1971-1980: Imagine

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwUGSYDKUxU

     “Imagine” by John Lennon is a very simple, slow song that came out in 1971. It originated when John Lennon wrote it. At the time, he felt more at liberty to say he’d gotten the idea himself and took the credit for the creativity of the song. However, later he admitted that many of the ideas and even some of the lyrics came from a book Grapefruit by Yoko Ono, published in 1964. When Lennon began writing the piece, he was in his bedroom in England and playing the piano. Lennon and Ono ended up co-producing the song.

     This song was built upon ideas from the past because it was a time when our country was still at war in Vietnam and the younger generation that had been the hippies were now growing up. Drugs were also becoming a force in Lennon’s life and he’s said to have quite powerful, philosophical hallucinations when he was under the influence.

     Why was the piece created? The piece was created when Lennon wanted to express his views on how an ideal world looks to him. He described the perfect communist/socialist community with no borders of countries. He describes a world free of religion, reason to kill; with only peace between people.

     With this song, John Lennon uses his lyrics to describe a peaceful, loving, and harmonious world of people who can coexist and get along together. This song expresses out the time period well for the people who were done with the Vietnam War and just wanted things to be peaceful again.

     This song, while talks about how things could be better, doesn’t say anything about what’s actually wrong. The song also gives no explanation to what types of problems the changes are trying to solve.