Lennon went wrong and it seemed then, and it still seems to me now, that a Beatle going wrong was an important political event- John Lennon knew just what sort of hero Harold Wilson wanted him to be: “Didn’t he encourage youngsters to take drugs?” “Ah yes,” agreed Wilson, “he did go wrong, later.” The most repulsive of the Lennon friends (“I knew him quite well”) was Harold Wilson, who explained on The World At One that he gave John an MBE “because he got the kids off the streets.” “But wasn’t he a bad example,” snapped Robin Day. It happened bit by bit, gradually, until this complete craziness is surrounding you, and you’re doing exactly what you don’t want to do with people you can’t stand - the people you hated when you were ten. One had to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that’s what I resent. John Lennon was a hero because he fought the usual meanings of pop stardom.Īs Bryan McAllister put it in his Guardian cartoon, “One has only to look at the people who claim to have known John Lennon to understand perfectly why he went to live in America.” As John Lennon put it himself in 1971: John Lennon was a hero because he fought the usual meanings of pop stardom, because he resisted the usual easy manipulations, and in the newspaper editorials, the radio interviews, the specially illustrated supplements with full color souvenir portrait, the struggle continued - everyone was still claiming John Lennon as their friend, their cultural symbol. The answer began to push through the obituaries. Why should I feel this way about a pop star? Something to Be He rang off without an answer and I watched the television tributes and tried to make sense of a sadness that was real enough but according to the politics of culture I usually pursue seemed somehow shameful and self-indulgent. “What does it mean?” called another long-ago friend who knew I’d share his sense of loss. John Lennon was certainly the nearest thing to a hero I’ve ever had, but though I knew what this meant in fan terms (buying Beatles records at the moment of release, dreaming about my own Lennon friendship - “I’ll never meet him now,” said one friend when she heard the news) I’d never really stopped to think what the pleasure I got from Lennon’s music had to do with heroism. The Mirror, its populist instincts currently sharpened by Thatcherism, got the mood most right. “The idea,” as Lennon once told Red Mole, “is not to comfort people, not to make them feel better but to make them feel worse.” What came through was not just Beatle-nostalgia but a specific sadness at the loss of John Lennon’s Beatle qualities - qualities that never did fit easily into Fleet Street ideology. The media themselves seemed less slick than usual, more ragged in their attempts to respond to a genuinely popular shock. The media response to John Lennon’s death was overwhelming as what began as a series of private griefs was orchestrated by disc jockeys and sub-editors into a national event, but it was difficult to decide what all this mourning meant. “Death of a Hero” it said in big black letters across the front of the Daily Mirror, and if I hadn’t known already I’d have expected a story about a policeman or soldier in Northern Ireland. This article was first published in Marxism Today in January 1981.
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