John Lennon
Plastic Ono Band

THE REVIEW

1970. John Lennon, four chords, a couple of friends, and a lot of pain to tell. With eyes veiled by tears caused by inner suffering, John reveals his world to us. A cold, superficial, damnably pathetic world, where “God is a concept by which we measure our pain”- from “God”.

The specter of the existential uselessness of a man bent over his own torments is reflected in the evocation of adolescent pain that appears in almost all eleven tracks of the album. John is a lonely man, on the edge between abandonment and despair, who finds few and fleeting moments of relief in Yoko (who, meanwhile, produces the mirror album "Yoko Ono -Plastic Ono Band"), in which he sees the completion of his soul. John is a dreamer destroyed by his own sensitivity, a wandering soul that, lacking adequate footwear, finds himself roaming the fields scorched by the desolate solitude enclosed in his words.

John Lennon was the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. No one like him has probed so deeply into the sadness of the bourgeois (“keep you doped with religion and sex and TV and you think you’re so clever and classless and free” from “Working Class Hero”), no one more than him has unmasked with such bitterly effective words the state of isolation of the individual who insists on defining himself as “modern”.

John is a man who from his despair draws the ability to whisper sweet words of love in your ear (“Love is touch, touch is love, love is reaching, reaching love, love is asking to be loved” from “Love”) but from the same despair sometimes lets himself be overwhelmed (“I don’t expect you to understand after you caused so much pain, but then again you’re not the blame, you’re just a human, a victim of the insane” - “Isolation”).

The targeted choice of a few piano chords, of a drummer with a coarse touch like Ringo Starr, of elementary bass lines by Klaus Voormann, and of small guitar embroideries adequately saturated have in this album (which I have renamed “The Modern Gospel according to St. John”) the same function as those deliberately indecisive lines and those colors between steel gray and dull blue which cannot help but darken the indifference of the gaze of the three men turned back in “Le Pont de l’Europe” by Gustave Caillebotte (1877): in the painting in question, the movement and position of those three men, placed at the edge of such a desolating context for human nature as the industrial revolution, do not allow us to see their expression but only to intuit the sad indifference in their gaze. The movement and position of the chords and lines of “God”, “Remember”, “I Found Out”, “Mother”, and “My Mummy is Dead” fulfill the same function: they precipitate the listener into the anguish of the present, allowing them to imagine the magnitude of the pain that governs Lennon without perfectly seeing its unit of measurement.

The only moment when it seems that sunlight manages to pierce through the thick cloak of clouds that darkens the Author's sky to illuminate his expression is in “Hold On”: the massive presence of major chords, the less harsh melody compared to the rest of the work, and a text more open to future happiness (the song begins with “Hold on John, John hold on, it’s gonna be alright, you gonna win the fight” repeating with “Hold on Yoko, Yoko hold on, it’s gonna be alright, you gonna make the flight”- note the refinement of the contrast between the warrior Lennon who must win the battle and the sweetness of the butterfly Yoko who will take flight) sow the seed of hope even in Lennon’s chronic despair. The same Lennon who allows himself a bit of dark humor in the latter part of God, where, after declaring disbelief in Hitler, Jesus, or Kennedy, he'll confess to not believing in Elvis, Zimmerman, the Beatles, or himself individually because “I just believe in me, Yoko and me”.

This album speaks of despair using the right oil colors for every shade of sorrow. This album speaks of yellow-shame, gray-pessimism, white-ice, and black-death. This album narrates the black death of the soul. Without satanism, without scenes of gratuitous violence, without blood on the cover, it infuses a sense of spiritual death greater than any Slayer album. Since “The Passion” by Mel Gibson is about to be released in theaters, I can affirm that this album is the “passion” of John Lennon (his “Via Crucis” stops however at 11 stations). Or rather: the Gospel according to John.