Come back to the five and dime, Desiderius Erasmus, Desiderius Erasmus
My girlfriend was telling me yesterday about how she thought the lyrics to John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" were more angry than they were hopeful. It's not like someone telling me that John Lennon was an angry guy is such a big shock - but his vitriol often goes forgotten because his catalogue has been subsumed into the land of the hippy-dippy. "All you need is love", maybe, but have you ever checked out the lyrics to that song? They're a nihilist's prayer. It's not like he's saying love is the key to happiness. It's more like everything is fucked regardless, so you may as well go ahead and at least try to offer one single moment of unselfishness. It will never be enough, but sure, give it a go. It's easy!
Anyways, Happy Xmas. Try the lyrics out in an Alastair Sim voice and you'll understand what my girlfriend meant. "And what have you done?" At the very best, it's a lament for the passing of time. But there's an accusation in it too, as in, it's not just the things you've left undone that are bugging him, it's maybe whatever you did. Although: "War is over!" What more wonderful proclamation could there be in such a reaching, falsely grandiloquent melody. But it's followed by the rotter's shrug, "...if you want it." He's like Dylan tossing his lyrics into the street. It's as much the snarling sell-out of a slogan as Johnny Rotten's "God save the queen / We mean it, man." That there's a choir behind him is something only meant to further confuse the matter.
That's John Lennon, man. The image of his blank face, bled into a sky strewn with cirrus clouds, is the perfect cover for an album called "Imagine", because what he most of all wanted us to imagine was Nothing. No you, no me, no this, no now, no then. Heresy and prophecy bleed into one another all the way through him. "I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as one." Indeed, someday, it will. If there's one thing you can say about Oblivion, it's that it has a bed made for us all.
So what hope does he offer? In "Happy Xmas", it's in the way he saves his most forceful, most inflectional reading for the line "A new one just begun." It's the only part of the song where he allows his voice to deviate from the grade-school level melody he's devised. He crams four notes into "begun", because he wants you to know that he welcomes the new year.
But he also knows that it's hard. Human failings, the merciless elements, the inexorable logic of age all add up to one thing: every passing year will, on average, be a little bit harder than the last. We can affect it in big ways, with new loves, new friends, new money, new governments, but that's the way things are sliding. Towards the quick snap, the whimper. The philosopher Seneca wanted us to prepare ourselves for the very worst by recognizing it as inevitable. We will lose or be forgotten to all of our friends and family. We will be rendered penniless by a gust of wind. We will lose our looks, our limbs, our last resorts. Misery is certain. The grace of God is fickle.
Lennon was rich, but he understood this perfectly. But in "Happy Xmas", he doesn't wind the song down to some singer-songwriter moment of personality infliction where he takes over from the choir and strums a bit and tells us how we should really be to our near and our dear ones because we share an oblivion with them. He just keeps opening the song up wider and wider, until it ends in a delirious, retarded "Aaa-aaa-aaa-aaahhh!" where words used to be. The anger and the accusatory tone, I would argue, have been wrestled to the ground by now. All he's after is the simplest kind of redemption - a moment where you're kind and innocent because you've forgotten how cruel and twisted you normally are. It's a really sad song, because it's nothing but an eyes-shut-tight denial. And it ends a capella! Talk about mortifying.
So if we can't even rely on a goofy-faced moment of shared idiocy to hold us together, what use could we possibly make of that complicated beast we call goodwill to our fellow man?
A better world is not in our cards. We have only the one we've got, and our tools are clumsy. We can never reach out to just the right person at just the right time. We can only reach out indiscriminately. The odds of anyone getting it right are slim. The hope that anyone should reach out to us is a miscalculation so staggering we spend years socializing our children out of it before we consider them safely able to act on their own. Still, all our culural touchstones, the heft of religion wherever it is found, church or cineplex, are mad for the kindness of strangers. We want it so badly we're salivating.
We shouldn't let each other suffer the embarassment of being deluded.
When it comes to songs about goodwill to your fellow man, Lennon wrote one that was much better than "Happy Xmas". He called it "Mind Games", and if you recall, he wanted us to keep on playing them. Standoffish he may have been, in fact a lot, and he was so familiar with irony he may as well have invented it. I don't think, though, that he had it in him to be sarcastic. The brackets indicate a sotto voce: Happy Xmas! (War is over!)
Anyways, Happy Xmas. Try the lyrics out in an Alastair Sim voice and you'll understand what my girlfriend meant. "And what have you done?" At the very best, it's a lament for the passing of time. But there's an accusation in it too, as in, it's not just the things you've left undone that are bugging him, it's maybe whatever you did. Although: "War is over!" What more wonderful proclamation could there be in such a reaching, falsely grandiloquent melody. But it's followed by the rotter's shrug, "...if you want it." He's like Dylan tossing his lyrics into the street. It's as much the snarling sell-out of a slogan as Johnny Rotten's "God save the queen / We mean it, man." That there's a choir behind him is something only meant to further confuse the matter.
That's John Lennon, man. The image of his blank face, bled into a sky strewn with cirrus clouds, is the perfect cover for an album called "Imagine", because what he most of all wanted us to imagine was Nothing. No you, no me, no this, no now, no then. Heresy and prophecy bleed into one another all the way through him. "I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as one." Indeed, someday, it will. If there's one thing you can say about Oblivion, it's that it has a bed made for us all.
So what hope does he offer? In "Happy Xmas", it's in the way he saves his most forceful, most inflectional reading for the line "A new one just begun." It's the only part of the song where he allows his voice to deviate from the grade-school level melody he's devised. He crams four notes into "begun", because he wants you to know that he welcomes the new year.
But he also knows that it's hard. Human failings, the merciless elements, the inexorable logic of age all add up to one thing: every passing year will, on average, be a little bit harder than the last. We can affect it in big ways, with new loves, new friends, new money, new governments, but that's the way things are sliding. Towards the quick snap, the whimper. The philosopher Seneca wanted us to prepare ourselves for the very worst by recognizing it as inevitable. We will lose or be forgotten to all of our friends and family. We will be rendered penniless by a gust of wind. We will lose our looks, our limbs, our last resorts. Misery is certain. The grace of God is fickle.
Lennon was rich, but he understood this perfectly. But in "Happy Xmas", he doesn't wind the song down to some singer-songwriter moment of personality infliction where he takes over from the choir and strums a bit and tells us how we should really be to our near and our dear ones because we share an oblivion with them. He just keeps opening the song up wider and wider, until it ends in a delirious, retarded "Aaa-aaa-aaa-aaahhh!" where words used to be. The anger and the accusatory tone, I would argue, have been wrestled to the ground by now. All he's after is the simplest kind of redemption - a moment where you're kind and innocent because you've forgotten how cruel and twisted you normally are. It's a really sad song, because it's nothing but an eyes-shut-tight denial. And it ends a capella! Talk about mortifying.
So if we can't even rely on a goofy-faced moment of shared idiocy to hold us together, what use could we possibly make of that complicated beast we call goodwill to our fellow man?
A better world is not in our cards. We have only the one we've got, and our tools are clumsy. We can never reach out to just the right person at just the right time. We can only reach out indiscriminately. The odds of anyone getting it right are slim. The hope that anyone should reach out to us is a miscalculation so staggering we spend years socializing our children out of it before we consider them safely able to act on their own. Still, all our culural touchstones, the heft of religion wherever it is found, church or cineplex, are mad for the kindness of strangers. We want it so badly we're salivating.
We shouldn't let each other suffer the embarassment of being deluded.
When it comes to songs about goodwill to your fellow man, Lennon wrote one that was much better than "Happy Xmas". He called it "Mind Games", and if you recall, he wanted us to keep on playing them. Standoffish he may have been, in fact a lot, and he was so familiar with irony he may as well have invented it. I don't think, though, that he had it in him to be sarcastic. The brackets indicate a sotto voce: Happy Xmas! (War is over!)
posted by gibletquesterrs at 8:51 PM
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