Mark Kemp’s best-of tracklist for John Lennon’s iTunes catalog
It’s a daunting task to dig through a catalog as deep as John Lennon’s, but with all of his albums finally available for digital download via iTunes, there’s now more reason than ever. Paste‘s senior contributing editor Mark Kemp has sorted through some of Lennon’s finest work, cataloging playlist-ready popular favorites and deep tracks alike.
1. “Look at Me,” from Anthology
In one of his most vulnerable songs, Lennon asks his listeners to look at who he is beyond the Beatles, beyond fame, beyond the mythology that had grown up around him during his tenure with the biggest pop band in the world.
2. “Mother,” from Plastic Ono Band
After the Beatles’ acrimonious break-up, Lennon turned inward, looking to his childhood for reasons for his insecurity. This song came out of his scream-therapy sessions and is one of the rawest, most primal songs in the rock canon. “Mother, you had me but I never had you,” he sings, and then in the next verse, “Father, you left me but I never left you.” The song was recently covered, brilliantly and fittingly, by Shelby Lynne, whose father murdered her mother when Lynne was a child and then turned the gun on himself.
3. “God,” from Plastic Ono Band
Throughout his youth and as a Beatle, Lennon looked to gurus, different religions and his own musical idols, like Elvis and Dylan, for answers to life’s big questions. In this song, he decides the only concept he can truly believe in is his own existence.
4. “Working Class Hero,” from Plastic Ono Band
Another dark one from his solo studio debut, this acoustic-guitar ballad chastises Britain’s class system for making the working-class citizen believe he can never raise himself above his place in society.
5. “Imagine,” from Imagine
On his second album, Lennon returns to the dreamer of his past, and in this beautiful piano-based ballad he dreams of a world with no boundaries, no theology, no rules, no limits.
6. “Gimme Some Truth”, from Imagine
Always one to expose hypocrisy, Lennon demands the Truth in this song. The problem is that Lennon himself – a confessed violent soul, a drug addict, a megalomaniac, a cheater – was as hypocritical as anyone he targeted, and he knew it.
7. “How Do You Sleep,” from Imagine
In this song he proves his hypocrisy. It’s perhaps the most brutal, least compassionate song ever directed at any one person. In this one, he attacks Paul McCartney, basically calling him a no-talent poser. On his early solo album Ram, McCartney had directed a number of barbs at Lennon.
8. “Cold Turkey,” from Lennon Legend
If the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” romanticizes the drug, this one puts dope in its proper context – as a conduit to utter pain. In the horrible screams toward the end of “Cold Turkey,” you can practically hear Lennon kicking the drug.
9. “Woman is the Nigger of the World,” from Sometime in New York City
One of Lennon’s most powerful political songs, this one accurately describes women as the most oppressed minority in the world: “We make her paint her face and dance / If she wont be a slave, we say that she don’t love us. / If she’s real, we say she’s trying to be a man. / While putting her down, we pretend that she’s above us…”
10. “Mind Games,” from Mind Games
Inspired by the book of the same name by Robert Masters and Jean Houston, in which the authors suggest that humans have the potential to succeed, spiritually and otherwise, by playing mind games with themselves.
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