Listening to Lennon #8: Milk and Honey (Plus, a Summary)

John Lennon was murdered 45 years ago this evening, on December 8, 1980. The photo attached was taken that afternoon--ghoulishly, but entirely coincidentally, it includes the face of Mark Chapman, his assassin, who had been hanging around outside the apartment John and Yoko had lived in for the past five years, along with all the journalists and photographers who dogged Lennon constantly, hoping to get an autograph. Lennon obliged. (I've clipped Chapman out of the photo.)

Lennon was shot by Chapman after returning to his apartment with Yoko after hours in the studio, recording and polishing a song by Yoko, "Walking on Thin Ice." Like several of her tracks on both Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey, the final, posthumous release of original music by Lennon, Yoko was merging her avant-garde musical sensibilities with post-punk and post-disco styles, making use of synthesizers and drum machines in a way that didn't make her music that foreign to what would soon be called "New Wave" on early 1980s American radio. That doesn't mean the song itself is very good, despite Lennon apparently declaring in the studio, perhaps less than a hour before his murder, that "you just cut your first number one, Yoko." By my hearing, Yoko's better stuff was, appropriately, that which she released in conjunction with her husband's final tracks. That's not the only reason to take Milk and Honey seriously, though.

I wasn't looking forward to listening to this album. I figured that, even if I give Yoko the benefit of the doubt and assume that she genuinely believed these left-over tracks from the Double Fantasy sessions were good enough to be deserving of public release, as a way to honor her late husband and his legions of fans, the results couldn't possibly avoid feeling like a cash grab. Well, I was wrong; Milk and Honey feels instead like a definite studio production in it's own right. Not a perfect one; it definitely has some filler on it among John's stuff. "(Forgive Me) My Little Flower Princess" is an unfinished, sappy ditty, and "Grow Old With Me" is a weak demo recording of a song of great, but completely unrealized, potential. But the energy and wit that Double Fantasy showed Lennon re-embracing after years away from the studio are very much on display on "I'm Stepping Out" (a delightfully poppy number), "I Don't Wanna Face It" (a slick, bluesy rocker), and especially "Nobody Told Me," easily one of the smartest, catchiest, grooviest pop songs that Lennon ever recorded in his entire career, solo or with the Beatles; why it wasn't on Double Fantasy in the place of one of the weaker tracks like "Cleanup Time" makes no sense to me at all. And then there's "Borrowed Time," an underproduced recording that manages to be charming and unintentionally haunting at the same time. 

And as for Yoko? While her tracks aren't in dialogue with John's as happens in the best parts of Double Fantasy--which would have been truly perverse if she'd tried, since she went to work on this album in 1983--several of them stand up as solid, if sometimes slight, dance and electronica-pop. "Sleepness Night" has too much of (often tired) transgressiveness to really be enjoyable, and "O' Sanity" is just silly, but "Don't Be Scared" is an actually compelling little mystery of a song, "Your Hands" is a dreamlike ballad, "Let Me Count the Ways" remarkably actually makes me see Yoko as a mother singing a lullaby to Sean, and "You're the One," with it's spooky compelling cricket chirps, should have been a single: I would put it alongside some of the best weird pop put out by Blondie, Kate Bush, or Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Overall, I give Milk and Honey a B+, the same as Double Fantasy, something I definitely did not expect. Which means that if we rank all of Lennon's, and Lennon and Ono's, post-Beatles albums together, it looks something like this:

Rock 'n' Roll: A

Imagine: A- 

Double Fantasy: B+

Milk and Honey: B+

Plastic Ono Band: B 

Walls and Bridges: B

Mind Games: B-

Some Time in New York City: D+ 

In retrospect, when I compare this list to my summary of Paul McCartney's far larger -post-Beatles output (23 albums at the time I wrote that review, and I wasn't even counting everything he'd put out--including two cover albums which this journey though John's work made me go back and review properly), I think I've been nicer to John than he deserves. But then again--perhaps Paul's own constant output simply invites unfair comparisons? Who knows how I would have felt about Macca if he'd slowed down, been less of omnipresent workhorse? But it's not as though I could ever truly ask for less from Paul, the Best Beatle. And similarly, I'd give just about anything if John, the First Beatle, could have been spared, and we could have heard more from him. A tragedy, in so many ways. But he left his mark, both through his band and on his own--and, crucially, through the artistic and emotional impact he had on work of his greatest partners. On the day he died, in the final interview he gave, John commented "There’s only two artists I’ve ever worked with for more than one night’s stand, as it were: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono. I think that’s a pretty damned good choice." I couldn't possibly disagree.