Not every song is going to have the same kind of impact that an artist wants it to.
No matter how much work is put into it, there are bound to be some people who simply don’t get it or want to make something that’s a little more radio-friendly, but the idea of an entire audience turning their back on someone like John Lennon feels insane when looking at his 1970s output.
In the midst of The Beatles’ breakup, it was already clear that some fans were being forced to choose sides between two musical loves. Although the band had simply grown apart and didn’t feel the need to play together anymore, the fact that Paul McCartney announced the split before anyone had wanted the information out there made him Public Enemy No. 1 for both his bandmates and the rest of the fans that felt like he was the one that wanted to see the whole thing end.
And while Macca’s first albums were bound to be an acquired taste for people who only wanted to hear a sequel to Abbey Road, Lennon actually got back up on his feet with ease. The experimental albums were never going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but everything from Plastic Ono Band to Imagine had absolutely beautiful songs across them, with Lennon peeling back the layers of his mind and even finding some time to take a few swipes at his old bandmates in the process.
But being introspective about his problems was only one facet of what Lennon wanted to do. The entire reasoning behind staging those experimental albums and bed-ins was to protest the horrors going on half a world away, and if ‘Power to The People’ and ‘Instant Karma’ were steps in the right direction, then surely an album all about the ongoing problems with the world would be his path to stardom, right?
Well, it could have been had he not started off with the wrong single. Although the phrase was coined by Yoko Ono, Lennon’s decision to name a track ‘Woman is the ****** of the World’ was always going to cause a stir. Lennon may have been using it as a way to enact change, but when he found out that the rest of the world wasn’t on board with him using that word, he started to reel back on his decision.
Looking back, Lennon didn’t seem to regret what he said but did have a few qualms about how Some Time in New York City was perceived, saying, “I was disappointed at the reaction to the last album. Over here, they banned it and made such a fuss about the songs, and it was never played because they said it insulted blacks, which it didn’t at all. I know a lot of Black people, and they know what’s going on.” The album itself wasn’t an all-out dud, but it’s easy to see where the arguments against the one song are coming from.
Because if you look between the lines, it’s easy to see what Lennon was talking about. There were a lot of feminist issues that he was standing up for with the song, and many of the sentiments can still be felt to this day, but it gets to be a little bit harder to defend if all Lennon is doing is using a racial slur as a way to depict the plight of women everywhere, even if he didn’t mean it in that context.
While the first single did cast a dark cloud over the rest of the album before it even came out, it was much easier to enjoy songs like ‘New York City’ and ‘Luck of the Irish’ when heard in a better context. But as it stands, this is the first time that Lennon tried to channel his inner revolutionary and was met with either indifference or contempt from members of his audience.
