John+Lennon

Overview
John Lennon started his life on Penny Lane selling lemonade outside a house his friends called Strawberry Fields. As the writer in a band, Lennon took these experiences and transformed them into songs. He sang, throughout the mid 20th century, as a member of the Beatles. The band consisted of Ringo, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Lennon. From Liverpool they came to America and brought British rock across the pond. There enormous success became known as “Beatlemania”. These men were irresistible by teenage standards. As their manger put it, “I dropped in a smoky, smelly, squalid cellar and there were these four youths. There act was ragged, their clothes were a mess. And yet I sensed at once that there was something here.”

Critical Issue
John Lennon, along with Paul McCartney, embodies the music of the band. Despite not being able to read music, they came up with an upbeat raucous sound bellowing out of electrical speakers. The Beatles sound became known for a raging drum set and three guitars that accompanied repeated catch phrases. The band’s fun attitude coincided with Lennon’s when he made comments such as, “The day the fans desert us, I’ll be wondering how I’m going to pay for my whisky and Cokes.” As the bands Spokesman John Lennon had no need to worry, even in modern musical culture the Beatles are praised. When writing music John Lennon understood that people wanted to hear your soul, and you had to take that risk. TIME Magazine wrote of these songs saying, “The songs that he (John Lennon) and Paul McCartney wrote for the Beatles, separately and together, brought more people up against the joy and boldness of rock music than anything else ever has.”

Conclusion/Historical Significance
As TIME Magazine saw it, “ Lennon also shared with many other rockers a kind of operational fatalism, a sense that doing your best, whether on record or in concert, required laying yourself open, making yourself vulnerable.” Some of John Lennon’s most well known songs include: Imagine, Whatever Gets you through the night, and Give Peace a Chance. His music spoke to the people at a time of political turmoil. He was able to give his fans a voice, and not just that, but a chance to be heard. John Lennon would become a rock icon in American pop culture. As he referred to himself, “In one way, I was always hip. I was hip in kindergarten. I was different from the others. There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things other people didn’t see. I was always seeing things in a hallucinatory way.”

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