Word: lennons
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Paul McCartney's instantly notorious first public comment on John Lennon's murder in December 1980 - "It's a drag" - was at the time held up as an example of gross insensitivity by an estranged friend. In reality it was the understatement of devastation. There's a telling line in Sidney Lumet's 1983 film "Daniel" - a fictionalized account of the struggles of the two children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. "Why don't you console her?" asks someone about the suicidal daughter at one point. The answer: "Did it ever occur to you that she might be inconsolable...
...certainly true that when Lennon was shot he was immediately mythologized and canonized. Did we overreact to Lennon's death in 1980? Are we pining for a mythological cipher...
...John Lennon was not God. But he earned the love and admiration of his generation by creating a huge body of work that inspired and led. The appreciation for him deepened because he then instinctively decided to use his celebrity as a bully pulpit for causes greater than his own enrichment or self-aggrandizement. For several key years in the late '60s and early '70s, Lennon and Yoko Ono turned their lives into a virtual "Truman Show" to promote the issues they believed...
...Lennon's many gifts was his humor. He knew that many people were laughing at them. He didn't care. He cared that the message was being heard. If disbelievers were going to ridicule his peace protests, that was at least preferable to them being engaged in violence. One of the secrets of Lennon (and indeed all four Beatles) was that he took his work seriously. But he never took himself too seriously...
...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...