John Lennon’s Continued Relevance in the 21rst Century

By Cray Rail

Posted on: May 2025

Image from Wikipedia

“By his example, and in his own words and music, he held the light that showed mankind how to reach for the best within itself.”

– Jackie DeShannon

“I always asked why people did things and why society was like it was. I didn't just accept it for what it was apparently doing. I always looked below the surface.

– John Lennon

Like a shooting star careening through the sky, John Lennon made his mark on the 20th century. But his legacy has lasted far into the 21rst century. Goodreads lists at least 22 books written about him, if that is any measure of his continued influence. While songwriting teams still achieve success today, Lennon’s collaboration with Paul McCartney formed the most successful songwriting partnership in modern music history. Today the Beatles’ catalog is worth more than one billion dollars, and ownership of that song book has a story of its own. 

Lennon’s Influence 

During his time with the Beatles and after they broke up, Lennon was a cultural leader who used his fame to promote progressive causes. While he wrote anthems that helped unite a generation, Lennon became a central figure in the upheavals and challenge to traditions that was the 1960s. He is a sort of founding father of the 1960s youth aesthetic: a rebellious, free spirited, rock and roller who evolved into a critic of authority and established institutions. 

Yet while Lennon embodied these traits, he wasn’t a snob. In an interview with Rolling Stone published posthumously, Lennon said of his final double album with Yoko Ono, “I came back from the place I know best -- as unpretentiously as possible -- not to prove anything but just to enjoy it.” Throughout his career he made sure that he didn’t come across as “pretentious.” This of course isn’t to say he was perfect but that as a celebrity he attempted to maintain his awareness of the working class he came from.  

In a Playboy interview published in September 1980 just a few months before his untimely murder, he demonstrates his characteristic humility with regard to the Beatles’ music. "We tuned in to the message. That's all. I don't mean to belittle the Beatles when I say they weren't this, they weren't that. I'm just trying not to overblow their importance as separate from society. And I don't think they were more important than Glenn Miller or Woody Herman or Bessie Smith. It was our generation, that's all. It was Sixties music."

Lennon downplayed his band’s unique role in helping to shape musical tastes in the 1960s. Yet it was Lennon’s voice that, like a beacon, showed the way for other innovators in rock. His strength and belief in his artistic vision were head and shoulders above what other rock artists were doing, with few exceptions. Rock was evolving with him and he with it. Even just looking at Beatles album covers you can see a metamorphosis through various phases within a relatively short period of time. This all happened roughly from February 9, 1964, the date they famously played on the Ed Sullivan Show and April 10, 1970 the date that Lennon’s band, The Beatles, broke up. A mere six years, but it was the 1960s after all, a time of major societal – and musical – change.

How John Lennon Impacted Me

As a young man I came to identify more with John than Paul, because of his swagger and ideas. As much as I liked George he would never have much of a career if he wasn’t friends with John in high school and his singing and songwriting developed later. When I was young I wanted to be like John, I could be witty and turn a lyric and sing. I’m certainly not the only one to idolize John Lennon, there are millions like me out there. But for my music to exist Lennon had a role in it, his outlook on life, his different phases, I went through some of them as well.

When I listened to The Beatles for the first time I began at the beginning and worked my way to their later solo work, especially John’s songs like Imagine and Mind Games. Some of his political songs I only recently became aware of while researching this blog post such as his song The Luck of the Irish and Remember on Plastic Ono Band. At first listening to the Beatles I couldn’t easily distinguish between John and Paul’s voices. I was into music from the early 1990s, mostly heavy metal, so for me hearing The Beatles was like an aural history lesson. After hearing fantastic covers of rock songs from originators like Little Richard, Chuck Berry and The Isley Brothers I quickly grabbed up their tapes, the dominant medium of my music listening for the first half of my life.

In their work from Rubber Soul through Abbey Road I started becoming a real Beatles nerd, noticing the often contrasting voices between between John Lennon and Paul McCartney (George and Ringo too.) I had an easy chord Beatles songbook and copied out the songs I wanted to sing on lined paper. I still have these songs in a folder somewhere and don’t have the book. Learning Beatles songs and John Lennon’s songs helped me understand chord progressions and pop music. I cut my teeth on learning Beatles songs and I really liked John’s work on the White Album, Revolution 1 and 9, Happiness is a Warm Gun, Cry Baby Cry and Sexy Sadie. My first digital recording session (October of 2000) featured at least two Beatles covers, a John and a Paul song both from the White Album. 

Oscar Zeta Acosta vs. John Lennon 

There’s an interesting quote in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: 

“The radio was screaming: ‘Power to the People – Right On!’ John Lennon’s political song, ten years too late. ‘That poor fool should have stayed where he was,’ said my attorney. ‘Punks like that just get in the way when they try to be serious.’” (Fear and Loathing, page 21)

Of course The Samoan had his own thoughts on revolution and other matters as detailed in his book The Revolt of the Cockroach People. To this day no one knows how Oscar Zeta Acosta met his untimely end. But to characterize Lennon as foolish is to miss his commitment to his vision of a better world. It's easy for hard-bitten radicals to sniff at a celebrity who in some ways represents the antithesis of what it means to be working class or “oppressed.” 

But Lennon addressed this when he talked about the popular misconception that he was being “controlled” by Yoko Ono. Earlier in that same Playboy interview he responded to claims that he was “under Yoko’s spell, under her control” by saying: "Well, that's rubbish, you know. Nobody controls me. I'm uncontrollable. The only one who controls me is me, and that's just barely possible."

Celebrity notwithstanding, John Lennon never forgot where he came from. Lennon himself dismissed his radical phase in the September 1980 Newsweek interview, “being a chameleon I became whoever I was with.” However songs like Working Class Hero tell us how much he understood his own class background and how his influence could help a greater cause. As he said in Working Class Hero:

“Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV

And you think you're so clever and classless and free

But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see”

Lennon must have continued to like the song because although it was written in 1970 he chose to release it again as the B side to Imagine in 1975. History doesn’t know how Oscar Zeta Acosta would have thought of Working Class Hero or John Lennon because of his untimely disappearance in 1974. Sadly we also can’t ask Lennon to comment on that era of his life either. It is for us today to decide whether these songs are still of value and still worth a listen. Lennon’s radical song writing phase doesn’t disappoint most modern critics. These songs have stood the test of time and will continue to inspire future generations.

“Fear,” “Loathing” and John Lennon

In an oft-quoted passage in Fear and Loathing Hunter S. Thompson pinpoints the decline of 1960s idealism as it got consumed in continued war, assassinations and wanton apolitical drug use.  

“History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time – and which never explain, in retrospect, what really happened.

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda … You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning …”

And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave …

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

The tone of Thompson’s passage mirrors an episode from Lennon’s “lost weekend” period, as told by John and Yoko’s friend Elliot Mintz in the book Memories of John Lennon. He talks about how Lennon wanted to visit Las Vegas because he’d never been there. Lennon was gambling at the roulette table and trying to cover almost every number until the few numbers he doesn’t cover come up. There was an impromptu scene with people hanging around the table and wanting autographs on napkins. As Mintz tells it “Dr. Thompson would have included it in Fear and Loathing if he had been present.” The whole episode must have demonstrated that the exuberance for change that belonged to an entire generation was over, or as Lennon said in his song God, “the dream is over.” 

What would John Lennon have said about this quote? I think he would acknowledge the truth of it but also point out that not everyone had abandoned the ideals that made the 60s the 60s. He would also probably be aware of it as a participant observer who could see his own role in history and tried to actively create a vision of hope for the future. He hadn’t stopped this project in 1980 he was continuing it. After five years raising his son Sean and being a self proclaimed “house husband” he released a double album with his wife Yoko Ono Lennon, with whom he shared half the revenue as equal partners. He wasn’t looking back any more at the “high-water mark” of the Age of Aquarius; he was forging a new path forward with his family which is evident in his song Just Like Starting Over.

Hunter S. Thompson’s quote from his most famous book marked the end of an era, but nothing could be more representative of that than John Lennon’s murder. Despite this cowardly act his work lives on in the minds, ears and hearts of millions and time will only make his work more relevant as younger people discover his music and his various phases. His influence – and the times he is emblematic of – will continue to interest listeners well into this century.