Ignoring Radicalism

At the main Times Square New Year's festivities this past year, the last few minutes before the stroke of midnight were spent having Cee Lo Green, a hip-hop-ish singer of some repute, singing the song "Imagine," by John Lennon. All very well and good, although it was a mediocre-at-best performance and felt kind of random. But in singing Imagine, Mr. Green changed the line "Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too" to "Nothing to kill or die for, and all religions true." Now, the new version is in the first place deeply offensive to anyone who even remotely shares the convictions on this issue of John Lennon; Imagine is one of the most famous anti-religious songs, and changing that particular lyric in that particular way feels simply violative. Moreover, the new line is gibberish, even from a pro-religion perspective: different religions make differing factual claims about the world, which cannot all be true.



There's another problem as well, though. This singer felt like he couldn't sing a line aspiring for a world without religion, but was happy to sing the opening lines of the song, "Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try/No hell below us, above us only sky"? Why? Exactly 100% of the radicalism of the song shines through in the opening clause. There are a lot of other songs in the world, many of them just as lovely as Imagine in their own ways. Why, if the anti-religious message is so offensive to him that he feels compelled to change, hideously, the lyrics of one of the greatest political songs of all time, did he sing the song at all?

This relates to the way that this song, which is deeply radical, ending up being opposed to not only religion but also possessions and countries, has become so damn mainstream. It's not a mainstream song!!! John Lennon was, in writing it, expressing deep opposition to the mainstream order of things, an order which has not changed much, except in the directions he opposed, since 1970. Nonetheless, people with perfectly right-wing, or at least not-radically-left-wing, attitudes about religion, possessions, and countries go along liking the song, because it's just such a damn good song, and not caring what it's about. Except that, apparently, Cee Lo Green took exception to one fairly modest of the lines.

I'm writing this mainly because it's Martin Luther King Day, or it was when I started writing this piece anyway. The same thing happens with Dr. King's legacy. He was also a radical. In his day this made him quite controversial indeed: as of 1966, a Gallup poll put his favorability rating at 33/63 nationally, though he had been mixed-to-positive in the previous several years. Then, of course, he was shot, which meant, among other things, that he couldn't speak for himself anymore, or continue to use his power to push for the kinds of change he actually wanted. He stopped being, in other words, a threat to the various people he wanted to threaten, and he stopped being able to say, when those people offered him vacuous, insincere praise in the public forum, "no, guys, these people aren't actually on my side, they don't actually like what I'm doing, and I don't like what they're doing." Since those opponents of his also stopped having an incentive to keep him from becoming too powerful or popular or revered a figure, he became eminently co-optable. As with Imagine, this has led to his becoming mainstream, far more than his actual ideas are. Just an observation, and not a terribly important one, but our society has gotten really good at ignoring when people it wants to like have challenged its foundations.


Also, Rick Perry spoke the phrase "South Carolina is at war with this federal government" today. Just sayin'.