Word: lennon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...What is the Lennon legacy? There is the astonishing body of music. The jaunty anthems he wrote in the early Beatle years (1962-1965) may have been teen love songs, but they displayed an exuberant joy that is surprisingly undiminished by the passage of time. Then, once Bob Dylan showed him that lyrics could be personal, Lennon tapped into his feelings and revealed a gift for sensitivity and self-awareness that completely belied his oft-proclaimed status as "just a rocker...
...Poets and playwrights wrote of insecurity. Pop singers may have (justifiably) felt it. But they certainly didn't sing about it to their fans. Lennon did. "Every now and then I feel so insecure," he sang in "Help!" He also admitted to jealousy, suicidal depression and (in "Cold Turkey") heroin addiction...
...When he undertook primal scream therapy under Dr. Arthur Janov in 1970, Lennon instinctively took painful revelations and turned them into cathartic art. Lennon had been abandoned by his father before birth, and then again when he was 5. His mother gave him up to be raised by her sister. Lennon lost his mother again when he was 18, when she was run over by a drunken policeman. Twelve years later, Lennon philosophized it simply and heartbreakingly. "Mother... you had me - but I never had you. I needed you - but you didn't need...
...song's stunning coda, Lennon set to music a repeated plea that was primal and universal. "Mama don't go... Daddy come home." His howls of anguish - unheard-of in popular music - were truth at 33 revolutions per minute...
...decision to turn his life into art set Lennon apart from McCartney in terms of style. Lennon was a diarist , while McCartney was a dramatist. Many followed Lennon into the new world of singer/songwriter-dom. But few matched his poetry or honesty. For Lennon, confessional songwriting was much more than just the prominent use of the first-person pronoun, which seemed to become the norm in the self-obsessed...