Loading ...The seeds of the song lay in a book by his wife Yoko Ono called Grapefruit. Published in 1964, it was a piece of conceptual art listing a series of instructions for the reader, in which the word “imagine” featured prominently.
“Yoko actually helped a lot with the lyrics, but I wasn’t man enough to let her have credit for it,” Lennon confessed to reporter. In early 1971, Lennon finished the lyrics (and Ono’s input was officially credited in 2017)
In October the song was released as a single around the world. But Imagine encapsulated his world view at the time,
Lennon once described the song as “anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it is sugarcoated it is accepted”.
“It’s virtually the communist manifesto,” he half-joked. The song wasn’t entirely accepted. The opening line “Imagine there’s no heaven” and later lyric “and no religion, too” incensed American Christian leaders who already disliked Lennon.
These were the same people who burnt Beatles records after Lennon proclaimed the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now” just five years earlier. “The song isn’t just a song, it’s a tool. If used the right way, with the right people, it’s a tool to create and encourage and inspire and motivate.”
The song is not without its detractors though.
Acclaimed singer-songwriter Elvis Costello called it “one of (Lennon’s) worst”, slagging it off in his single The Other Side Of Summer with the lyric “was it a millionaire who said ‘imagine no possessions?'”.
“Imagine can feel a little trite and condescending,” agreed Goodden.
“It’s bizarre to see the video, shot inside Lennon’s huge Tittenhurst Park mansion, in which he sings, ‘Imagine no possessions’.
“The multi-millionaire Lennon was as materialistic as anyone and in later years he changed the lyrics to ‘I wonder if we can’, seemingly mindful of the charges of hypocrisy.”
In the wake of his death, the song returned to the charts around the world,
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-04/imagine-50-years-john-lennon-beatles/100238128