Question

Discuss the influence of John Lennon's post-Beatles music and the impact of his death on popular musicians who followed. Please refer to specific songs/artists/styles in your response.

Answer 1

Born in wartime England on October 9, 1940, Lennon was destined to be a transformative figure in the anti-war movement. In 1967, he began his role as an unabashedly pro-peace public figure when he appeared in the anti-war comedy How I Won The War, his only appearance in a non-Beatles full-length film. Two years later, in 1969 — the same year he left the Beatles — he released the song “Give Peace a Chance,” which became an anthem for the anti-Vietnam and counterculture movement at the time. He and Ono also participated in two weeklong “bed-ins,” non-violent protests against the Vietnam War that turned into a media spectacle.

Following his departure from the Beatles, Lennon released eight solo albums filled with commentary on war, inequality and his desire for unity across all mankind. His debut solo, 1970’s album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, was a commercial and critical success that included the song “Working Class Hero,” a seething indictment of wealthy elites’ exploitation of the middle class.

His third studio album, Some Time in New York City (1972), touched on the topics of women’s rights, racial tensions in the U.S. and Britain’s contested role in Northern Ireland. In August of that year, he performed two benefit concerts in Madison Square Garden for patients of Willowbrook State School mental institution; they would prove to be his final full-length shows.

Through all this, it became clear that the post-Beatles Lennon had only one goal: to spread positive messages through his public actions, his music and the media attention he inevitably garnered wherever he went. From “Give Peace A Chance” to “If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace,” he remains one of the most quotable anti-war figures of all time, as well as an icon inevitabily referenced by activists and pacifists of every generation.

On December 8, 1980, the music world ground to a halt when John Lennon was murdered .When Lennon died at age 40, however, everyone who had grown up with the Beatles was approaching middle age too. In addition to their sadness about Lennon’s death, they could not ignore their own mortality. in the subsequent three and a half decades, the legacy of Lennon’s death has been one of love more than fear. The stars got smarter about security, but few walled themselves up from the outside world. Although no one would have articulated it this way at the time, the feeling was: If you can never greet fans anymore, truly, the terrorist has won.  Paul McCartney, who had more reason than anyone to take the likes of Chapman personally. He’s hardly bodyguard-avoidant, when he’s on a predictable schedule: When he visited Bogota, Columbia for two days, the ex-Beatle was described as being surrounded by a 1,400-strong “ring of steel.” Playing a gig in Israel. McCartney had even more security, to the tune of 5,000 men, reportedly. McCartney did to honor Lennon’s life and death, he did his onetime partner proud by refusing to see life entirely from behind tinted windows or have a bodyguard phalanx blocking every fan’s approach.At one of the Grateful Dead’s last gigs with Jerry Garcia in 1995, they played the entire show with the house lights up, because of a death threat. Another way rockers honored Lennon’s death, besides refusing to retreat into castles, was to grapple with it in song. The music that was written about and in the wake of Lennon’s killing included not just maudlin tributes but some surprisingly thoughtful, bittersweet attempts to look for meaning in the madness.Others took on the subject of Chapman more blatantly, and even more angrily. Belying his gentle image, Rick Springfield all but vowed vengeance on Chapman in “Three Warning Shots,” mockingly singing, A handful of other songs ironically took the killer’s point of view, like the Cranberries’ “I Just Shot John Lennon” and Wall of Voodoo’s “Seven Days in Sammystown.” Less ironically, the metal band Eighteen Vision asked “Who the F— Killed John Lennon,” while folk-rocker Ellis Paul’s “Who Killed John Lennon” spoke for many with its opening line: “Do not mention his name" For a Lennon fan, there can be no end