Why the Song "Imagine" Sucks

Great pop songs tend to revolve around simple ideas. I Love You and This Is Awesome, I Love You and This Is Awful, Why Won't You Love Me, I Don't Love You Anymore And You Should Leave—those themes cover about 90 percent of the music enjoyed by the world at large. That's not a knock on popular music. There's a lot of variation and nuance that a good songwriter can squeeze out of those four standard tropes—if you don't believe me, listen to every Beatles album before Sergeant Pepper. (After that, the Beatles started writing songs about the topic that makes up the last 10 percent of pop music: We Are On Drugs and Shit Does Not Make All That Much Sense.)

But as some really excellent, really famous songwriters age (or alternately, start hooking up with really pretentious artists whose names rhyme with “Hoko Tone-o”) they try to branch out from these basic themes, either because they're tired of writing about love or because the Have Something Important to Say. Call it Sting Syndrome.* Like adolescents who just read A People's History of the United States, these songwriters stop doing (so many) drugs, look around the world, and discover, shockingly, that there are a lot of problems with it. That's how we get Michael Jackson's “Black or White,” Paul McCartney's and Stevie Wonder's awful “Ebony and Ivory,” and most of all, that's how we got John Lennon's “Imagine.”

Now, I don't know that much about Lennon's post-Beatles career, but I know that “Imagine” is his most famous song, a song I hear in grocery stores and laundromats, a song's whose legacy has lived on thanks to Yoko Ono, who acts like Gandhi wrote the lyrics and has constructed a monument of bullshit and light to it. It's one of the most critically acclaimed songs of the last century and number three on Rolling Stone's list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” And I hate it.

Don't get me wrong—it is catchy. It's got that nice gentle piano riff and a good melody. This is John Motherfucking Lennon we're talking about, after all. The man could have written a song about how much he likes Triscuits and it would have been musically interesting and probably a number five hit in the UK. But the reason everyone likes “Imagine” isn't for its catchiness, it's for its lyrics, which are put on a pedestal along with “Blowin' in the Wind” and the famous bits of the Bible. If you want to read the lyrics, here they are.

Yes, that John certainly is a dreamer. No, he isn't the only one. Many people imagine what it might be like to live in a world with no wars, religion, or countries. That would probably be pretty cool. We'd sit around playing the sitar, smoking really primo dope, and having sex with one another in a variety of positions. So what? Imagining is easy. Everyone imagines, and that's the fucking problem. The difficult part is when you stop imagining and try to get from point A (your shitty life) to point B (the sitars, the fucking, etc). Martin Luther King wasn't a great man because he had a dream, he was a great man because he was willing to get arrested, beaten, and even die for that dream.

Compare MLK's dedication to the worldview expressed in “Imagine.” The song doesn't advocate any action, it doesn't detail any specific problems or solutions it just sort of drifts along and says, “Hey, wouldn't it be great if things were great?” Not every song needs to be a treatise on geopolitics but shouldn't a “meaningful” song actually mean something?

“Imagine” could be the anthem of the ineffectual hippie movement, the people who “broke down barriers” by taking acid, listening to trippy music, and being promiscuous. The song fetishizes thoughts and fantasies and ignores direct action. It explicitly asks the listener to “join the dreamers” in order to make the “world live as one,” which is one of the least-subversive ideas I've ever heard. It's subtle pro-capitalist, pro-establishment propaganda: the institutions the hippies supposedly opposed (the military-industrial complex, big business, etc) would prefer that they keep dreaming—while they're sitting in meditation circles and seeking transcendence, they can be easily ignored. Actually trying to change things is too hard for most people, which is why as the hippies aged and realized that imagining didn't do anything for anyone, they started figuring out ways to make money.

Ironically, young John Lennon was way ahead of the hippies. The Beatles covered “Money (That's What I Want)” early on and wrote cynical, mocking anthems like “Revolution 1.” They realized that the most meaningful, resonant songs are about the endless permutations personal relationships, not just putting your schmaltzy personal philosophy to music. Then Lennon grew his hair out and turned into a caricature of a painfully earnest hippie.

Case in point: the “Bed In” protest he and his new bride Yoko Ono performed in 1969. Non-violent protest is supposed to draw attention to the brutal nature of the forces you are opposing—they hit you, and you don't hit them back, thus drawing attention to the justice of your cause and the injustice of your oppressors. By contrast, sitting in bed and getting people to pay attention to your “protest” because you are famous is just being lazy. I've praised lying in bed before, but not as a form of political action; you should lie in bed because it feels good. Similarly, you should have sex and do drugs and listen to Rock and Roll not because you are expanding your consciousness or breaking down barriers, but because it feels awesome. The problem with the Bed In, Ono's monument to “Imagine,” and the song itself is that they assume that just imagining is good in and of itself, that wishing for an impossible world is somehow helpful.

Maybe if Lennon had lived longer, he'd have the decency to be embarrassed by “Imagine.” Maybe he would have revealed that whole phase of his life to be a complicated satire on the soft and ideologically muddled state of the anti-war movement in the early 70s. But he's dead and, unfortunately, the song he left behind is a meaningless, maudlin, sap-filled ballad that doesn't care enough about its own ideas to examine them. Yes John, it would be nice if there were no countries, but if you want us to get there, we're going to have to kill some people.

*For the young people who are not rock historians: Sting was the frontman for The Police, who recorded some really awesome albums and had a string of hits like “Roxanne” and “Don't Stand So Close to Me” and “Everything She Does is Magic,” which were all great songs about love. Then Sting went solo and recorded the most serious, straight-faced, boring pop-jazz albums ever. Listen to as much of so-serious-it-makes-you-want-to-look-pensively-out-the-window-into-the-rain “Fields of Gold” as you can and then listen to “So Lonely” to get the taste out of your ears and you'll understand why Young Sting kicks Old Sting's ass.

(Note: this blog is now a weekly, with daily (or so) links and shorter entries. Further information here.) Read more!

Things That Don't Suck: Salinger's Death

Unless you've been living in an isolated cabin in New Hampshire, you'll have heard the news by now: J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye, is no longer among the living. Like thousands of writers across several generations, I think of Salinger as one of my major influences, not so much for Catcher, but for his short stories and novellas dealing with the brilliant but troubled Glass family. (I used to read “Seymour, an Introduction” every year around Christmas as a cure for the wintertime blues.) In the four books he published in his lifetime (Catcher was his only novel) he demonstrated nearly perfect control of the English language; to borrow a phrase of his, his stories were “prose home movies,” precisely rendered portraits of movement and dialogue in which everything is in exactly the right place. “Omit needless words,” Bill Strunk advises us in Elements of Style, and Salinger shows us what that looks like.

But Salinger departs this world under rather odd conditions. He's not David Foster Wallace, dying at the peak of what should have been a long career, or Kurt Vonnegut, passing away after decades of critical and commercial success, or John Kennedy O'Toole, killing himself before his brilliance could be recognized. By all accounts, Salinger kept writing during his years of self-imposed isolation while at the same time refusing to let anyone publish or even see his manuscripts—now that he's dead, at least some of this work will see the light of day. Although a lot of his fans are in mourning right now, there's a lot of silver lining in this cloud: he lived to the extremely ripe age of 91, and now we'll finally get to see what he was working on this whole time.

It should be noted, too, that while the guy certainly had no obligation to publish books and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous publicity for the sake of a bunch of people he had never met, there was a nasty edge to his desire for “privacy.” Last year a Swedish author wrote a “sequel” to Catcher in the Rye that featured Holden Caufield and Salinger as characters; the book was banned in the US after Salinger cried copyright infringement. The book's publication wouldn't have affected Salinger's life in any way, yet he decided to fuck over a first-time novelist because apparently Salinger's characters and ideas are like precious jewels that he has to lock up in a cabinet and never let anyone touch. Years earlier a writer decided to write a sequel to George Orwell's Animal Farm, which was published as a “parody” over the objections of Orwell's estate, and guess what? It's a worthwhile novel that didn't diminish the value of the relevancy of the original in any way. (That might not be the case with the Catcher sequel, but still, it was awfully petty for Salinger to bring the suit.)

Then there's the case of “Hapworth 16, 1924,” the last of his stories to appear in published form. If you have a copy of the June 19, 1965 issue of The New Yorker, you can read it, but thanks to Salinger's obstructionism, it never got anthologized or reprinted. It was nearly published by a small press until the Editor-in-Chief made the mistake of talking about it to a newspaper, which made Salinger very angry and he pulled out of a deal that could have helped a struggling press a great deal. There's the right to privacy, then there's screwing over people who just wanted to pay tribute to your work.

When I read Salinger, I don't give much thought to the man himself or his life, and that's probably the way he wanted it. He was a celebrity author who hated fame and never appeared to care about any of his fans, except the young women who he invited to live with him. I don't think I liked Salinger, the guy, at all. I just liked his sentences, and those, thankfully, aren't dying any time soon. Read more!

An Open Letter to Bill Donohue About why his Column Sucked.

Dear Mr. Donohue,

I hope you don't feel I'm being too forward in writing this letter. I don't really know who you are, but I wrote a missive to Bono earlier this week, and that put me in a letter-writing mood I guess. And I couldn't help but notice your column in the Washington Post, under the “On Faith” heading. Is that where they ask people to write essays and automatically accept them “on faith” no matter how sloppy they are? Or what's the deal with that? Anyway, you said a lot of provocative things in your essay—you sure don't like gay people!--but your writing was a little sloppy, I thought. And I have this degree in Writing that isn't doing me any good, and nothing but time on my hands, so I thought I'd give you a few pointers in case you get asked to write another column:

1. Start off with a good hook. Your first sentence begins with the line, “There are many ways cultural nihilists are busy trying to sabotage America these days,” which is a little heavy and disorienting. Define your terms! Who are these cultural nihilists? Are they the gays? Are you talking about musical theater? (I don't like that stuff either.) A better way to start off would be pointing to a specific example of “cultural nihilism” and then use that example to get to the point of the essay. Speaking of which...

2. Have a clear reason for writing the essay, or a “thesis.” It sounds like your thesis is, “These people are really bad,” which is a little unfocused. You should limit yourself to a smaller topic so you can be more precise. Like the thesis of this essay is, “Bill Donohue made a lot of formal mistakes in his essay that are unrelated to the content.” This allows me to focus on particulars and not make vague generalities. Speaking of which...

3. Avoid vague generalities. You attack artists for mocking Christianity, saying, “From scatological artistic exhibitions to the latest obscene installation, the charlatans have succeeded in politicizing the arts.” But you should really bring up some examples. Are you talking about Piss Christ? That was made over 20 years ago. You might not be up on much contemporary art—you don't even live in New York City like I do—but if you are going to make sweeping statements, you might want to give us the impression that you know what you are talking about. And who are these outrageous people politicizing such a neutral field as “the arts?” Is it the gays again? Specific examples would help.

4. Oh, and you should write with transitions. See the two “speaking of which” lines I included at the end of the first two items on my list? Those are “transitions.” They allow the reader to move from idea to idea easily, and allow us to follow your reasoning. It's a basic technique that most Freshman Comp courses teach. (By the way, did you go to college? It sounds like you don't like education in this country very much! Is it because there are so many gays in the colleges?) Here you have a lot of paragraphs that are only connected by the idea that you don't like any of the people you are talking about. That may work for some comic writers like Jack Handy or Stephen Wright, but since you probably weren't trying to be funny, it doesn't really work.

5. Don't misrepresent facts. Whoops, there's no transition between the last two paragraphs, but this is a numbered list, so that's excusable. Anyway, you say some things in your essay that should have maybe been more carefully considered. I don't want to be all nitpicky, but you say “Catholics were once the mainstay of the Democratic Party; now the gay activists are in charge.” It turns out the 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee was Catholic and so is the Vice President, and the gays just protested in Washington, which is sort of the opposite of what you said. Oopsy! And you mention that Lee Bass's $20 million gift to Yale was returned because Yale hates “western civilization,” but the Yale student newspaper says it was because Bass wanted to hand-pick professors for the courses his money would have funded. (By the way, Yale's art school is really important in the art world. Are they the ones responsible for introducing politics into art?)

6. Conclude with a clear plan of action for the reader to follow. This is the traditional way to end a persuasive essay, and you sort of do this. Here's your last paragraph:

The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they're too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels.

I'm a little confused by this, quite frankly. Do you not walk your dog? And while you have a clear message for conservatives (“Start fucking, right now”), I'm not sure what I should do, since I don't consider myself a religious conservative. I should not have kids? That seems extreme. Or are you saying that the world is a better place if I don't reproduce? That also seems really mean-spirited. Or, I know, maybe you mean that all the people you don't like are gay, and so can't have children in a biological sense, which would mean no more gays, right? Anyway, you don't need to worry about me reproducing just yet. I use condoms, which should make you, the head of the Catholic League, very happy. Read more!

A Painting Shows Us Why the Far Right Sucks

What can you say about an oil painting of Jesus Christ holding the Constitution out to a child in the middle of a pan-patriotic orgy?



You probably don't want to say anything, at first. As with any great work of art, you'll want to study it carefully for its many nuances--what could this painting possibly mean? Fortunately, the artist anticipated some confusion over such an abstract piece and put up a website explaining all the symbolism, something that Picasso or Dali never had the decency to do.

Understandably, this ultra-conservative master worked has been mocked by liberal blogs, who never shoot for difficult targets when there's a ridiculously easy one dangling in front of them. (Some Christians even hate it.) And sure, it's hilarious, even by the high standard of internet memes, but if it's real and not an amazingly well-executed parody, it's also a pretty good illustration of how unhinged the Religious Right's rhetoric has gotten.

Now, I don't hate Republicans (at least, not more than Democrats), and I have no problem with Libertarians unless they talk about how great Atlas Shrugged is. Heck, even Christians are alright in my book as long as they don't start speaking in tongues and prophesying when I'm in the room. But I can't stand people who use dishonest arguments and there are a few elements of this painting that point to the non-factual, discourse-polluting way Christian Conservatives treat the Constitution.

#1: The painting's title, "One Nation Under God."
Conservatives are fond of saying the nation was founded "under God," usually as a preamble to a rambling assault against public schools, the courts, or Keith Olbermann. The Founding Fathers were Christian, the argument goes, so the Constitution must have been Christian. This ignores the utter absence of the word "God" in the Constitution as well as the grounding of the Founders' philosophy in the Enlightenment and John Locke in particular--the Enlightenment, for those of you who don't remember, was the intellectual movement in Europe against faith and towards reason. Maybe the thing that makes me the maddest about this painting's website is the description of John Locke: “It is not important that he was not a Christian. God often uses good men to fulfill his purposes.”

No, it is important Locke was not a Christian, just like it's important that the words "Under God" weren't added to the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954. Christians claiming Payne and the Founding Fathers as their own is like me saying Thomas Aquinas was a Christian. I'm not claiming that Aquinas' Christianity "isn't important" because he was a great philosopher, and snidely saying, "Often, even Christians are reasoanble."

#2: Farmers, "Truly the backbone of America," versus the evil lawyers.
That thing about farmers is a direct quote from the painting's website, and it's the type of thing right-wing politicians have been saying for a long time now. Meanwhile, the painting's "lawyer" character is over by Satan, counting his hundred-dollar bills, which he probably plans to spend on sodomy and abortions. From the painting, you'd think that the Constitution came into being spontaneously as a gift from Jesus to the "patriotic" Americans like farmers and small business owners. Actually, the opposite is true: the Founding Fathers, all lionized in this painting, were almost all lawyers, which helped make the Constitution the finely-crafted document it is. Lawyers, not farmers, are the backbone of this country.

What were the farmers doing while the lawyers created one of the most important texts in world history? They were rebelling against the government in protest against taxes and the court, while claiming that they were acting in the spirit of the revolution. One of the reasons all the rich lawyers decided to radically change the government was the current government couldn't stop the farmers from rebelling. And if those Libertarian "tea party" folks went back in time, you can guarantee that they'd be on the side of the farmers, not the Constitution--after all the Constitution represented the greatest expansion of

#3: The idea that the Constitution was divinely inspired.
The best thing about the Constitution is that unlike the BIble, the Koran, or Bill O'Reilly's memoirs, it doesn't claim to be a holy document. The Founding Fathers were smart and Enlightenment-bred enough to know that they were fallible, and included a mechanism that would allow future generations to alter their laws. If we create intelligent robots, for instance, but don't want those robots to have the same rights as humans, we can add a bit to all of the Amendments that says "...except for robots." Or if we decide that Jesus wrote the Constitution, we can put a statement at the end of the whole thing that states, "Oh, by the way, we couldn't have written this without Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior."

But two-thirds of the states and both houses of Congress have not added that piece to the Constitution, so it wasn't handed down from God. Actually, the USA was one of the first countries to claim it wasn't founded by God, which is pretty awesome. I'm proud of my country that was founded by men. Retconning the story of America so it includes Jesus, ignoring Locke's (and other's) non-Christian beliefs, pretending that the Founding Fathers were not lawyers and politicians but some kind of angelic spirits and that the Constitution is an inviolable, holy document--that shit is not okay, and is counter-factual. If you want to believe in small government, fine. If you want to believe in Jesus, fine. Just don't pretend the two things have to do with one another in any way, and don't pretend that the Founding Fathers would automatically be on the side of your anti-federalist, anti-empiricist crusade. And please, for Christ's sake, leave the painting to the liberals. Read more!

Why Michael Jackson Sucks

In elementary school, I had a music teacher who was one of the least pleasant women I have ever encountered. She sat her students, who were about eight years old, in front of keyboards they weren't allowed to touch and singled out those who didn't sing in tune with the rest of us. After I left the school, she got in trouble for throwing a book at a kid. The only time I remember enjoying her class was the week of Halloween, when she let us listen to Halloween-themed music, including the Ghostbusters theme and "Thriller," by Michael Jackson. Very few of us kids knew who Michael Jackson was, but we liked listening to the song way better than practicing "When the Saints Go Marching In" on our recorders.

Our reaction to Jackson's music wasn't exactly unique. A lot of people liked his songs and liked watching him dance around singing them. It's been nearly three months since Jackson died of a doctor-administered drug overdose and here in Brooklyn, I still hear his music floating around from open car windows and block-party boomboxes. Dozens of stores are selling quickly-produced t-shirts and buttons with both young and old Michael Jacksons on them. Someone spray-painted his likeness onto a fence near my house. And nine days ago there was a birthday party for him in Prospect Park.

The birthday party is ironic for a couple of reasons. Number one, no one would have cared much about his birthday if he was still alive, and number two, if Jackson were alive he would have preferred to celebrate surrounded by twelve-year-olds and the skeletons of deformed people. But the party, along with the memorabilia market and the overloading of Twitter, prove that, strangely, a lot of people really like Michael Jackson.

I don't think it's strange that people like Jackson's music. That guy wrote some catchy stuff and had a great voice (not to mention a lot of talented musicians playing and Quincy Jones producing). But Jackson as a person is another story--he was essentially an eccentric millionaire who exhibited a bizarre combination of naivete and arrogance.

Consider his molestation trial: he showed up twenty minutes late for a hearing, mumbled some answers to the judge, and danced around in front of the court house for his fans. He eventually got acquitted, after which he denounced the media for causing all his problems (whenever someone blames the media, you know it's an exaggeration at best) and retreated even further from the public eye. Yet his fans said things like this: “He stands for so much, all the goodness in the world and innocence.” (That's one of his supporters from England, quoted in the above link.)

No, he doesn't stand for all the goodness and innocence in the world. If you are idolizing Jackson because of what he stands for, you need new idols. The man became famous for singing and dancing, then mostly stopped doing both in order to become an increasingly unhinged drug addict--the only difference between him and Amy Winehouse is that he was more successful before his life fell apart.

In fact, I'm not sure Jackson ever tried to stand for much in particular. Sure, he had some nice "racism is bad" and "let's all love one another" songs, but so does every pop artist. As a lyricist, he was a step above Prince but not exactly Dylan-esque. I mean, his most famous line is probably that weird "shamona!" yell, right? And when he became fabulously wealthy he spent his money on prescription drugs and a private amusement park. You tell me how to turn that into someone worth admiring.

To me, Jackson represents a fundamental truth of popular culture: if you are famous enough, a lot of people will like you pretty much no matter what you do. Popularity has become a virtue in and of itself. Or maybe it's impossible for people to like a work of art without getting attached to the artist. It's hard to read The Cantos by Ezra Pound and think of Pound as a Fascist, and it's hard to listen to Thriller and picture Jackson as anything other than a paragon of virtue.

But whatever Jackson was, he wasn't a paragon. He was pretty damned good at singing and dancing, but that's pretty much it. He made some music that practically everyone liked, but he didn't seem interested in recording new music anymore. I liked "Thriller," but I liked the Ghostbusters song too, and I'm pretty sure I won't be in mourning when the guy who recorded that dies. Read more!