The 1980 Listening Post - John Lennon & Yoko Ono - Double Fantasy

 John Lennon & Yoko Ono - Double Fantasy

#445

By Stephen Romone Lewis

John Lennon & Yoko Ono

Double Fantasy

Genre: Pop 

Allen’s Rating: 4 out of 5

Stephen’s Rating: 4.75 out of 5

Allen’s Highlights:

Just Like Starting Over

I’m Losing You

Beautiful Boy

Watching the Wheels

Stephen’s Highlights: 

Watching the Wheels

(Just Like) Starting Over

I’m Your Angel

Hard Times are Over

    First listen 2020.

    I needed to listen with fresh ears to honestly evaluate this album. I failed. 

Two years into a Beatles obsession, Lennon was assassinated. I was 13. My first experience with loss. My parents gave me Double Fantasy, an early Christmas present, 18 hours after his death. It’s impossible, even now, to disassociate my feelings of adolescent heartbreak from this music. Whatever emotions John and Yoko intended me to have listening to their songs are replaced with grief, hopelessness and anger. Lots and lots of anger. These are not sappy songs of blissful matrimony, they boil my blood.

Listening to “Beautiful Boy” I can only hear myself scream, “Ronny, you could have stopped Hinckley! A bullet to your lung. You almost bled out you…”

As a kid I thought the lyrics to “Woman” seemed like dreck, but now they sound like me shouting, “WHEN WILL WE STOP ARMING THE MENTALLY ILL!”

Is it over produced? I don’t know! I don’t hear production. All I hear is an increasingly hoarse voice crying to John. “You should have gone to England; the worst he could have done was stab you. Right, George?”

Do Yoko’s songs ruin what could have been a pop masterpiece? I don’t know! I stopped paying attention after I flipped the disc. Forty years of congressional “leaders” confusing “a well regulated militia” with well armed psych wards. Every song leads me deeper into a revenge fantasy where…

Wait. 

The widow is singing, “It's been very hard, but it's getting easier now. Hard times are over, over for a while.”

It’s difficult to maintain a decent hate spiral while people chant, “Hard times are over.”

BUT! But! Sandy Hook!

“Hard times are over.”

You don’t sound like you believe yourself anymore than I do, Yoko.

“Hard times are over.”

But… 

“Hard times are over.”

Okay.

“Hard times are over. Over for awhile.”

https://open.spotify.com/album/1NWA2fPLUAW5df7UGI5thp?si=m3oauSzMSHasKzfeLrG9kA