I’ve focussed on a few songs in this section which really do take everything back to basics, but really, could there be anything more straightforward, both in terms of music and message, than John Lennon’s anthem to peace? I mean, it’s just one line mostly, and really the same melody all the way through, and yet somehow it doesn’t come across as lazy or contrived, possibly because the man believed deeply and fiercely in what he was singing about. Perhaps he just thought to himself: who cares if the song sucks? (It doesn’t by the way) I jsut want to get my message across, using the medium I have defined my life by.
Give peace a chance --- John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band ---1969
Music by John Lennon, Lyrics by John Lennon and Yoko Ono
And so we have one of the simplest, yet most elegant, beautiful and above all honest songs in quite possibly the history of music. Lennon is even peaceful with the one line in his chorus. He doesn’t try to shove peace down your throat --- if that’s not a contradiction in terms --- or go on about how we should all be nicer to one another (though of course that never hurts). He doesn’t even lay out the barest blueprint for how this peace is to be achieved --- because frankly I’m sure he was as clueless as to how that could be done as we are today --- and yet, again, this does not come across as someone preaching peace but avoiding the issue of how it is to be attained. It’s jsut the simple wish of a sincere man who wanted us all to stop hating and kicking the **** out of each other over everything from territorial boundaries to whose god is the right one.
And who among us could quarrel with his message? Well, perhaps the likes of Assad, Hussein, Bush, a few others. The ugly minority who are or were too filled with hatred and prejudice to ever see a clear path to peace. But the vast, vast majority of humanity all really want one thing, deep down, and that is a safe and peaceful world for their children to grow up in.
And back in 1969, one man said it best, not the loudest, but in a quiet murmur that was taken up by the American anti-war movement and peace organisations across the globe, so that even now, over forty years since it was written and twenty since his untimely death, “Give peace a chance” still rings out across the world as an anthem, a hope and almost a demand as the planet hovers ever closer to extinction, threatening to forever silence the voices that chorus out those nine most simple words before Lennon’s dream can ever become a reality.
Let’s just hope the people who can make it happen are listening, before it ends up being too late.