Blast from the Past – John Lennon "Jealous Guy"

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx99_pClMUo&feature=related] Some of the greatest music ever made. Look, let’s get honest. Do they make music like this anymore? Come on. I disagree with White nationalists who say that the greatest music ever made was made by, saw, Whites like Bach and Beethoven, and they can prove it scientifically (LOL). These guys don’t get it. John Lennon and the Beatles are as good as the great classical composers. And there would be no Lennon or Beatles without Black music. This is from 1971, John Lennon’s solo album, Imagine , which, if you ask me, is one of the great all-time albums. It’s his best solo album, I guarantee that. The Beatles’ breakup has never been well-explained. Most bands start hating each other after a while, the way a lot of family members, spouses, co-workers and “best friends” do. A little familiarity births a lot of contempt. There’s something to be said for a bit of distance in relationships. The best analysis is that John and Paul were always rivals. Almost all of the music was written by John and Paul, I believe John often writing lyrics and Paul often writing music. Of course, they were both total geniuses. As an outside opinion, I’ve always felt George and Ringo were geniuses too. George and John were introverts and Ringo and Paul were extroverts. By the time of the breakup, John was already running around India with gurus, dropping quite a bit of LSD and taking up with super-weirdo avant-garde artist Yoko Ono of Japan. Paul especially hated Yoko, calling her “the Okinawan witch.” As an outside opinion again, I’ve always loved Yoko. I don’t see what anyone has against her, other than “she broke up the Beatles.” BS. The main argument against Yoko is that she is talentless (not as an artist, no) and that she’s ugly (Hell of a critique of a woman’s essence as a human being, and as an outside opinion again, I recognize a beauty in her that maybe John saw). Both John and Yoko were original hippies who stayed true to the cause. The most important subplot of the John and Yoko story, the one that rings louder than all the rest, nearly drowning them out, is the one of perfect love. For a while at least, maybe until his death, they were in love as deeply as any two adolescent lovebirds can be. You can see it in these photos. You can see it in their eyes, their expressions. Perfect love reverberates off these photos like a Kirlian aura. For us Lennon lovers, that makes her great right there – she was the woman John really and truly loved. They were both socialists too, and Yoko still is. No one knows what happened to John holed up in his apartment in New York. He became withdrawn and lived off brown rice, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms and Thai sticks. It’s said he became a grouch, and he may have been depressed. And maybe more than a little paranoid., maybe for good reason. Until that asshole, one of the biggest assholes of the 20th Century (may his name burn in Hell forever) shot him dead. Mark David Chapman is probably mentally ill in some way, but no one seems to know how to categorize homicidal stalkers. They love the celebrity, so they are going to kill them. Ok, makes sense? Nope. I just don’t get these types. Maybe we need a separate DSM entry for them, as they are definitely not healthy. John Lennon’s greatness stemmed from his introversion. You can see it in his eyes and his expressions. He was always off in his own world, thoughts in the cloudy ether. You can hear it in his music – that music could only be written by an introvert. In a world of extroverts, there will be PUA’s and American Idols galore, but there will be no John Lennons. This is what the wiser and more ancient cultures like the East have always recognized. There’s a place for most civilized personality types in the Garden of our World. A spot here, a corner there. Give them sun, water and watch them grow. One crop is hardly better than another. They all grow tall and strong and can produce their own kind of perfect beauty.

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0 thoughts on “Blast from the Past – John Lennon "Jealous Guy"”

  1. I have not listened to the Imagine album, but I have a hard time believing it could match the raw emotion of Plastic Ono Band. The saddest stuff you’ve ever heard, with some decent upbeat songs tossed in so you don’t slit your wrists.
    You can actually hear him work out all the stuff he’d built up as a result of the early abandonment by his mother (as well as her early death when he was only 17).
    And Plastic Ono Band is the one with Working Class Hero! That must be right up there in your list of greatest songs ever, no? Also listen to “Mother” and best of all “God.”
    As far as hating on Yoko…she is clearly crazy. That is the main reason people don’t like her much. I think she had him under some kind of mind control. Such is love…Her art is like a lot of the modern stuff, just somebody throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.
    More and more I’m with the conservative folks who denounce 99% of what we now call “art”. The word itself, if you go back, used to denote something which required a lot of painstaking work and attention to detail. Anybody can scream their head off and bang a bunch of metallic stuff.
    I was surprised to learn that John Lennon used to hit his wife…his first wife. He says that he never did this to Yoko.

    1. LOL! John Lennon is emo! I just thought of that. He’s one of the original and best emo-wuss music artists, isn’t he? But we all love it anyway.
      As far as music to slit your wrists by, ever heard Lou Reed’s “Berlin.” I had a job as a music critic for my university paper. In 1980, we had to list the top 10 albums of the 1970’s. I listed “Berlin”! LOL! Man, a lot of people were really outraged and shaking their heads “Tsk!” over that. One of the most controversial albums ever made. Love it or hate it.

  2. i do love some Lou Reed. “The Kids” is one I’ve listened to over and over, that’s on Berlin. It’s fairly easy to play on the guitar.
    These ghettos chicks who prostitute, you know, my “girlfriends”…i always think about one of them in particular and worry she’ll have her kid taken away.
    at the end of the song there’s these wailing kids. wiki says the producer had his kids in the studio that day and told them their mommy was dead to get them to cry like that. wtf?

  3. I’m a big Lennon fan, inevitably. i still have the copy of the vinyl album Imagine, that I bought in 1971, and, amazingly, it is still playable on the turntable!
    Jealous Guy is far from my favourite track, however. it’s about fourth. Favourite track is Gimme Some Truth! I never tire of that. The songs Imagine and Crippled Inside are probably my second and third favourites. The gritty It’s So Hard is great, too…hell, it’s a good album, still sounds good.

  4. Robert, there was classical music in the 17th century and there was pop then too. It was what we call “folk” today, even though much of what is called folk today isn’t folk, but I digress. I had a professor in the 1970s who maintained rock was
    then America’s folk music by folk music’s own defintion. Yeah, right, then what were the folkies of the 1970s doing, Prof?
    Anyway, High Art is High Art and pop art is pop art.
    No way is the best of John Lennon or (pick you favorite pop artist) equal to the best of Beethoven.
    People around here, I just noticed in particular,
    e.g. Jacob, (no offense) have a problem with Hierarchy in many aspects of Life.

  5. Lennon is not remotely comparable to Beethoven! I far prefer the latter! Some Beatles critic – the man who wrote Revolution in the Head I think it was – compared the Beatles’ best songs to Schubert’s Lieder, which my grandmother, and then her daughter, my aunt Barbara, used to sing. I beg to differ. To take an analogy from cooking, pop music is a bit like fast food, and classical music is the real Cordon Bleu, served with a Grand Cru Classé…My fatehr listened to Schubert’s Lieder all his life. He loved them. I have been listening to Anton Bruckner’s monumental 7th Symphony. I find it absolutely sublime. Each time I listen I hear it in a new way. I’m sorry if you don’t like Bruckner’s symphonies, Ken. He is what I am into at the moment, Bruckner and Mahler, late Austro-Hungarian Romanticism.
    Yes we do. Some forms of hierarchy are entirely justified, however. Some people are simply much wiser, and much more spiritually evolved, than others.
    I don’t know why you bother to check into this blog, Ken, you are not at all like some of the other stroppy, bolshy, critical or self-important people on here. Your general demeanor is quite different. If I were in your neck of the woods I would invite you to go for a walk in the Californian Sierra, so that we could have a long talk.

  6. Just a couple of small factual points on the UK’s No. 1 exports:
    it wasn’t really John who was running around India and getting in with gurus by the late 1960s, it was George Harrison. They had all visited India in the mid 1960s but it was George who ended up making albums with Ravi Shankar.
    And even Ringo never thought Ringo was a genius. A journalist once asked John whether he thought that Ringo was the best drummer in the world. No, said John, he’s not even the best drummer in the Beatles.

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