Nevertheless, the single made it to Number 57 on Billboard‘s Top 100 – which means it did get on the air. For extra perversity, Lennon set his soapbox vocal and underground-wire-service lyrics to a hearty retro blast of American Fifties R&B. “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” Sometime in New York City, 1972īefore Patti Smith wrote “Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger” and black rappers claimed the racist epithet as a signifier for ghetto brotherhood, Lennon tested his privileges at Top 40 radio with the chorus of this feminist manifesto, written with Ono, as the first single from Sometime in New York City. But King Curtis disrupts the churn with strafing peals of sax, and George Harrison’s slide guitar courses through the track like jungle vine. The jamming was rare on a Lennon record – more like an outtake from a Rolling Stones session for Sticky Fingers, with Nicky Hopkins on piano for added authenticity. This chant of refusal was barely a song – a couple of chords and variations on the title line (“rich man,” “lawyer,” “church man,” “failure”). “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier, Mama, I Don’t Wanna Die,” Imagine, 1971 But the shove of the rhythm section and Lennon’s distinctive hammering on piano sound anything but defeated. “Sometimes I feel like goin’ down,” Lennon sings in a bitter growl. This funky march is like “Yer Blues” from The Beatles, with an ironed-out beat and hearty blasts of tenor saxophone by King Curtis. But when Lennon wrote in the second person, he often did it staring into a mirror. Lennon followed the opening peace anthem on his second album with this grenade wrapped in rockabilly rhythm and prairie-saloon piano, with a slinky country-boy solo on dobro by George Harrison. The chorus – “One thing you can’t hide/Is when you’re crippled inside” – may have been a slap at ex-bandmate Paul McCartney (who would get it full blast on Side Two, in “How Do You Sleep?”). The top 10 Beatles songs “Crippled Inside,” Imagine, 1971 It’s “Help” without the electric-guitar chime, stripped to the barest piano gestures and, right before the bridge, a silence broken only by Ringo Starr’s kick-drum thump, sounding like the loudest heartbeat in the world. “Isolation,” John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, 1970Īmid the blunt pronouncements about maternal need, renounced faith and eternal love for his wife and creative partner, Yoko Ono, unleashed by the couple’s experiences in primal-scream therapy, “Isolation” was Lennon at his most afraid, confronting his post-Beatle freedom with paranoia and insecurity.
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