About John Lennon

 

Let's suppose for one moment that John Lennon wasn't assassinated, let's say that on December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman had forgotten all about a book he had to return to the library: an old, battered copy of Salinger's "The catcher in the rye", for example. Let's just pretend he didn't kill the leader Beatle. What do you have then? A living icon, a man who celebrated life by oposing to Vietnam with a bed-in strike in Canada, a guy who paid Yoko Ono five imaginary dollars to hammer an imaginary nail in an artisitc installation. Would our world be any different? I think yes.
John Lennon was such a creative force of nature that we can compare him to what japanese shintoism calls "Kami", described as a natural god and literally translated as "The highest place". He described his work with The Beatles as "Meat-market", but, if he was right, that has to be the finest meat you could ever get. When The Beatles split, John Lennon was born again, he was born into a world of magic and never-ending wonders that allowed him to re-invent himself everyday and then marvel at what he evolved in. And that is precisely what attracts us to John Lennon: The ambiguity of an overwhelming genius and the astonishment of a kid in a fair.
The musical scene wouldn't be the same if Lennon were still around, because he would definitely be doing music as I write. "Imagine" is such a revolutionary song that you can smell tracks of it in every U2 song, and you feel that optimism crumbling down to the ground in every angry riff and verse form Rage Against The Machine. I think that one of Bono's main sources of inspiration to take on humanitarian causes was the assassination of John Lennon. What do you say to a man who can singlehandedly kill the most inspiring and tender figure of an acid, disappointed generation? How can you judge Chapman, when the magnitude of the crime escapes our own wildest fathoms? Killing John Lennon is killing "Le Petit Prince". Killing John Lennon when it happened is like killing Harry Potter nowadays. Harry Potter is unreachable, but he is far more believeable than the existence of biological weapons in Irak and definitely friendlier than any of Tony Blair's public apologies.
John Lennon meant revolution at all levels, even when you see the pictures of him walking down Greenwich Village hand in hand with Yoko, you can tell by his clothing that there is something cooking there beyond a rockstar/artist rommance. If John Lennon hadn't been killed we could say that David Bowie would not be the only massive music figure who set the milestones of fashion and cultural adaption of our days, he would not be the only chameleon and perhaps we would see him more often in Vegas casinos than in Buckingham gardens. If John Lennon were still alive we wouldn't be so shocked by Michael Moore's Shame-on-you-Mr-Bush quote of the year during the Oscars ceremonies because Lennon would have made us all sing it together in a more harmonious and less subversive way. If Lennon were alive Bono's political causes would be regarded as an attempt of imitation, Lennon would have had the Pope wear a fig ring before he even thought about kissing it.
The world would be different indeed, and he could have shown performers how to get rid of the Rockstar stigmata once you start flying solo, because he did. He flew like a shooting star lighting our skies for a moment, a moment when "The world could be as one".

 

FEDERICO AC.
25.07.2K4.