Well we can skip the first song straight away. As lovely as it to listen to John imagining no possessions when he's sat at a white grand piano in his sprawling Surrey mansion with a Rolls out the front, I think I've got to the point that if I ever hear it again I may vom. Lennon's mate Elton put it better well: "Imagine six apartments. It isn't hard to do. One is full of fur coats. The other's full of shoes". This idealistic hymn to world peace has been ruined by ubiquity and some cringeworthy cover versions. Plus the rest of this album has some much more interesting tracks on it.
'Crippled Inside' is Lennon's pop at country rock, 'It's So Hard' is blues rock n roll and 'Oh My Love' is a pretty melancholy ballad. There's also 'Jealous Guy' and the ranting 'Gimme Some Truth'.
The most interesting lyrically and historically (if you're a Beatles but anyway) is 'How Do You Sleep?', Lennon's scathing attack on fellow Beatle Paul. The song is solely credited to Lennon but it was allegedly co written with Yoko and manager Alan Klein. It followed what Lennon perceived as attacks in McCartney's Ram album, in particular the song 'Too Many People' which was aimed at the Lennons preaching. John replied in much more direct fashion: "So Sgt Pepper took you by surprise...Those freaks were right when they said you were dead...The only thing you've done is Yesterday...oh how do you sleep at night?" During the footage later released as part of the Imagine documentary you see a clearly upset Lennon singing "How do you sleep you cunt?" before asking the engineer to stop.
IMAGINE ends with 'Oh Yoko!' a perfectly pretty pop record that EMI wanted released as a single but Lennon felt was too commercial. It's my favourite song in the album. It's the way he sings the song title, the long vowels, it's just lovely.
OH YOKO!
CRIPPLED INSIDE
OH MY LOVE
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