John Lennon Essay -- essays research papers

John LennonLennon was born in 1940 during the Nazi bombing of Britain and given the optic name Winston, after Prime Minister Churchill. Knowing firsthand the horror of a world at war and living through the era of Vietnams unpointed carnage as well, Lennon came to embrace and embody pacifism via such classics of the Beatles era as "All You Need Is Love" and "Strawberry Fields Forever." Yet he also had a countervailing dark side that found expression in pained outcries that dated as far back as "Help." This unvarnished locution of the Lennon persona reached a fevered pitch with the drug-withdrawal blues of "Cold Turkey," a 1969 single released under the name Plastic Ono Band.Although Lennon was a complicated man, he chose at this juncture to simplify his art in order to figure out his life, erasing the boundaries between the two. As he explained it, he started trying "to shave off every imagery, pretensions of poetry, illusions of grandeur...Jus t say what it is, simple English, make it rhyme and put a backbeat on it, and express yourself as simply and straightforwardly as possible." His most fully realize statement, as a solo artist was 1970s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Lennons first solo album, it followed several avant-garde sound collages recorded toward the end of the Beatles era with his married woman and collaborator, Yoko Ono. The raw, confessional nature of Plastic Ono Band reflected the primal-scream therapy that Len...