What Was Happening in 1971 That Made Lennon Want to Write the Song “Imagine”?
Question by Lena S: What was happening in 1971 that made Lennon want to write the song “Imagine”?
I am attepting to write an essay on this song and just need some input.
Best answer:
Answer by Eve
I don’t think it was so much what was happening (although it was an interesting decade…it was just after the 60s remember…make love not war….) but I think with all the insight he got from the drugs and Dhali Lama quest and all that jazz (I’m sure they were looking for the path to enlightenment) I guess it him…he is an artist and visionary after all…and in that personal space of his he must have discovered soem truth and was inspired to write something about the thoughts rolling around in his head…imagine…maybe from his personal pain and anguish…it hit him how much hatred and intolerance and misunderstanding and lack of compassion, etc. existed in the world..how religion caused chaos much as it does now…and wow…imagine a world with no religion…no war…nothing to live or die for….what a song…no one could ever write anything better than that one. John Lennon was amazing…just friggin amazing…what a shame some useless scum had to cut his life short.
Answer by Matthew D
He was shooting up Heroin
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During this time in his life John was a very dedicated and active pacifist. Imagine was written right after the whole “bed-in for peace” and “War is over if you want it” campaign. Imagine reflects a lot of his ideas of peace and harmony.
Go to your video store and rent the 1988 movie, Imagine: John Lennon. It will give you more insight into the man’s life during the time of the writing of this song. plus it’s a great movie.
Good luck on your essay.
Well– There was a war in Vietnam that people wished were different or that it would go away.
The truth is, though, that his annoying wife Yoko wrote many of the lyrics. It was largely inspired by her childhood in Japan.
There’s more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagine_%28song%29
Including:
“Imagine” is a utopian song performed by John Lennon, which appears on his 1971 album Imagine. Although originally credited solely to Lennon, in recent years Yoko Ono’s contribution to the song has become more widely acknowledged.
Imagine is widely considered as one of the greatest songs of all time. In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine voted “Imagine” the third greatest song of all time. [citation needed]
In the book Lennon in America, written by Geoffrey Giuliano, Lennon commented the song was “an anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic song, but because it’s sugar-coated, it’s accepted.”[citation needed]
The lyrics were thought to be inspired solely by Lennon’s hopes for a more peaceful world. In reality, the song’s refrain was coined by Yoko Ono, in reaction to her childhood in Japan during World War II. According to The Sunday Times, the song’s refrain can be found in several of her poems written in the early 1960s, before she met Lennon, and in her 1965 book Grapefruit.
Together with his wife Yoko Ono, he attempted to transform the world through non-musical means. To many they appeared as naive crackpots; Ono in particular has been victim of some appalling insults in the press. One example shown in the film Imagine depicts the cartoonist Al Capp being both hostile and dangerously abusive. Their bed-in in Amsterdam and Montreal, their black bag appearances on stage, their innocent flirting with political activists and radicals, all received massive media attention. These events were in search of world peace, which regrettably was unachievable. What Lennon did achieve, however, was to educate us all to the idea of world peace.
When John and Yoko moved to New York City in August 1971, they became friends with antiwar leaders Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and others, and planned a national concert tour to coincide with the 1972 presidential election. It would have been the first US tour by any of the ex-Beatles since the lads had waved farewell at Candlestick Park in San Francisco at the end of their 1966 tour. But it would not have been the usual rock tour. 1972 was the first year 18-year-olds had been given the right to vote in the US, and Lennon wanted to help persuade young people to register to vote and vote against the war, which meant voting against Nixon. Thus the planned tour was to combine rock music with anti-war organizing and voter registration.
The Nixon Administration found out about Lennon’s plans from an unlikely source: Republican Senator Strom Thurmond, who suggested in a February, 1972 memo that “deportation would be a strategic counter-measure.” The next month the Immigration and Naturalization Service began deportation proceedings against Lennon, arguing that his 1968 misdemeanour conviction for cannabis possession in London had made him ineligible for admission to the US. Lennon spent the next two years in and out of deportation hearings, constantly under a 60-day order to leave the country, which his attorney managed to get extended each time.
The 1972 concert tour never happened, but Lennon and his friends did do one of the events they had been thinking about: the “Free John Sinclair” concert in Ann Arbor, Michigan in December 1971. Sinclair was a local antiwar activist who was serving ten years in the state prison for selling two joints of marijuana to an undercover cop. Lennon appeared onstage along with Phil Ochs, Stevie Wonder and other musicians, plus antiwar radical Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers. 20,000 attended; two days after the concert, the state of Michigan released John Sinclair from prison.
While his deportation battle was going on, Lennon spoke often against the Vietnam War, appearing at rallies in New York City and on TV shows, including a week hosting the Mike Douglas Show in February 1972, where Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale appeared as his guests. He was tailed by a team of FBI agents, who concluded “Lennon appears to be radically oriented however he does not give the impression he is a true revolutionist since he is constantly under the influence of narcotics.”
In the end, Nixon left the White House in the Watergate scandal, and Lennon stayed in the USA, winning his green card in 1975. The full story didn’t come out until after Lennon’s murder,
Discrimination peaked
It’s been there for a while, but 1969 – 1973 it peaked.