Rabbits Full of Magic

08 December 2010

 

RIP John Lennon



listen to my chiptune remix of "She's Leaving Home"

John Lennon - like so many who have quested against violence - was murdered and its only natural that he became the first deified Beatle. There was his "Bigger than Jesus" comment, but there was also that moment in "No Reply" when he sang "I saw the light!" and even though it was about being hung up on a girl the way he sang it edged the Beatles nearer to Godliness than anyone in the vinyl-age pop music idiom. John Lennon (even before his 1969 Jesus phase) always radiated a kind of magic energy. On Rubber Soul he led his group even further down a mystical path, with the futurist tribal magic dance ritual "The Word". He almost sounds fascistic in his declaration: "Now that I know that our views must be right, I'm here to show everybody The Light!" on top of a 2-note piano drone. He sounds like a man possessed, like Moses come down from the mountain. Less than 12 months later he was reading about The Clear Light that one sees after death in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, writing "Tomorrow Never Knows", the world's first sample and drum loop-based pop song.


Enter Japanese conceptual artist Yoko Ono, smeared and scapegoated and racially abused for many reasons which are all pretty unforgivable. The industry couldn't handle an establishment pop star releasing ground breaking avant garde minimalism like "Two Virgins" and (my favorite) "Life With The Lions". The latter in particular is a jaw-droppingly brilliant vision of Ono's Zen-like fluxus minimalist mindset amplified by The Light- John's love for Yoko. Still in The Beatles, John released an album beginning with a 20 minute feedback-and-wailing primal scream noise drone track, complete with hippy jazz coda as if a sampler had suddenly switched on. On Side B John (or possibly Yoko or any of their friends) plays a transistor radio like a free-form musical synthesizer, crafting a harsh electronic rhythm that could be mistaken for Throbbing Gristle if only it weren't so raw and minimal.

Speaking of experimental electronic music, John Lennon was one of the earliest purchasers of the famous mellotron, a proto-synth, proto-sampler that he tinkered with at home and in the studio with The Beatles. There is an unreleased recording of Magical Mystery Tour incidental music by John on this instrument - part of which can be heard on the end of that album's "Flying". The outtake is nearly 10 minutes of pre-Music For Airports layered tape loop ambient music, and it is sad that Apple is sitting on revolutionary material like this and Lennon/Ono's video work. In sound and video the two made work with drones, loops, feedback, and repetition to induce a change in consciousness in the audience. One becomes focused on meditating on the formal aspects of a radio tuner, the sound of a cello reversed and sped up, a montage of peoples' legs, the Number 9, etc.

The more musical pieces on "Life With The Lions" record make me think of Beat Happening; the improvised, acapella melodies, the rough acoustic guitar, the bedroom recording environment. So this is the first lo-fi recording, the first DIY bedroom record. John was always weary of the illusion of The Beatles, and his scorn was often aimed at the music industry vampires than ran the show back then and continue to do so. For a brief moment he could have both the beautiful, detached, baroque Beatles dream, and this new intimate, pure and direct connection with his fans.

His most famous album and the song that gets quoted every time this day comes up, "Imagine", was recorded on his bedroom piano, with Phil Spector manning the tape deck. How fucking amazing is that?

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