Song: “Working Class Hero”

Artist: John Lennon

Album: John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band (1970)

Genre: Folk

Content Warning: The original recording (as opposed to the radio edit) contains profanity.

Synopsis:

The B-side to the ubiquitous “Imagine,” “Working Class Hero” sheds the cloying sentimentality of the former and gets down to serious political business. It’s just Lennon and his guitar, strumming three chords and railing against a nameless “they” (presumably the cultural and political elite) who exert an ever-present downward pressure on working people. “They” inflict physical violence and humiliation at school; “they” ensure that you choose an inoffensive career; and “they” feed you a steady diet of religion, sex and TV to render you easily-managed.

While the Brits have always been more class-conscious than us Americans, Lennon’s offering continues to touch a nerve 50 years later and from across the Atlantic – not least because recent political developments [1] have ushered socioeconomic class (in particular, the white working class) back into the national conversation.

What’s cool about it:

I dunno. I’m a sucker for a guy alone with his acoustic guitar. And it’s got a nice hammer-on pick too.

For my money, Lennon is more compelling when he paints dystopias rather than utopias. Was everything about his upbringing orchestrated by dark powers to keep him down? Probably not – but he obviously feels like it was, and he succeeds in having “you” feel the weight of a societal deck stacked against you. Bad schools, difficult home life, constrained job opportunities – and there is “no time” to develop the internal resources necessary to overcome all this stuff. In a particularly effective line, Lennon scoffs at the notion of the “room at the top” that “they” promise the masses beneath. He is less wrong than I would like him to be. While reports of the death of upward mobility are frequently exaggerated, it’s equally true that it has become harder for children to earn more than their parents [2].

But Lennon does not reserve his scorn solely for “them.” He does not feel sorry for “you” either, as you delude yourself into thinking you’ve beaten the system merely by spouting bits of leftist ideology. For all your cleverness and sloganeering, he growls, you remain “peasants as far as I can see.” Nothing less than heroism, of an admittedly unspecified sort, is what the hour calls for. Perhaps in the post-revolutionary world-to-come there will be “nothing to kill or die for,” but in this present evil age we must be heroes.

Conservative reactionary stuff:

The Left is generally suspicious of Great Man theories of history, in which remarkable individuals (rather than mass social movements) shape the course of human events. It’s thus just a bit ironic that Lennon feels compelled to use the language of “heroes,” by definition individuals who accomplish great and admirable things. The forward march of human progress, he senses, has somehow gotten stuck, requiring remarkable exploits by a chosen few to get things moving again. Perhaps he himself could lead the charge: “If you want to be a hero, well, just follow me.”

And why not? If “they” broke it, then “you” can fix it. It just requires detoxing from the cocktail of religion, sex and TV that “they” have forced upon you. Of course, the particular “dope” Lennon decried in 1970 seems a little quaint now, particularly with regard to religion; we now know, pace Marx, that opiates are the real opium of the masses.

More importantly, Lennon implicitly assumes that if “you” win, then you necessarily dismantle the system, usher in a classless society and bring about the world that “Imagine,” uh, imagines. But, for me, it’s hard to imagine a world in which “you” can avoid becoming “them.” There’s a Cold War-era Russian joke in which the Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev is showing off his collection of fancy foreign cars to his mother. “That’s great, son,” replies his mom, “but what will you do if the Communists come back?”

[1] Trump, obviously, but also things like the college admission scandals.

[2] The fading American dream: Trends in absolute income mobility since 1940 | Science Magazine