Everybody is aware of John Lennon’s “Think about.”
It floats via Instances Sq. on New Yr’s Eve, performs throughout Olympic ceremonies and fills the air at company galas meant to have fun “unity.” Its melody is tender, its message is straightforward and its premise is seductive: If solely we may think about a world with out possessions, borders, or faith, we’d dwell in peace.
However what’s hanging is how this turned the Lennon music the world remembers — and the way a lot of his genuinely radical work has been forgotten.
Ask most individuals about “Working Class Hero,” “Energy to the Folks,” “Gimme Some Fact” or “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier, Mama,” and also you’ll seemingly get clean stares. These songs burn with class anger, anti-imperialism and contempt for energy. They had been written in the identical period as “Think about,” but they’ve been buried beneath the gentle fog of its sentimental idealism.
In “Working Class Hero,” Lennon dismantles the parable of social mobility, describing how capitalist society trains us to obey, devour and mistake conformity for fulfillment. “They maintain you doped with faith and intercourse and TV,” he spits, “and also you suppose you’re so intelligent and classless and free.” It’s not a dream of peace — it’s an post-mortem of oppression.
In “Energy to the Folks,” he does one thing nearly unthinkable for a pop icon: He calls for collective revolt. It’s a chant, not a prayer — a direct name for working-class empowerment and political participation. And in “Gimme Some Fact,” Lennon channels his fury on the political deceit of the Nixon years: “No short-haired yellow-bellied son of Difficult Dicky gonna mom hubbard soft-soap me.” It’s not well mannered, and that’s the purpose.
After which there’s “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier, Mama,” considered one of Lennon’s most underrated political statements. Constructed round a grinding, repetitive groove, it’s much less a music than an act of refusal — a mantra towards each establishment that turns individuals into devices of energy and battle. “I don’t wanna be a soldier, I don’t wanna die,” he wails, then widens the rejection: “I don’t wanna be a lawyer or a liar.” The repetition turns into defiance itself — a protest towards being molded, conscripted or outlined by a system that sees human beings as roles to fill, not lives to dwell. It’s the sound of exhaustion was resistance.
These songs confront the listener; “Think about” comforts them. One is a hammer, the opposite a lullaby. And naturally, it’s the lullaby that the institution has chosen to maintain alive.
And it’s straightforward to see why.
“Think about” affords hope with out battle, empathy with out motion, peace with out politics — and all underneath the phantasm that the assertion is radical as a result of it comes from a revered insurgent. It takes the craze of the oppressed and converts it right into a obscure ethical want — a clear anthem for a world that has no intention of fixing.
As a result of in “Think about,” the issue shouldn’t be energy however perception; not methods of exploitation, however concepts that divide us. The treatment, the music then suggests, is to not manage or resist, however to dream a bit tougher. Possibly a lot tougher because the occasions worsen. In a way, the music’s utopianism turns revolt into fervent reverie and, in that means, flatters the listener into pondering that ethical readability is someway an alternative choice to battle.
That’s why “Think about” survives whereas “Working Class Hero” fades. It’s protected. It doesn’t indict anybody. It doesn’t identify enemies. It may be performed by a financial institution, a billionaire or a authorities company as a result of it asks nothing of those that are listening. The identical tradition that when feared Lennon now packages him as a prophet of contentment — a model ambassador for concord.
Within the early Seventies, Lennon’s activism was taken so significantly that the U.S. authorities tried to deport him. The Nixon administration feared his anti-war affect and had the FBI wiretap his telephones, tail him and use a minor drug conviction in Britain as a pretext to disclaim his inexperienced card. (Sounds acquainted?) For years, Lennon fought surveillance, harassment and expulsion — a marketing campaign of intimidation meant to silence a political risk. (After Nixon resigned, the case was dropped, and in 1976 Lennon lastly acquired his inexperienced card.)
However now, that very same state and the tradition that supported that state (the so-called “Silent Majority”) that when noticed him as harmful routinely performs his softest music at public ceremonies.
The irony is that Lennon understood precisely how energy works. He sang about propaganda, class exploitation and the best way methods cultivate dissent. However in the long run, his one music that has gained iconic cultural standing shouldn’t be a rebel music however the sound of a rebellious voice neutralized — a once-dangerous voice absorbed into the background music of the very world it meant to vary.
©2025 The Fulcrum. Go to at thefulcrum.us. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
