Amerika

It was 37 years ago today… when a lonely and maladjusted man, perhaps a forerunner of the /pol/ aggro-NEETs of our decade, took aim and destroyed the greatest icon of the hippie era. John Lennon led the Beatles into pretentious pseudo-intellectual pop music that was beloved for its Leftist politics more than anything else, and turned catchy songs into a mantra-like indoctrinate for the 1960s.

When Mark David Chapman raised his .38 special and perforated Lennon, he not only entered himself into the history books as an early type of what later became the spree shooter, namely the attention-driven perpetrator of violence, but also delivered the crucifixion that Lennon had pretended to undergo with his artistic drama and attention whoring.

Having made himself famous for being half of the writing team that produced catchy songs — Lennon-McCarthy invented a way of writing a simple three-part melody and then wrapping it around a pop song format — John Lennon, the Irish-descended outsider who never felt at home in England, turned on and attacked the societies that had enriched him, both England and the United States. It was as if he blamed them for celebrating him despite his failings, and in resentment at condescension he lashed out.

After leading numerous people into the hippie movement, proclaiming atheism and pacifism while living in exclusive parts of New York, Lennon found himself in conflict: the hippies were drifting toward what was essentially Communism, but Lennon found that distasteful, despite being unwilling to connect an ideology of individualism with the type of larcenous, abusive behavior that necessarily goes along with it.

In fact, he descended into that behavior, making numerous people connect the individualism of the hippies with their personal selfishness and the types of mentally controlling philosophies — egalitarianism, socialism, pacifism, asceticism — that they endorsed. Chapman was motivated by dislike of Lennon’s anti-philosophy:

By then, Chapman was already a religious zealot who, though a former Beatles fan, had turned against Lennon for once bragging that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”

At his evangelical group, Mark sang the words: “Imagine there’s no John Lennon,” to the tune of Lennon’s hit song “Imagine.”

Entering his fourth decade, Lennon thus found himself somewhat artistically becalmed, writing songs about seemingly profound truths that he may have no longer fully believed, but since his fame and continued relevance was based in being a hippie icon, he was trapped into being a trope himself, a media figure. Fortunately Mark David Chapman intervened and spared us all further tedium.

Tags: communism, john lennon, mark david chapman