi-talentless girlfriend. Seriously, just try to read the lyrics to “I am the Walrus” or “Come Together” and offer an explanation of them that makes sense to anybody other than a patchouli-reeking ENG 102 teaching assistant.

Speaking of “Come Together,” that’s another prime example of Lennon’s thievery because he was forced to settle a lawsuit out of court for lifting big pieces from an old Chuck Berry song.

That brings us back to Lennon’s hypocrisy. The very same asshole who beseeched us to ang “imagine no possessions” was a multi-millionaire and lived a commensurate life-style. The guy’s primary living space was in a top-buck Central Park-adjacent apartment building. If that weren’t enough, the same dickweed extolling the virtues of “imagine no religion” couldn’t get enough of every spiritual and New Age fad which bounced down the pike, including Hindu meditation, I-Ching, and various incarnations of astrology. The pièce de résistance comes from the fact the very same guy who sang “all you need is love” and praised having “nothing to kill or die for” probably kicked two people to death, including his own unborn child. He also helped finance and publicize violent radical groups like the Black Panthers.

The beauty of everything I’ve mentioned here is it so wonderfully wraps up all the detestable qualities of that dead British fraud and all those who deified him. John Lennon was the embodiment of preaching ideals to which he either couldn’t or wouldn’t live by; a trait shared by a large percentage of the hippie shit-bags who worship him. Not living what you preach is simply not forgivable.

But I can forgive being a mediocre musician…the world is full of those; shit, I’m one myself. But unlike John Lennon, I never kicked at least two people to death. When you’re a thieving hypocrite who killed two innocent people, the argument can be made that taking a chest full of .38-caliber slugs might just be “Instant Karma.”

Change my mind.

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