Theorising ‘first-person music’

What is ‘first-person music’? And how has previous scholarship addressed it? Broadening Lennon's term, I understand ‘first-person music’ as referring to post-Woodstock popular music that depends on a cluster of interrelated values concerning self-expression and self-realisation for its meaning. In the most general sense, ‘many artists at the turn of the 1970s’, Ann Powers has written, were ‘beginning to think that the impetus for cultural change might not be communal effort, but individual revolt’ (2017, p. 217). In the USA, the singer-songwriter movement represented in its most distilled form that broader turn towards valorising individual self-expression. Singer-songwriters, as Christa Bentley has argued, ‘found an audience hungry for music that directed listeners into [a] state of self-reflective personal growth’ through ‘introspective, first-person storytelling’ (Reference Bentley2017, pp. 1 and 4). This turn moreover began to be institutionalised through rock criticism in diverse, sometimes contradictory, ways. Rolling Stone monetised the confessional turn in the early 1970s, ‘selling intimacy,’ as Joe Hagan writes, with revealing photo-essays and tell-all profiles – ‘a fusion of the countercultural imperative to liberate oneself and good old-fashioned show business’ (2017, p. 210).

Rockist historiography has inflected that larger artistic turn towards ‘first-person music’ since 1970. On the one hand, rockist discourse has often overdetermined the political significance of certain singer-songwriters. By the mid-1970s, authors routinely claimed world-historical political significance for rock music in general, and 1960s artists like the Beatles and Bob Dylan in particular. ‘[The Beatles] wrote and sang songs’, Jeff Greenfield stated in the New York Times. ‘We turned it into politics and philosophy and a road map to another way of life’ (Reference Greenfield1975, p. 14). Lennon and Dylan ‘showed that [1960s rock] was capable of more than disruption’, Mikal Gilmore claimed in Rolling Stone 15 years later, ‘that it could unite masses for worthy causes and could actually bring about social and humanitarian change’ (Reference Gilmore1990).

On the other hand, some critics maintained a more ambiguous position vis-à-vis the emerging value of self-expression found in the confessional turn. The American rock critic Lester Bangs notoriously panned ‘first-person’ music, famously mock-threatening to disembowel singer-songwriter James Taylor if the critic had to ‘hear one more Jesus-walking-the-boys-and-girls-down-a-Carolina-path-while-the-dilemma-of-existence-crashes-like-a-slab-of-hod-on-J.T.'s-shoulders song’ (Reference Bangs and Marcus2003 [1971], p. 71). This perspective can be considered within a larger critical consensus about the 1970s, one which has often tended towards caricature. ‘One word sums up the decade and its music’, claimed Jeremy Pascall, introducing ‘The Splintered Seventies’ in The Illustrated History of Rock, ‘dismal’ (Reference Pascall1978, p. 156). Such perspectives did not emerge within a vacuum. New rockist norms, as I discuss at the end of this essay, must be situated within a wider epistemological context that valorised ‘the 1960s’ for its authentic political engagement while decrying ‘the 1970s’ as a ‘Me Decade’ giving rise to a ‘culture of narcissism’ (see Wolfe Reference Wolfe1976; Lasch Reference Lasch1979).

Critical academic perspectives on self-expression in rock music have tended to approach this value in two ways. One influential body of literature has explored ‘authenticity’, examining its construction as well as historicising how this value entered the practice and discourse of rock (cf. Frith Reference Frith1981; Regev Reference Regev1994; Auslander Reference Auslander1998); this essay extends that work, albeit from a different angle. In contrast, Theodore Gracyk's I Wanna Be Me (Reference Gracyk2001) presents a more philosophical examination of self-discovery in rock. Gracyk examines the dialectic between socio-political structures and individual musicians and listeners. He aims to understand the relationship between popular music and personal identity more broadly. Gracyk writes that ‘[if] personal identity involves a constant struggle against the impositions and assumptions of others, then it also seems to depend on appropriations from a larger cultural apparatus that is beyond our individual comprehension’ (2001, p. 8). That is, the struggle to understand ourselves inheres not only within interpersonal relationships, but also within social institutions. As Gracyk convincingly argues, rock music has provided listeners with a resource to work through that struggle, a struggle immanent to modern life itself. For Gracyk, however, ‘personal identity’ remains an a priori category of analysis against which competing claims – about rock music's ability to extend, or to reign in, our possibilities for living in the world – might be assessed.

My perspective presents an alternative to that second approach. Below, I examine individual subjectivity itself as a specific project that needs to be historicised. The story I narrate includes a global cast – a pop star from the UK, two London-based intellectuals, a San Francisco-based rock entrepreneur, a California psychotherapist and a member of a transnational art collective. However, it is the specifically North American context that enabled the diverse practices and projects these individuals were pursuing at the cusp of the 1970s to be articulated. My close reading of narratives about John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970) then does not help us prove or disprove a phenomenon we might call ‘the Me Decade’, or even ‘the rise of individualism’. Nor do I assume that popular music in general, and rock music in particular, represents a positive resource for self-fashioning. Instead, I present this album as a lens for perceiving linkages between a particular, postwar conception of the individual subject in the USA, a conception embedded within 1960s countercultural politics and subsequently transformed during the 1970s and 1980s. Rather than evaluate how rock music has (or has not) functioned as a resource for self-expression, my narrative concludes by problematising this resource and its politics since 1970.

‘Feeling my pain’: Arthur Janov's Primal Therapy and John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band (1970)

In March 1970, John Lennon and Yoko Ono read Arthur Janov's book Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis. Janov's publisher, Dell, sent unsolicited copies to cultural influencers like Lennon; pop stars like Mick Jagger and actors like James Earl Jones received books as well. Primal Therapy presented the remarkable results of the American psychotherapist's experimental group sessions with over 60 patients at his clinic in California over 18 months in 1967 and 1968. His treatment identified the repression of childhood traumas, or Pain (capitalised in the book), as the root of adult neuroses. Janov's patients exorcised these traumas by ‘primaling’, expressing their repressed pain by screaming and sobbing in group therapy sessions.

Deeply impressed, Lennon sent copies of Primal Therapy to friends, sometimes underlining words in Janov's prefatory dedication – to ‘my patients, who were real enough to recognise that they were sick and wanted to end the struggle’ – for emphasis.Footnote ¹ Janov flew to London for private consultations with Lennon and Ono in April; the couple then travelled to Los Angeles for intensive group sessions between May to early September. On 24 September, Lennon and Ono returned to London, each recording an album during sessions booked at Abbey Road Studios between 27 September and 27 October. Phil Spector mixed the tracks in late October, and Apple Records released the two albums simultaneously on 11 December.

At just under 40 minutes, the 11 tracks on John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band constituted a searing, album-length self-examination of Lennon's life, politics and personal relationships. The lyrics explored family, pain, love and loss; the recordings often sound like quickly sketched first drafts. Lennon stretched and tore his voice. At times repetition threatened to pull apart the pick-up band, composed of Lennon, Ono on ‘wind’, Ringo Starr on drums and Klaus Voorman on bass; the musicians peppered their rough, workmanlike playing with bum notes. However, the howling also gives way to calm, with emotionally raw passages rubbing up almost painfully against moments of somnambulant self-reflection. Several songs invoked primal therapy in overt ways. The opening track, ‘Mother’ (A1), concluded with Lennon screaming for his parents; the penultimate track, ‘God’ (B5), included one of Janov's key terms, Pain. Other tracks, however, referenced Lennon's experiences with the therapy only obliquely. The lyric of ‘I Found Out’ (A3), for instance, included passing references to parents, albeit within a longer litany of institutions with which the singer had become disillusioned.

Writing in the Village Voice, the American critic Robert Christgau named it the best album of 1970. The extent to which the therapy directly influenced the album, however, became a point of contention after Lennon and Janov fell out in early 1971. For what it is worth, contemporary reviewers did emphasise the link. Writing in Rolling Stone, for instance, Greil Marcus called the record ‘Lennon's proof that the true power of rock as music is to be found in stripping it as bare as primal therapy was supposed to strip the soul’ (1971). My aim is not to assess whether or not the therapy actually influenced the album, but rather to interpret how the therapy, critical discourses about the album and the album's musical and lyrical content articulated at this particular historical moment and place.

By 1970, the expectation that our real selves should be discovered, expressed and actualised in our daily lives was, relatively speaking, new (cf. Grogan Reference Grogan2013). Postwar humanistic psychologists and psychiatrists had progressively introduced into American discourse several key notions about the nature of the self and reality that today, a half-century later, most people take for granted. The larger American project I am describing had a longer history. Since the 1930s, Western thinkers had problematised ‘man’, depicting human beings as subject to a ‘crisis’ characterised by the individual's efforts to live a meaningful life within political, economic and cultural structures that seemed, at best, to constrain them (see Greif Reference Greif2015). During and after World War II, an entire constellation of terms emerged from this broader problematic in the USA. Novel concepts included ‘self-actualisation’, elaborated by Abraham Maslow in Reference Maslow1943, as well as the term ‘identity’ itself, theorised by psychologist Erick Erickson in Reference Erickson1950. Embedded within such concepts were two key assumptions: about psychological interiority (that there exists an authentic self that we might discover or uncover) and mental health or ‘integrity’ (that a ‘healthy’ mind depends on the unity of our public self-presentation with our interior self). As these assumptions diffused throughout the postwar USA, they linked to an emerging politics that centred on liberation – but that claimed to be universal. Psychologist Carl Rogers, for instance, identified a ‘fresh current’ sweeping across the world, as ‘man [is] endeavoring to become himself: not a puppet, not a slave, not a copy of some model, but his own unique individual self’ (Rogers Reference Rogers and Wann1964, p. 130).

By the end of the 1960s, the modern psychopolitical conception of the self and this emergent politics of liberation combined distinctively across a range of institutions, practices and therapies in California (Grogan Reference Grogan2013, pp. 185–8). One such place was the Primal Institute, opened in 1968 by Arthur Janov in West Hollywood. According to Janov, Western societies organise human beings in ways that prevent us from tuning in to our ‘real’ selves. This disconnect gives rise to the psychic condition he labelled Pain, with a capital P. Normal people mitigate this condition by creating an unreal self, the public face we show in our day-to-day lives. To reconnect with our true inner identity, however, we need to break through this unreal exterior. Talking, Janov claimed, does not work. Individuals must ‘feel’ or ‘primal’ in dramatic sessions where they pierce the protective bubble surrounding their internalised Pain by screaming and howling, calling out for their parents and shedding the strictures of polite behaviour with tormented wails. ‘Whereas in therapy [before] I would intellectualise and verbalise – in short, bullshit – for the therapy hour’, Janov quotes one patient as saying, ‘now I spend as much time as I need feeling my Pain’ (Janov Reference Janov1970, p. 220).

Tirelessly promoting the therapy, Janov appeared on popular television programmes, such as the Dick Cavett Show, and cultivated celebrity endorsements from not only Lennon, but also the actor James Earl Jones (who claimed it cured both his smoking and his haemorrhoids). In addition to describing the therapeutic practice, which generally took place behind closed doors at his West Hollywood clinic, Janov also had patients enact the therapeutic practice in public. (He later also made public video footage of therapeutic sessions; it would be his filming of Lennon and Ono that allegedly soured them on him.) In one such demonstration, a young man seems to retreat into a childlike state, telling the audience, ‘I don't feel very good … I'm sad’, before throwing a temper tantrum: ‘[H]e put his head on the table and started to cry, beat the table and thrash his legs wildly. “Mommy,” he screamed, “you promised you wouldn't!” He kept it up for five minutes’ (Janov Reference Janov1971).

Janov arrived at his therapy's general theoretical framework gradually over a period of several years. Yet one moment had crystallised its unusual practical method, according to the book, almost immediately. During a break between sessions in early 1967, Danny Wilson, a college student from Florida, told Janov about a performance artist he had read about:

Janov urged Danny to emulate the performance in their next session. Danny resisted, but Janov persisted – and it worked. Over the course of just a few minutes, Danny worked himself into a ‘hypnotic state’, before the ‘writhing gave way to small convulsions’ and then there issued forth ‘a piercing, deathlike scream that rattled the walls of [the] office’. ‘I made it!’ Danny told the doctor. ‘I don't know what [happened], but I can feel!’ (Janov Reference Janov1971, p. 10).

Primal therapy addressed broader questions circulating in the American counterculture, notwithstanding Janov's claims about both the originality and universality of his approach. As historians Paul Williams and Brian Edgar write, primal therapy represented ‘an amalgam of the ideologies of the 1960s youth movement translated into therapeutic terms’ (Williams and Edgar Reference Williams and Edgar2016, p. 2). At their core, these ideologies responded to the social, political and technological challenges wrought by modernity; each sought in various ways to understand – and ameliorate – the fraught relationship between the individual and their rapidly changing society. By the publication of The Primal Scream, the problem (if not its solution) had reached an uneasy point of consensus, at least in places like California. ‘[S]hould freedom from the “old” world take the form of mass political emancipation or the liberation of the individual self?’ as Williams and Edgar summarise. ‘Are these two options predicated on each other or mutually exclusive?’ (Williams and Edgar Reference Williams and Edgar2016, p. 2).

The roots of Janov's therapeutic insights indicate the breadth of individuals addressing this problem during the 1960s. Janov's patient, Danny, had been referencing the performance art of Raphael Montañez Ortiz, born in Brooklyn in 1934. In 1962, Ortiz published Destructivism: A Manifesto. Similar to Janov, Ortiz had been deeply concerned with, as he put it, ‘the desperate need to retain unconscious integrity’. As an art student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Ortiz worked hard to develop an epistemological framework that would help him to foreground personal experience through his artwork in order to address this psychopolitical concern with integrity. Like other intellectuals at the time, Ortiz explored far afield. He explored shamanism and underwent a Native American initiation rite, where he had an out-of-body experience that deeply influenced his understanding of the relationship between art and the human mind; he studied meditation and the practice of ‘rebirthing’; and he participated in studies on creativity and consciousness at the controversial Sullivan Institute.

At the Destruction in Art Symposium in September 1966, Ortiz presented ‘Self-Destruction’, the London stage performance that Danny Wilson related to Janov a year later in California. Organised by Gustav Metzger, the Symposium brought together artists associated with the transnational Fluxus movement and the European avant-garde; it included not just Ortiz, but also artists like Al Hansen and Yoko Ono. The symposium's objective was ‘to focus attention on the element of destruction in Happenings and other art forms, and to relate this destruction in society’. Its most infamous moment was Ortiz's destruction of a grand piano, widely reported on in the mainstream press. ‘Self-Destruction’, performed on 22 September at the Mercury Theatre, received less publicity. Ortiz began that piece fully dressed in business attire. He gradually shed jacket, tie, shirt and pants, in the process becoming an infant – screams, vomit and all – in a visceral pantomime illustrating the neo-Freudian concept of regression, the refusal of the civilising forces of social convention on the human subject.

While avant-garde performances such as ‘Self-Destruction’ remained oriented towards a relatively small audience in the mid-1960s, the notion that society itself could make human beings ‘sick’ had become mainstream (cf. Laing Reference Laing1960, Reference Laing1961). A diverse coalition of antiwar activists, artists and humanistic academics reached a consensus that, in fact, the individual who remained rational in the face of an increasingly irrational society could not be called ‘normal’. This idea had a significant, albeit unexpected consequence. Society itself may not need to be radically remade in the first instance; individuals could, perhaps, begin by reshaping themselves. ‘Rather than remaking society from the top down’, as Jessica Grogan summarises, discussing this shift in thinking in the US context, ‘[psychologists] would begin by reforming the individual’ (2013, p. 26). In dramatising the harmful effects of social convention on the individual, Ortiz's public performance constituted a form of social critique, a protest against the violence exercised by society on the individual subject. However, translated into the clinical context, this same act of performance became transmuted into a form of private therapy. As private therapeutic practice, this performance shifted responsibility onto an individual now responsible for not only recognising in themselves the effects of society's violence, but also overcoming these effects.

‘Don't get the therapy confused with the music’: the Rolling Stone interview

‘[B]lood and ego-mania’, artist Tony Cox, then married to Yoko Ono, had written in reviewing Ortiz's 1966 performance. ‘The art of the future will envelope all our senses, including, most likely, senses and physical properties of which we are at present unaware’ (Cox Reference Cox1966, p. 9). There is no evidence Lennon or Ono recognised the link between the therapeutic practice and the artistic piece. The connection did not come up when, three days prior to the release of Plastic Ono Band in December 1970, the two sat down with Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner for an extended interview at their manager's office in New York City. Wenner published the wide-ranging conversation over two issues in Rolling Stone the following month; a year later he released the full interview in book form, through his new imprint, Straight Arrow Publishers, as Lennon Remembers (1971).

Wenner's magazine had been entwined with Lennon's career since its founding. The Beatle appeared on the cover of the inaugural issue in November 1967; Wenner published nude photos of Lennon and Ono to accompany their interview promoting the experimental album, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, in November 1968; and the magazine provided the couple a platform for their peace campaign in 1969. Wenner and his wife Jane had experienced Lennon's unblocking firsthand at a screening of Let It Be in a San Francisco movie theatre the previous July. Months later, Wenner seemed to believe the new album had been directly inspired by the therapy sessions in Los Angeles. That was not quite correct. ‘Mother’ and ‘Isolation’ had been conceived in London. ‘Look At Me’ featured a finger-picking style Lennon and McCartney learned from Donovan during their retreat to Rishikesh, India in February 1968; that same style can be heard on ‘Dear Prudence’ and ‘Blackbird’ from The Beatles, released in December 1968. ‘I [just] finished them off in California’, Lennon explained (LR, p. 32).

At this point, Lennon remained a devotee of the therapy. ‘We primal almost daily’, he told Wenner. ‘The thing in a nutshell: Primal Therapy allowed us to feel feelings continually and those feelings usually make you cry. That's all. Because before I wasn't feeling things. I was blocking the feelings. When the feelings come through, you cry. It's as simple as that, really’ (LR, p. 24). At their June meeting, Lennon had inscribed a copy of The Primal Scream to Wenner, writing: ‘After many years of “searching” – tobacco, pot, acid, meditation, brown rice, you know it – I am finally on the road to freedom, i.e., being REAL + STRAIGHT’ (quoted in Hagan Reference Hagan2017, p. 6). Now Wenner plied Lennon with questions about everything from Beatles groupies to his relationship with Paul, to Charles Manson, then on trial for the series of grisly California murders that (the prosecution claimed) had been inspired in part by Beatles songs. (‘I just think a lot of the things [Manson] says are true’, Lennon said, ‘that he is a child of the state, made by us, and he took their children in when nobody else would, is what he did’; LR, p. 96.)

Much of the first part of the interview, however, concerned the influence of primal therapy on Lennon's creative process. ‘[A]s a concept and as a whole thing’, Lennon told Wenner, ‘I'm pleased’. Here the publisher began to draw out Lennon on the relationship between his ongoing therapy sessions and the music. ‘You said this would be the first Primal album’, Wenner prompted. Lennon demurred; the conversation apparently happened during the California weekend six months before. ‘Yes, well’, Lennon at last replied. ‘I don't know’ (LR, pp. 20 and 21).

As Wenner continuously attempted to draw direct lines between the therapy sessions and the album, Lennon countered by situating the songs within a longer context. ‘For instance’, Wenner asked, ‘you have to say that a song like “Well Well Well’’’ – and its outro, featuring Lennon screaming the title over and over again as the song collapsed, the band falling apart – ‘is connected with Primal Therapy, or the theory of Primal Therapy’. ‘No, but listen to “Cold Turkey”’, Lennon replied. ‘Listen to “Twist and Shout.” I couldn't sing the damn thing, I was just screaming. Listen to it[:] “Wop-bop a loo, wop a bop loo”’ (LR, pp. 36–7). A single released in October 1969 and credited to Plastic Ono Band, ‘Cold Turkey’ depicts heroin withdrawal through shrieking, shaking vocals in an extended vamp over its concluding 90 seconds. ‘Twist and Shout’, written by Bert Berns and Phil Medley in 1961, concluded the Beatles first album, Please Please Me (1963); recorded at the end of a 13-hour rush recording session, it famously features Lennon's shredded vocals, recorded on the second-to-last take of the night – just before his voice finally gave. ‘Wop-bop a loo’, of course, refers to the nonsense syllables in ‘Tutti Frutti’ (1955) by the original rock ’n’ roll screamer, Little Richard.

‘Don't get the therapy confused with the music’, Lennon thus cautioned. Yet there do exist audible thematic and musical connections between primal therapy, as practised by Lennon under Janov's care in 1970, and the album. These connections can be discerned in terms of the album's overall sound, its lyrics, as well as through Lennon's creative process.

In terms of its sound, Lennon's use of screaming represents the most obvious connection between the album and the therapy. Six of eleven tracks – ’Mother’, ‘I Found Out’, ‘Isolation’, ‘Remember’, ‘Well Well Well’ and ‘God’ – employ, to some extent, screams. In several tracks, this can be heard simply in the stretching of the voice to its breaking point; the word ‘believe,’ in the track ‘God,’ or the word ‘I’ in ‘I Found Out,’ for instance, often cracks under Lennon's intense delivery. In other cases, the screams are structural, building in intensity through repetition as in ‘Mother’ or ‘Well Well Well’.

Beyond its sound, the album's lyrics engage core precepts from Janov's philosophy. The album opens with funereal bells introducing ‘Mother’ (A1), an exorcism of parental ghosts past: Lennon's mother, Julia, had been killed by a drunk driver when he was 15; his father, Freddy, whom he had reconnected with several years prior, left when he was in primary school. In the final chorus, Lennon's voice pushes past its breaking point, repeating over and over again: ‘Mama don't go! Daddy come home!’ According to Janov, neuroses usually developed during infancy as needs go unmet: ‘[The infant] will reach up to be held, cry when he is hungry, kick his legs, and thrash about to have his needs recognized’, Janov observed. ‘If his needs go unfulfilled for a length of time, if he is not held, changed or fed, he will suffer continuous pain either until he can do something to get his parents to satisfy him or until he shuts off the pain by shutting off his need’ (Janov Reference Janov1970). In extreme cases, Janov claimed, unfulfilled needs resulted in death. To envoice this pain in ‘Mother’, Lennon stayed late after the musicians had left, able to give his voice full licence only in the privacy of the quiet, deserted studio. That theme, parental abandonment and the uncertainty of childhood, casts a pall across the entire album, which ends with an emotionally wasted Lennon sing-speaking ‘My Mummy's Dead’ (B6) in an empty monotone.

Excepting that short demo, however, the album concluded Side B with the song ‘God’ (B5). ‘God’ features the modular, late-Beatles structure that had been developing since The Beatles (1968), its three main sections stitched together. The first section invokes primal therapy's keyword, twice repeating ‘God is a concept/by which we measure our Pain’, a line Janov later claimed emerged at his clinic. The middle section builds simply across a first-person litany of people and institutions: ‘I don't believe’, Lennon begins each line, listing religious–spiritual systems and figures (magic, I-Ching, Bible, tarot, mantra, Buddha Gita, Jesus), historical leaders (Hitler, Kennedy and kings), and concluding with a rock ’n’ roll triumvirate of Elvis, Zimmerman (Bob Dylan's given surname) and the Beatles. The list might have been longer. Lennon had considered Churchill, for instance, as well as a fill-in-the-blank space for listeners to participate: ‘I could have gone on, it was like a Christmas card list. I thought, “Where do I end?”’ (LR, p. 31). The litany ends in the third section, in which Lennon reveals that reality is, simply, himself and Yoko. He sheds at last the persona of ‘Beatle John’, leaving just himself, and eulogising the past with a final line, repeated twice: ‘The dream is over’. In its essence, this track exemplified a core tenet of Janov's philosophy. Human beings build up a false self for public consumption. However, through therapy – recognition of the requirements placed on us by others, as well as the ‘parent substitutes’ we adopt to cope with our subjective alienation – we can regain our ‘real’ identity.

In conversation with Wenner, Lennon hesitated to examine individual lyrics in any depth. However, the interview did engage his evolving creative process in broader terms in two ways. First, Lennon discussed the role of technology in mediating between the performer and the finished recording. Studio technologies blunted the Beatles’ emotional impact, especially through excessive overdubbing and multitracking, making songs sound ‘dead’. ‘I can't stand putting the backing on first then singing, which is what we used to do a lot in the old days’, Lennon explained. ‘They'd gotten to that sort of dead Beatles sound, or dead recording sound. So I like to – some of them [on this album] are the second take – get them right off’ (LR, p. 21). Even obvious mistakes – a flubbed piano chord in the opening track, for instance, or bassist Klaus Voorman changing chords too early in ‘Remember’ – remained on the finished album. The group context of writing and recording at Abbey Road had especially hampered Lennon's vocal performances, he claimed; the Beatles were ‘super-critical of each other so we inhibited each other a lot’ (LR, p. 24). Recording quickly, even clearing the studio in order to sing more honestly, removed these inhibitions.

Second, Lennon discussed the process of creating ‘real’ songs in terms of honesty. Much of his output as a Beatle, he told Wenner, had been finished quickly in order to keep pace with Paul McCartney who, had Lennon not churned out material, would have dominated their releases. In contrast, ‘real’ or ‘honest’ works expressed personal experience. ‘[In India] I could write a lot’, Lennon explained, ‘like “I'm So Tired” and “Yer Blues,” where they were pretty realistic. They were about me and they always struck me as – what's the word? – funny, ironic, or something’ (LR, p. 82). At this point, Lennon had not been emotionally prepared to reveal himself fully. Framing ‘Yer Blues’ as a 12-bar plaint and using the dialect word ‘yer’, he suggested, allowed a measure of critical distance, a kind of plausible deniability about the song's raw subject matter (which featured the line ‘Yes I'm lonely/want to die’). This new album, however, stripped away those layers, leaving Lennon vulnerable, raw, but honest.

Finally, on a broader level, Lennon felt the album reengaged him with a more authentic and honest rock aesthetic. ‘The music is very simple and sparse’, Wenner prompted. ‘Well I always liked simple rock’, Lennon answered. ‘I like rock and roll and I express myself best in rock … Anybody knows, any musician will tell you, just play a note on a piano, it's got all the harmonics in it. So it got to that. I didn't need anything else’ (LR, p. 100). And this is why rock as a genre had the ability to move people:

In sum, the Rolling Stone interview framed a very specific vision of the politics of rock. Within the framework of this interview, rock could be proposed to be politically significant in two distinct, but interrelated senses. In one sense, rock provided a vehicle for self-discovery. The proximate cause of Lennon's self-discovery, the therapeutic practice, as well as the deeper cause, his evolution over time as an artist, cannot easily be parsed. Each are mutually constitutive elements in the narrative that Lennon and Wenner co-create about the political meaning of this new album as being ‘real,’ or in some sense expressing ‘truth’. Yet in another sense, the ability of rock to serve as a vehicle for self-expression and self-discovery – its primitiveness, its rawness, its simplicity – has been presented as a quality immanent to the sound of the music itself.

‘Politics and culture are linked, aren't they?’: the Red Mole interview (1971)

Six weeks later, on 21 January 1971, Lennon and Ono sat down for a very different set of questions with New Left intellectuals Robin Blackburn and Tariq Ali for Red Mole. This interview foregrounded Lennon's emergent radical political sensibility, touching on issues related to the working class, internationalism and the revolutionary potentials of popular culture. In contrast to the Rolling Stone interview with Wenner, Blackburn and Ali focused more heavily on Lennon's political values rather than his creative process or life as a Beatle. For his part, Lennon endeavoured to articulate his answers about the recently released album and the Beatles to broader political problems.

In so doing, Lennon was largely responding to an analytical framework that Blackburn, a radical historian and public intellectual, explicitly set out in the interview. ‘Well, in any case, politics and culture are linked, aren't they?’ Blackburn asked. ‘I mean, workers are repressed by culture, not guns at the moment – ’; ‘ – they're doped …’, Lennon interjected. ‘And the culture that's doping them’, Blackburn continued, ‘is one the artist can make or break’. ‘That's what I'm trying to do on my albums and in these interviews’, Lennon replied. ‘What I'm trying to do is to influence all the people I can influence. All those who are still under the dream and just put a big question mark in their mind. The acid dream is over, that is what I'm trying to tell them’ ((Blackburn and Ali Reference Ali and Blackburn1971, hereafter RM), p. 8).

At the same time, Lennon also addressed how the Beatles had fit into this political framework. The success of the Beatles, and rock music in general, he proposed to Blackburn and Ali, may have initially suggested that ‘the workers had broken through.’ (Though, of course, Lennon actually came from a middle-class background.) Yet the ability of a ‘working class’ musical group to gain commercial success could be compared with the ability of African Americans, who occupied an analogous dominated position to working class rock musicians, to succeed as entertainers or athletes. In this way dominant social groups allowed subalterns an ‘outlet’, which in fact allowed ‘the system’ to maintain the status quo: ‘[N]othing changed except that we all dressed up a bit, leaving the same bastards running everything’ (RM, p. 7). Here Lennon argued that while working class musicians might challenge the political status quo, the ‘system’ attempts to integrate this challenge by validating (and thus defanging) their critique. This dynamic in turn affects musicians’ ability to create in an authentic way. ‘We were all so pressurised that there was hardly any chance of expressing ourselves, especially working at that rate, touring continually and always kept in a cocoon of myths and dreams’, Lennon claimed. ‘It was a special humiliation for me because I could never keep my mouth shut and I'd always have to be drunk or pilled to counteract this pressure. It was really hell’ (RM, pp. 7–8).

According to Lennon, ‘Working Class Hero’ (A4) addressed that dynamic. Musically, the track was an outlier. Unlike the visceral, immediate live sound of the other 10 tracks, this track was recorded over more than 100 fiddly takes. The spare acoustic guitar accompanied lyrics that critique institutional pressures on the proletariat: family, school, the trades; ‘religion and sex and TV’; and not least an ideology that promises a better life if you just work a little bit more, strive a little bit harder. In terms of these interviews, the track was also an outlier. It was the only song discussed by Lennon, Ali and Blackburn in the Red Mole interview (excepting a short digression about ‘My Mummy's Dead’ [B6]), but it was largely ignored by Jann Wenner in the Rolling Stone piece. (‘I never liked the fruity Joan Collins and Baez and all of that stuff’, Lennon had told Wenner in a short aside. ‘So the only folk music I know is stuff about miners up in Newcastle, or Dylan. [B]ut it doesn't sound like Dylan to me. Does it sound like Dylan to you?’ [LR, p. 25]).

Speaking to Blackburn and Ali in Red Mole, however, Lennon could insert ‘Working Class Hero’ into a rough, pre-existing set of claims about the potential political significance of rock music as a form of subaltern protest. In doing this, Lennon made two moves. On the one hand, Lennon established his political credentials through claims about his political evolution. ‘I've always been politically minded’, he told Ali, and in broad terms suggests that this early political consciousness (‘it's just a basic working class thing’) had simply been dulled by acid and fame in the mid-1960s before re-emerging after 1968. Yet on the other hand, Lennon could frame his political consciousness using longstanding countercultural terms, as conditioned by the struggle between ‘the system’ and ‘reality’. Since boyhood his creative work (drawings, prose and later music) satirised ‘the system’, he told Blackburn, until fame brought him ‘farther away from reality for a time’ (RM, pp. 7 and 8).

Within this larger ideological framework, rock music can be proposed to be politically significant in two interrelated, but distinct, senses. First, songs can articulate conditions inexpressible in mere words. ‘Art is only a way of expressing pain’, Lennon explained to Ali in another aside about the relationship between his trauma and music. He then suggested that the intensity of the trauma correlates directly to the intensity of musical practice (that Yoko Ono's ‘far out kind of pain’ influenced the ‘far out stuff’ she does as an artist). Blackburn in turn suggested that, while Lennon's work with the Beatles was ‘very good’, ‘there was always a missing element’, which Lennon identifies as ‘reality’. Second, songs can communicate political messages directly. Blackburn mentions that striking workers and students at the London School of Economics repurposed ‘Yellow Submarine’, for instance, singing, ‘We all live on bread and margarine’ and ‘Well all live in a Red LSE’. Lennon then describes ‘Give Peace A Chance’ (1969), which he glossed as an attempt to write a modern replacement for older songs like ‘We Shall Overcome’ (RM, p. 9).

Rock music, Lennon then suggests, provides a natural articulation point between these two senses. ‘When I started, rock and roll itself was the basic revolution to people of my age and situation’, Lennon says. ‘We needed something loud and clear to break through all the unfeeling and repression that had been coming down on us kids’ (RM, p. 8). The best songs were ‘the black ones’, because they were ‘simple’. ‘[African American slaves] couldn't express themselves intellectually so they had to say in a very few words what was happening to them’. In Lennon's narration, this visceral, bodily expression of subjective conditions had only been translated into direct political messages by the late 1960s; the example given in this interview is Edwin Starr's song ‘War’ (1970). European folk songs also influenced rock and roll, but lacked this power; in the 1950s, the songs ‘were so middle-class’, ‘all college students with big scarfs and a pint of beer in their hands’. And today, this music – something ‘old and dead’, and ‘a bit boring, like ballet’ – continued to lack revolutionary power (RM, p. 8).

From the 1960s to the ‘me decade’?

The day after he spoke with Blackburn and Ali, Lennon cut ‘Power to the People’ (1971). One of his more overt slogan songs, ‘Power to the People’ initiated a two-year period that saw Lennon and Yoko pursue a new radical political agenda in the USA. They intensified planning an international peace movement and played a benefit for White Panther John Sinclair, in jail on trumped up drug charges. Lennon liaised with 1960s figures like Abby Hoffman, and became an object of FBI surveillance. The couple released Sometime in New York City (1972), a collection of political slogans in the form of songs, which received abysmal reviews. After his early death in 1980, debate about the political meaning of his legacy periodically raged. Had Lennon exemplified the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s – or its betrayal?

More broadly speaking, of course, popular historiography has long framed the 1970s as a betrayal of the 1960s, with changing aesthetics in rock music providing that betrayal's soundtrack. This story emerged via different avenues. Christopher Lasch, for instance, would diagnose a post-Woodstock withdrawal overt political engagement as symptomatic of a ‘pathological narcissism’ in his book Culture of Narcissism (1979); President Jimmy Carter drew on these ideas in his politically disastrous speech about ‘malaise’ in July 1979. Edwin Schur similarly argued that ‘self-absorption’ had replaced ‘social change’ (Reference Schur1976); in a significantly more nuanced recent work, historian Philip Jenkins has suggested that changes to political discourse and the mass media helped create a new pessimism that, ultimately, enabled the transformation from the 1960s to the 1980s (Reference Jenkins2006).

The 1970s would receive its most enduring sobriquet, the ‘Me Decade’, from the iconoclastic writer Tom Wolfe. In a 1976 essay in New York magazine (but first pitched to Rolling Stone just a year after the publication of Lennon's interview), Tom Wolfe famously tweaked 1960s radicals who had traded politics for spiritual navel-gazing, drawing lines of causation from religious movements to pornography to Tocqueville's Democracy in America to advertising to self-help movements and therapies. With quasi-religious fervour, Americans had disengaged from social responsibility to turn inward, Wolfe polemically argued, focused entirely on themselves. They now found themselves engaged in a ‘Third Great Awakening’ – a pseudo-religious ferment that had resulted in the countercultural energies of the 1960s being redirected towards individualistic concerns.

Wolfe represented this religious revival with a woman at a self-help seminar in Los Angeles. A trainer tells her, ‘Take your finger off the repress button!’ And she does: ‘She can feel it all’, Wolfe wrote, ‘all of the pain … and for the first time in her life she has permission … to let the feeling gush forth’ (Wolfe Reference Wolfe1976, p. 26). She begins moaning, and the moaning spreads, rising up, becoming a scream as she lets herself go, a ‘full scream [that] spreads from soul to soul, over top of the keens and fading moans’. This is her ‘one piercing moment of release and liberation at last – a whole world of anguish set free’. And what has given rise to this emancipation, to this moment where she feels able to envoice this pain – and in so doing, set herself free? Haemorrhoids. Indeed, Wolfe's description of that self-absorbed archetype of the Me Decade suggests curious connection to the story that I have narrated above. Do her screams differ from Lennon's? Do her haemorrhoids differ from those suffered by James Earl Jones?

Academic work in popular music studies has challenged the narrative divide between the 1960s and 1970s in diverse ways (e.g. Fast Reference Fast2001; Auslander Reference Auslander2006; Powers Reference Powers2017). Yet how did rock music help invent that narrative in the first place? And how did that narrative's invention help shape the ways in which listeners, musicians, critics and academics have been able to think about rock music? While the stark division between the 1960s and the 1970s had to be invented, there was significant overlap between these periods. Historically speaking, the idea that one period was essentially communitarian and the other individualistic is a gross oversimplification. These two positions overlapped; they existed in tension with one another. (Recent work on Janov, indeed, demonstrates this quite clearly; cf. Williams and Edgar Reference Williams and Edgar2018.)

Lennon's promotion of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band in the Red Mole and Rolling Stone interviews exemplifies this tension in microcosm. The UK-based academics Blackburn and Ali espoused a class-based politics that endeavoured to lay bare the social and institutional dimensions of political struggle; the San Francisco transplant Wenner, in an American magazine driven by personalities, emphasised the creative agency and will of the individual. New Left politics, as espoused in Red Mole, had often viewed the rock counterculture with suspicion; this gave rise at various points in that interview to an understanding of popular culture as exerting a numbing effect on the masses. An emergent post-countercultural politics in Rolling Stone, however, enabled rock's articulation to a newly emerging form of individualism then taking shape in the USA.

And yet Lennon's voice, the album and rock music in general could, at this moment and time, be fitted within each particular framework with relative ease. In this sense, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band can be heard as an articulation point bundling together multiple, competing techniques and discourses about the politics of the individual in modern society. These ideas and practices were not mutually incomprehensible, but rather represented contrasting solutions to one over-arching political project: how should individuals live meaningful lives in advanced industrial societies? How could they elude the bonds of the social, political and economic structures in which they found themselves to maximise their freedom – to become who they truly were inside?

The notion that there exists something inside of us – an individual core, an authentic interior we must seek out, give voice to and set free – represents one of the generative principles governing how people in the West have endeavoured to relate to each other and themselves. Leerom Medovoi has argued that identitarian thinking – that is, the premise that the key to living a good life and being a productive member of society rests on whether or not our authentic, internal self-image aligns with how others perceive us – represents the product of historical forces in the post-World War II world in general, and the postwar USA in particular. Medovoi sees this logic as simultaneously embedded within, and generative of, forms of postwar popular culture in the USA such as novels, films and, of course, music (Reference Medovoi2006). Coincident with the emergence of rock ’n’ roll itself, the invention of ‘identity’ as a key psychopolitical term in the USA proliferated new techniques for understanding and acting on our interior selves between the 1940s and 1970s. These techniques can be grouped, roughly, into two classes. On the one side were those projects concerned with understanding how institutions structure our lives, with taking steps to change, reform, or break down those institutions in order to make our lives more liveable. Yet on the other side were those projects concerned with transforming our own interior psychological substance in ways that make living within pre-existing structures, if not entirely liveable, at least more manageable.

Self-expression and rock subjectivity since 1970

That the second project gained ascendancy is today a matter of historical fact. What might that fact mean for understanding the politics of rock music since 1970? Since the early 1970s, powerful political and economic forces have redirected emergent forms of subjectivity – and especially those forms of selfhood related to practices and ideologies of ‘self-realisation’ or ‘self-actualisation’ – towards the consolidation, maintenance and perpetuation of capitalist modernity. As a political–economic system, capitalism has always depended on particular, historical forms of selfhood. Over the course of the late 20th century, however, its traditional forms have been transfigured by a shift from a Fordist economic order, demanding an ethic of self-denial and even self-abnegation, to a more flexible, disorganised, post-Fordist order dependent on individualistic initiative and radical autonomy (cf. Weber Reference Weber2012 [1905]; Boltanski and Chiapello, Reference Boltanski and Chiapello2005, pp. 35–8).

This shift has been approached in different ways over the past two decades. Theorists such as David Harvey have unearthed particular moments where state actors harnessed political–economic policy in ways that, ultimately, resulted in bringing us towards the present-day neoliberal status quo (2005). In a related vein of work, social theorists such as Nikolas Rose have indicated the psychopolitical dimensions of neoliberal government, with a particular emphasis on how contemporary liberal Western societies depend on subjects who are themselves ‘empowered’ to take charge of their own lives (1998, Reference Rose1999).

Dominant approaches to popular music have tended to obscure its relationship to this world-historical shift. In much academic writing, David Hesmondhalgh has recently suggested, ‘music is seen as a positive resource for forging self-identity’ (Reference Hesmondhalgh2013, p. 44). Major 20th-century genres from jazz onward, he continues, ‘have all been strongly tied up with romantic notions of personal autonomy’, with rock music particularly significant in ‘producing a culture that was centered on values of rebellious creativity, but which, in retrospect, was assimilated very quickly to values of commercialism’ (p. 45). That concluding pivot to the perennial debate about ‘commercialism’ and its relationship to the politics of popular music in postwar societies, however, occludes a larger story.

The larger story concerns the relationship between popular music and late 20th-century projects of self-discovery and self-expression in the West in general, and in the USA in particular. Yet what if we resisted the assumption that making or consuming music in itself constitutes a ‘positive resource’ for self-fashioning? For that paradigm erases the significant potential role played by popular music in the interpellation of individual human beings as the subjects of late capitalist modernity. In its place, we might substitute an approach historicising and radically contextualising the very idea that making and consuming popular music could offer such a resource. A resource for whom? Under what circumstances? And towards what ideological ends?

Following the lead of critics and historians of the postliberal or neoliberal present, popular music scholars might train their focus on the period examined above – post-1968, but pre-Reagan and pre-Thatcher – to address these questions. In this essay, I have endeavoured to historicise and contextualise the idea that music-making functions as a key resource for self-making through a close reading of one specific album. My account has emphasised how ideological strands in countercultural thought, creative practices and critical discourses in popular music, and therapeutic practices could be articulated at this moment through a vehicle such as an interview in Rolling Stone. Appearing at the turn of the 1970s, the album and its promotion help us to more clearly see the connection between this period and the 1960s. Yet in the end, my narration can only suggest in broad strokes how we might write a new account of post-Woodstock rock music. A similar approach to other topics – the singer-songwriter movement in California, punk and hardcore music in the USA, the founding of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or the subsequent turn to charity mega-events in the 1980s, to name but a few – would help fill in that broader account.

Two interrelated points from the literature on this transitional period could foreground such an approach. On the one hand, there is the elevation of a cluster of values related to freedom and individual autonomy (see Rose Reference Rose1998; Boltanski and Chiapello Reference Boltanski and Chiapello2005; Harvey Reference Harvey2005). Capitalist societies, according to Boltanski and Chiapello, have traditionally been subjected to two primary forms of critique (2005, pp. 35–7). Artistic critique has focused on capitalism's relationship to values such as creativity, freedom and autonomy, seeking to identify spaces where capital disempowers individuals’ capacity for experiencing ‘freedom’. Social critique has emphasised the structural violence wrought by capitalism, its propensity to exacerbate inequality and foment competition among individuals who come to perceive themselves as autonomous actors, all the while breaking down the bonds (social, familial and otherwise) that might connect people but elude its grasp. After the 1960s, Boltanski and Chiapello suggest, powerful capitalist actors in the West moved to suppress the latter form of critique, while validating and ultimately institutionalising the former.

On the other hand, we have a related phenomenon, a ‘new individualism’, and its relationship to the post-1968 legitimacy of social structures in the West. By the end of the 20th century, Axel Honneth writes, this ‘new individualism’ had taken on its ‘durable form’: individuals ‘no longer willing to understand their own lives as comprising a linear process of the development of an identity’ now tended ‘to think of the various possibilities for personal identity as being the stuff of experimental self-discovery’ (2004, p. 470). According to Honneth, this shift – from conceiving an identity as something that has to be developed, to something that needs to be uncovered, revealed or discovered – has had significant political consequences. Here self-realisation is not simply a personal or individual project. Rather, imperatives to discover one's true self ‘have so definitely become a feature of the institutionalised expectations inherent in social reproduction that the particular goals of such claims are lost and they are transmuted into a support of the system's legitimacy’ (2004, p. 467).

Conclusion: the sound of year zero?

In its ‘definitive list of the 500 greatest albums of all time’, Rolling Stone placed Plastic Ono Band at number 23, just behind Robert Johnson and Chuck Berry:

The album's significance appears, in part, to be due to the status of Lennon and the Beatles within the rock canon. However, no less important to its status is that ‘raw core of confession’, the audible journey towards first-person music that stripped away all pretension to lay bare the expressive potential of electric guitar, bass, and drums. But the idea of a ‘Year Zero?’ A Year Zero represents a new way of thinking, of creating – the starting point of a new order.

In this article, I have presented a close reading of Lennon's promotion of the album Plastic Ono Band in order to explore the political meaning of this moment. At the turn of the 1970s, a broad range of political potentials were able to be assigned to artists like John Lennon. Through interviews in two contrasting venues, as well as through the process of the album's creation and the therapy itself, we can discern the intermixing of two distinct registers of critique: the artistic critique, in which Lennon and his interlocutors propose that the power of rock music resides in its ability to set the artist free, as well as the social critique, in which the music's power seems to reside in its capacity for revealing the structural violence of contemporary societies in the West. However, this case study also demonstrates how self-expression as a creative practice could be articulated to rock music as a genre, within both Lennon's own self-understanding as an artist and the discourses of rock criticism. This articulation, moreover, was made possible only against the larger epistemological shift in understanding the status of the individual vis-à-vis society, the shift towards understanding the individual self as a project.

Rock became embedded within that overall politics of self-discovery and self-expression during the late 1960s and early 1970s. With the waning of older projects aimed at remaking social structures and the waxing of those new ones aimed at remaking our selves, rock accrued new political values, values that were often incommensurable with its previous values. For sure, this process occurred across many different sites: among songwriters in Laurel Canyon, just down the road from Janov's institute; through New Hollywood adoptions of rock music within its cinematic narratives of personal discovery; through the lionisation of Bob Dylan, especially among critics writing at Rolling Stone in the 1970s and 1980s, to name just three. Understanding this broader turn towards elevating rock music as a means for personal expression and self-discovery in the USA allows us to understand a major fault-line in postwar thought.