Listening to Lennon #1: Plastic Ono Band

So, as promised, my review of Lennon's solo albums begins.

By January of 1970, the last time the Beatles ever worked together as "The Beatles" was more than four months in the past. Lennon had been divorced from his first wife Cynthia for over a year, and he'd been married to Yoko for nearly one; he'd also recorded and released two big solo hit records, "Give Peace a Chance" and "Cold Turkey," and was working on a third, "Instant Karma," which would do even better on the charts than either of the previous two. He'd cut his hair short, he and Yoko had (for the moment) quit heroin, and he'd long since privately told his fellow Beatles that the band was over, though they'd all agreed not to make any public announcement. Through all this, it's not clear what the end of the Beatles meant for John; in interviews while he and Yoko were traveling Europe and then again when "Instant Karma" came out, he'd talk about how what was ending wasn't so much a band as an "image," and that the current confusion as to the direction of the band might easily be a "rebirth." Lennon seemed happy--which was always a difficult thing to determine with him, but the signs were there.

But then the spring of 1970 brought Paul's release of his first solo album, McCartney (honestly, I don't think it's very good), triggering John's defensive, jealous spirit; Paul's incredibly ill-conceived (however frustratingly justified) promotional interview which was taken as a public declaration that the Beatles were finished, which John saw as a presumptuous betrayal; the release of both Let It Be the album and Let It Be the documentary film, with its (incorrectly!) depressing take on the "Get Back" sessions that produced both of the above, and the latter of which reduced John to tears when he saw it; and, finally, John's discovery, in March, of the psychotherapist and wanna-be guru Arthur Janov, whose book The Primal Scream convinced Lennon--a man who, as Rob Sheffield put in in Dreaming the Beatles, had always been "deeply attracted to conversion experiences and renunciation scenes"--that he desperately needed to scream his way out of his problems, his frustrations, his abiding and confusing hates and regrets. He and Ono spent four months, in London and Los Angeles, going through Janov's therapy. In the meantime, Yoko miscarried, Lennon turned 30, and had a terrible row with the father who had abandoned him as a child, whom he never saw again after his birthday. I'm hardly the first to say that you can't make sense of Lennon's first solo album, Plastic Ono Band (his name for the floating line-up of musicians that played with him and Yoko) without considering all of this.

So the entire album is a work of therapy? Not quite; there are a couple of songs on it that could have been developed in any context. "Love" is a sweet, stripped-down tune, with Lennon's voice stretching to sing lyrics as sappy as anything Macca ever wrote (I mean, "Love is asking / To be loved"?), while "Look at Me" is a polished if rather plain ditty that had its roots in something Lennon was working on way back in India in 1968. But besides those, every song on Plastic Ono Band, to one degree or another, is an explicit expression or a reflection of John's resentments, his immaturities, his angers, his fears. "Working Class Hero" is a masterful political statement, a perfectly tight bit of quiet, controlled folky fury, which Lennon apparently obsessed over more than any other song on the album. "Hold On" is more an idea than a fleshed out song, but his use of tremolo, complemented by Ringo's superb drumming, makes it seem like genuine moment of hope in the midst of comprehensive despair. "I Found Out" and "Well Well Well" are both darkly bitter, pulsing, insistent songs of righteous indignation and John's shouting, all about making do and living life despite the betrayal of others. "Remember" and "Isolation" are both full of dissonances and rhythmic shifts; they're worth pairing together, though the sadness of the first is staccato and accusatory, and on the second its bluesy and reflective. I think they're all pretty solid tunes, however inseparable they are from the album's overall vibe.

That just leaves Plastic Ono Band's bookends, "Mother" and "God" (leaving aside the creepy, brief, monotone "My Mummy's Dead" ditty at the album's conclusion). "Mother" is the fullest artistic work on Plastic Ono Band, I think, and really is kind of a masterpiece of raw, musically expressed pain; his repeated, increasing hoarse cries at the end--"Mama don't go; Daddy come home!"--deepen and propel the song towards its conclusion. "God," though, is odd. It's an artfully arranged but sing-songy incantation, a kind of anti-mantra; if it wasn't for the tremendous combination of Billy Preston's gorgeous piano and Ringo's furiously controlled drumming, the whole thing would sound kind of petulant. Or at least I think that--but then, I've never been famous, and there's basically no chance I or anyone else who reads this will ever be remotely as famous as Lennon was. So maybe I've no place to say that his plaintive concluding lines--"I don't believe in Beatles....I was the walrus / but now I'm John. / And so, dear friends, / you'll just have to carry on. / The dream is over."--don't deserve the ponderousness he delivered them with. Like I said before, the end of the Beatles was huge--and to the extent that John was considered by many the Beatles' wounded artistic muse--thanks in no small part to John spending the first years after the break-up constantly telling himself and everyone else that--his pronouncements in "God" perhaps deserve all the respect they received. (As far as I'm concerned, though, the best thing about "God" is that it inspired Bono to write "God Part II," a mostly forgotten track from Rattle and Hum which is, I think, the best rock tune U2 ever recorded.)

I give Plastic Ono Band a solid B, maybe even a B+; it's better as a personal artistic document than as an album of popular music, but it's not entirely lacking in the latter. It'll be interesting to see if I decide that Lennon ever did better than this dark but mostly compelling first solo album of his.

Thoughts on MacIntyre

Via Alan Jacobs, I’ve learned that Alasdair MacIntyre passed away on Thursday, at the age of 96. Unlike other philosophers, theologians, and political theorists I’ve written memorials to on my blog over the years, MacIntyre’s work—which engaged deeply with issues of ethics, Aristoteliansim, and rationality—never had a major impact on my own. Still, I don’t see how any English-speaking student of politics or philosophy from the past half-century could have avoided being shaped by After Virtue, his short and explosive argument against the then-prevailing assumptions of Enlightenment liberalism, which was published in 1981; I was, like everyone else, and in that sense I owe him as much a debt as any other thinker I linked to above.

For a long time, my understanding of that debt was inextricable from the liberal-communitarian debates which academic philosophers and political theorists (including folks like me who were trained to become such, and for whom even if it didn’t quite work out that way, still can’t get that debate off my mind) who are today in their 50s were inundated with in graduate school. MacIntyre always denied being a communitarian, though he was lumped in with them anyway, and I think not inappropriately so. Beyond all the sturm und drang which attend any kind of intellectual argument over the drawing of disciplinary and ideological lines, there remains the simple fact that MacIntyre self-professed “revolutionary Aristotelianism” ultimately pointed to the local community, to the centrality of tradition, and to the continuity of stories and language—in other words, to things and phenomena very much beyond the ambit of the sovereign, rights-bearing individual—as the starting point to any of kind rationally defensible moral philosophy, to say nothing of any kind of actual civic health. By making the—I still think highly persuasive—argument that liberal individualism leaves us with what he called a mere “emotivism” as a basis for understanding, interpreting, and judging our own and others’ actions, he absolutely add significantly to a broad set of communitarian ideas which are still valid today.

Of course, today it is the postliberals who are most interested in claiming the communitarian MacIntyre for themselves. As bizarre that MacIntyre himself apparently found the prospect that his writings had somehow inspired people like Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, and others to embrace the goal of a retreat from and an overturning of the current liberal order, MacIntyre’s contempt for the conservative acceptance of capitalist inequality (when asked in 1996 what he still retained from his pre-Aristotelian Marxist phase, MacIntyre simply stated “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post”) probably isn’t enough to prevent that appropriation. Fred Dallmayr—who, as I’ve written, understood what it means to move beyond liberalism much better than most of those who parade that label—noted in a chapter from his book Post-Liberalism: Recovering a Shared World that MacIntyre’s thinking, which he called “stellar,” nonetheless evinces a certain “metaphysical realism” and “functionalism,” thereby undermining ways of thinking about our situation which call for a more immanent, more attendant, more patient approach. MacIntyre’s revolutionary Aristotelianism absolutely does not call for a revolutionary communitarian imposition, but it’s possible the way in which he formulated those ideas opened up an interpretation of them that he firmly disagreed with.*

But it would be wrong to make any set of reflections of MacIntyre’s immense philosophical achievements to rest entirely upon the political contestation over his prioritization of community. Far better, I think, would be to say something about how MacIntyre defined the communities of tradition, locality, and story in question. Because that can take us in an interesting direction.

In a book of MacIntyre’s that doesn’t appear to me to get much critical praise, but which was very important to me once upon a time (maybe even more so than After Virtue), he explored a fundamental, philosophical challenge to communitarian ideas, though he didn’t use that language to set up the problem. Essentially: if you’re not going to employ universalist concepts whose rationality are available to all individuals equally, and rather are going to insist upon the priority of concepts that have some communal, historical, or cultural particularity, then how can you avoid relativism? In short (and as the title of the book in questions asked): if you’re going to tie the possibility of rational, moral judgment to particular communities, then Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? should we employ? MacIntyre’s answer to these questions is dense and rewarding, and pretty much impossible to briefly summarize. But the first step is recognizing how forthright he is in accepting the puzzle. There is no attempt to sideline what it means accept that Aristotelian phronesis, or practical judgment, cannot be made logically universal:

But since practical reasoning, as Aristotle understands it, involves the capacity to bring the relevant premises concerning good and virtues to bear on particular situations and since this capacity is inseparable from, is indeed a part of, the virtues, including justice, it is also the case that one cannot be practically rational without being just. And for reasons which are in essentials the same as those which entailed the conclusion that one cannot be just apart from membership in some particular polis, one cannot be practically rational apart from membership in some particular polis. That one’s rationality should be not merely supported by but partly constituted by one’s membership in and integration into a social institution of some particular type is a contention very much at odds with characteristically modern views of rationality (p. 123).

Philosophical liberals will, of course, tear their hair out at that conclusion, but the rigor with which he makes this argument has stood the test of time: we are not self-constructing, but rather socially constituted beings, and thus mostly think, and judge, by and through those institutions and histories and forms which characterized our constitution. Okay—but does that mean all of them? Obviously not; some communal phenomena and constructions are far more relevant to questions of justice and rationality than others. For MacIntyre, the primary one—obviously so, given the importance he attaches to stories—is language, and the structural forms by which language is conveyed. On his reading of history, the boundaries of any shared, spoken, written language are what give us linguistic communities, which in turn provide our social communities. He never quotes Herder or Gadamer in Whose Justice? Whose Rationality?, but he’s plainly working in the same vein as them: trying to articulate, in Aristotelian terms, a philosophical hermeneutics, a way of understanding the constituting power of language over time and through the social bonds and interactions which define us.

The complaint about linguistic communities is, of course, obvious: languages change! They change through translation, through interpretation, through just the generational process by which stories that revealed to one set of listeners one set of references upon which they could reason, end up revealing to another, later, set of listeners an entirely different set of references, because of geographic or technological or cultural change. MacIntyre acknowledges this, insisting the every tradition is open--by definition, as a spoken, written, particular thing—to evolution: “[T]he time and place may come, when and where those who live their lives in and through the language-in-use which gives expression to [their tradition] may encounter another alien tradition with its own very different language-in-use, and may discover that while in some area of greater or lesser importance they cannot comprehend it within the terms of reference set by their own beliefs, their own history, and their own language-in-use, it [nonetheless] provides a standpoint from which, once they have acquired its language-in-use as a second language, the limitations, incoherences, and poverty of resources of their own beliefs can be identified, characterized, and explained in a way not possible from within their own tradition” (pp. 387-388).

That’s a long sentence, and appropriately so, because he’s talking about a long process. (Whether his own articulation of Aristotelianism supported it or not, his work on thinking through the real world process of phronesis absolutely had a patient, immanent character to it.) MacIntyre is telling us that in encountering differences, and as we learn about them and even embrace them, there will always be a constant need to maintain our own received traditions, stories, and language—not to defend them from some kind of pollution, but because it is through working through their interaction with one another that we can see clearly what one story can teach which another story cannot.

It's worth saying in conclusion that, dense as MacIntyre’s work often was, he could be viciously funny (at least in an academic sense). One of my favorite passages from Whose Justice? Which Rationality? has stayed with me for decades, because it’s such a thorough dumping on those who talk blithely about “the Western tradition” or “the Christian tradition” as something to be defended. Building upon his own careful philosophical consideration of linguistic communities and historical traditions, he takes the time castigate the type of teaching every one of us who has ever had to take on a survey course usually fall into, faulting both modernity, but also a flawed conservatism that doesn’t understand what it’s about:

The type of translation characteristic of modernity generates in turn its own misunderstanding of tradition. The original locus of that misunderstanding is the kind of introductory Great Books or Humanities course, so often taught in liberal arts colleges [guilty!], in which, in abstraction from historical context and with all sense of the complexities of linguistic particularity removed by translation, a student moves in rapid succession through Homer, one play of Sophocles, two dialogues of Plato, Virgil, Augustine, the Inferno, Machiavelli, Hamlet, and as much else as is possible if one is to reach Satre by the end of the semester. If one fails to recognize that what this provides is not and cannot be a reintroduction to the culture of past traditions, but is a tour through what is in effect a museum of texts, each rendered contextless and therefore other than its original by being placed on a cultural pedestal, then it is natural enough to suppose that, were we to achieve consensus as to a set of such texts, the reaching of them would reintegrate modern students into what is thought of as our tradition, that unfortunate fictitious amalgam sometimes known as “the Judeo-Christian tradition” and sometimes “Western values.” The writing of self-proclaimed contemporary conservatives, such as William J. Bennett, turn out in fact to be one more stage in modernity’s cultural deformation of our relationship to the past (pp. 385-386).

It’s not surprising that a man who could write a passage like that was the kind of professor who insisted on referring to his students as “Mr.” and “Ms.,” and once handed out a “B minus minus” as a grade. Thinkers like this leave a profound legacy, and even if MacIntyre’s is, I fear, fated to be misappropriated, his own arguments make it clear that, so long as we speak our language and tell our stories, there are always practical possibilities for some St. Benedict, like MacIntyre himself, to come along a remind us of the immense gifts of connection and continuity we possess. Requiescat in pace, sir.

*Update, 5/27/2025: Noah Millman’s tribute to MacIntyre is really superb, and in talking about his piece with our mutual friend Damon Linker, Damon made an observation which clarifies what I was gesturing at in this paragraph very well: “In the end, though, I’m not a MacIntyre admirer. I get my Aristotle from Strauss. And the problem Noah notes early on in his piece — of MacIntyre projecting Aristotelian theory onto the lived reality of the ancient and medieval worlds — is a big problem and the ultimate source of the influence he had on the ‘postliberal’ right. This influence made MacIntyre uncomfortable, but it was his own fault for eliding crucial distinctions in a way that made it sound like he was describing a lost world of moral wholeness and meaning that was banished by the Enlightenment, etc. That’s garden-variety reactionary romanticism, and it’s unfortunate MacIntyre gave it fuel.”

Regarding John (and Paul, and the Beatles too, but Mostly John)

Paul McCartney has been my favorite Beatle for years, as the long journey I took in 2019 through Macca's then-nearly-50-years' worth of solo, non-Beatles recordings should prove. The man is simply incredible, as a musician, performer, arranger, and instrumentalist. He's got an uncanny ear for melody, and his elastic appreciation of different sounds and styles, along with his incredible (however inconsistent) work ethic, has meant that he's built songs for decades that demonstrate a mastery, or at least a partial mastery, of the capaciousness of pop music. I can't think of any English-speaking artist besides Bob Dylan whose influence on popular music in the 20th century (and more!) can compare with Sir Paul, and it frustrates me to no end that while I was able to finally catch the former in concert, I've probably missed my chance to ever see the latter. 

But all that said, after recently reading Ian Leslie's tremendous John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, I found myself thinking: have I, perhaps in kind of a perverse refusal of the worship of John Lennon which I saw all around me in pop culture as a young person in the 1980s, purposefully underplayed the role John played in making Paul the musician he became? As a pop radio kid, I was vaguely learning who the Beatles were at a very young age--and yet out of any of them, it was the groovy hits that McCartney put out that I learned first, and that perhaps overshadowed whatever else I was picking up. Despite being a news addict from elementary school on, I actually have no memory of the announcement of Lennon's murder in December 1980 (just before I turned 12). Instead what I remember was the endless reminiscences of him, on every station and in every publication, for months if not years afterward (a sad scene about how devastating many found his murder even showed up in one of my Moon Knight comic books). Perhaps all that--no doubt combined with the anti-hippie vibes that weren't too hard to find in the conservative Mormon milieu I was raised in--made me inclined to just not take John seriously.

If I did, that's a huge mistake, not just because Lennon is an artist worth reckoning with, but because it undermines my own understanding of  McCartney. As all the very biographies of Paul I read confirmed (indeed, how I even noted here when talking about Peter Jackson's Get Back), John's relationship with, his competition with, and his collaboration with Paul is probably incalculable in terms of how they all contributed to Paul's musical genius. I'm not saying the world wouldn't have known Paul McCartney if the 17-year-old John Lennon hadn't have captivated him and then, upon sizing up the 15-year-old Paul's audition for him, invited him to join his group The Quarry Men when they first met in the summer of 1957; I think Paul is just too protean an artistic force to have been kept down by any circumstance or lack thereof. But without his older friend's wit, his anger, his arrogance and his neediness, his mix of idealism and cynicism, and most of all his friendship? Black 47's Larry Kirwan once wrote a play--"Liverpool Fantasy"--that imagined an alternative history where the Beatles hadn't made it (in Kirwan's imagination they broke up, tellingly, because John quit the group when they seemed ready to acquiesce--as did actually happen--to studio demands for them to play something other the rock and roll John was devoted to at their very first recording session in 1962). While Kirwan presented John, George, and Ringo as all still living in Liverpool, Paul wasn't; by the play's imagined 1986, he'd become a massive American pop superstar, singing in Las Vegas and cranking out heavily orchestrated, disposable hits under the name "Paul Montana." I think that's a little cruel, a fiction that leans too hard into the mostly (but only mostly) false image of Paul as a crowd-pleasing, superficial hit-making machine. But still: any honest reckoning with Paul's history and accomplishment simply cannot due without considering what John's drives and hang-ups and delights and hatreds helped make him into.

So that's what I'm going to do for the rest of 2025: listen to John Lennon's solo music--all of it--closely, and see what I think, and how I can put it together with my understanding of the life he led, and what that understanding of Lennon's aspirations and accomplishments says to me. This will be an easier task than what I did with Paul; for one thing, with his life tragically ended 45 years ago, John had far less time than Paul has had to build up a musical library to explore. Thanks to the same friend who encouraged and enabled me to do my deep dive into McCartney's music back in 2019, I have available to me remastered recordings of all eight of Lennon's post-Beatles albums (yes, that means I'm skipping over the three avant-garde albums of experimental music that he and Yoko Ono produced in 1968 and 1969), plus a collection of Lennon's officially released non-album singles and various studio outtakes and home recordings. I'll review and reflect upon one of those albums each month, May through December. For today though, some random thoughts about and reviews of that catch-all collection first.

The singles portion of John Lennon: Singles and Home Tapes consists of six songs, all of which are terrific. This isn't surprising; they all were, after all, studio recordings that the engineers and record company people and John himself all thought worthy of an independent release, and whatever may or may not be said about any of those others, Lennon himself, whatever his limitations as an instrumentalist or solo songwriter, had a deep, intuitive grasp of both the zeitgeist and of American rock and roll as it enraptured him as a teenager in the 1950s--he knew what worked (usually, anyway). Three of the singles are first-rate expressions of that rock and roll sensibility; of the others, one is among the greatest popular Christmas songs written and recorded in the past century, and two more are inseparable from the equally idealistic and simplistic (and "commercializable," if that's a word) peacenik movement of the late 1960s; to criticize them on the level of songmanship, as opposed to the sing-along tunes of protest they were purposefully designed to be, is to misunderstand completely what Lennon, as guided and shaped by his new love and wife Yoko, had determined himself to become. Which is not to say they should be criticized. On the contrary, whether or not they're world-class musical art, the truth is that even John's hippie singles provide more than adequate proof that, at its best, John's talent--mixed up as it was with his anger with himself and the status quo, his deep insecurity about his own accomplishments and relationships, his double-minded contempt for (but also longing for) intellectual and artistic pretension, and his often messianic idealism--could nonetheless still create great music, even without his greatest friend, rival, and partner at his side (or looking over his shoulder).

"Give Peace a Chance," the last of the six on the "Singles" disc, was the first one recorded, in a Montreal hotel room during John and Yoko's "Bed-In" in the summer of 1969, with dozens of hippie hanger-ons and luminaries (Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Dick Gregory, Tommy Smothers, etc.) clapping and singing along; the second to last on the disc, "Move Over Ms. L," was the latest one recorded, from John's drug-addled "Lost Weekend" period in Los Angeles in 1974, a short and quick, delightfully innocent, mostly nonsense rocker, that shows that all hallucinogenics in the world couldn't stop Lennon from approximating Chuck Berry or Carl Perkins when he had a mind to do so. It's my favorite song out of the whole collection, to be honest; comparable to some of the very best of McCartney's straightforward solo pop, I think. I can't listen to it and not think of the rocking gem from the Beatles' rooftop concert, "One After 909," where John and Paul's love for each other and the rock and roll music which made them who they were is just overflowing.

As for the rest, "Cold Turkey," a bluesy hard rock tune, also from 1969, features Eric Clapton on guitar, and would have been a perfect fit with The White Album's "Revolution" (the single version, not the album one), or when Lennon performed "Yer Blues" with Clapton and Keith Richards as The Dirty Mac in 1968. "Power to the People," from 1971, is a strong, quasi-R&B song that no doubt often fired up crowds during anti-war protests back in the day, with Bobby Keys, the Texas saxophone wonder who went on to power so many classic Rolling Stones tunes--and whom I was lucky enough to see perform live back in 2009--giving this song much of its oomph. "Instant Karma (We All Shine On)," from 1970, is a pulsing, insistent number, with the sound just rushing at the listener from almost the first beat; it's not surprising that Phil Spector was in the recording studio for that one. And who can criticize 1971's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)"? Sure, self-conscious 19th-century traditionalists can, and so can Christians who insist that not centering the Biblical story in every holiday song is some kind of crime. But other than those sticks-in-the-mud, it's hard to imagine finding any sincere fault with the tune. Lennon managed in this song to channel the spirit of the season in a musically simple, politically pointed, historically grounded, yet entirely inviting and open-ended way. Most other songwriters never come close to that level of accomplishment, and John, in 1971, was still just getting started.

The "Home Tapes" disc of the collection is a mixed bag. It's interesting to hear early and alternate takes of such songs as "Mother," "God," and "Beautiful Boy," but they can't compare to the official album tracks--though perhaps, as I work my way through the albums themselves, I'll change my mind. For now, I think the only track that truly makes it worth owning is the solo piano version it contains of the unreleased "Serve Yourself" (a track that exists in many bootlegged versions, some of them exceptionally profane). I don't consider it a particularly good song--but then, I'm biased, as I consider Dylan's Christian albums mostly strong and powerful music, and the specific song that Lennon found infuriating and was inspired to respond to--"Gotta Serve Somebody"--a masterpiece for both gospel and rock and roll. Lennon didn't agree, unsurprisingly. Which is okay; John followed his own path, one that was tragically cut short far too early. For the rest of the year, I'm going to follow it the best I can.

Thoughts on Dylan

1) I saw Bob Dylan on Saturday here in Wichita, which was only the second show of his 2025 extension of his never ending tour (nominally supporting his most recent album, the excellent Rough and Rowdy Ways, but really just Bob being the traveling poet and song and dance man he's always been). It was a great show, with Bob sitting at the piano the entire time, playing pretty consistently, adding bluesy chords, rockabilly swing, and some romantic melody as the song required. And his four-piece band was tight, never showing off, but providing a solid foundation for a supremely musical evening. I wish I could have snapped some pics, as I have a very good seat, but it was a strict no-device show (including old cameras like mine!), and security was tight. But other than that, I had a wonderful time.

2) His set list? Almost exactly the same as his set list from Tulsa last Tuesday, where he kicked off this round of touring; the only change for us in Wichita was the addition of "Across the Rubicon," which was awesome, since I think that's maybe the best song on Rough and Rowdy Ways. ("Murder Most Foul" would outrank it, except I have a hard time considering it an actual song; more like some ancient bard orally capturing the whole gestalt of a particular society at a particular moment in time.) I was moderately disappointed with his significantly shorted version of "Desolation Row," and would have preferred almost any cut from Nashville Skyline aside from "To Be Alone with You," but I loved his harmonica work on "When I Paint My Masterpiece" and, especially, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," which he and his band made whimsical, upbeat, and almost sweet; on the basis of the couples I saw leaning into each other and swaying to the song, I'd bet that I'm not the only one who considered it the highlight of the night.

3) Speaking of Tulsa, Melissa and I took a day-trip there only two weeks back; we've lived in Kansas for going on 19 years, yet in all that time, Melissa had never seen this city only a little over two hours southeast of us, and I'd only been there once for a conference which didn't give me any time to explore. We had a grand time there--and for both of us (which is surprising for my wife, since she's not a Dylan fan), the highlight was the Bob Dylan Center. I had kept my expectations low, since I feared that it would just be a glorified add-on to the Woody Guthrie Center next door, which I've long heard raves about. But a bookseller at Magic City Books strongly encouraged us to check out the Dylan museum, and I'm glad we did. It really does a brilliant job at organizing its immense collection of photos, letters, films, notes, and more; the introductory videos do a great job situating Dylan as an artist and a cultural figure, and the main exhibit is filled with wonderful discoveries (the loopy, gushing letters Johnny Cash wrote to Dylan were charming). My favorite feature was a jukebox programmed with Dylan songs, Dylan covers, and "Dylanesque" tunes selected by Elvis Costello, but that just scratches the surface. It's not a huge museum, but after two hours there we still hadn't seen it all.

4) Becoming the sort of person who could spend most of an afternoon hanging around a Bob Dylan museum has been a long process. As I've detailed here on my blog many times over the years, my pop music sensibilities have always been, first and last, about the radio--and by the time I really started listening to pop radio around 1978, Dylan's time as someone who got much radio airplay were done and gone. So I was generally aware of him as a singer and song-writer, and occasionally recognized when other artists were covering his songs, but it wasn't until sometime in late 1993, when I picked up a double VHS tape copy of the 30th anniversary concert held for Bob at Madison Square Garden, that I really woke up to this astonishing and unpredictable artist. Besides all the wonderful music, just the range of the man's writings, both in substance and style, blew me away. I mean, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"? "My Back Pages"? "When the Ship Comes In"? I mean, it's folk, but also rock; it's political, but also personal; it's judgmental and dismissive, but also sneakily open-hearted. It's hardly an original realization, that Dylan contains multitudes, but it's what began my 30-plus years of recurring curiosity in the man. Being the political nerd I am, I dived into analyses of his lyrics, examinations of his interviews, reflections on his historical role--but more than that, I listened to his songs.

5) As for the songs, what can I say? I was delighted to finally be able to check seeing Bob in concert off my bucket list, but that doesn't change my most basic judgment about his music (one shared by my wife as well): the man just isn't ever the best interpreter and performer on his own material. I won't go as far as her (and, to be honest, many tens of thousands of others) in declaring that Dylan's voice grates. Like Mick Jagger, I think there's something distinctive and musical to his vocal instrument, even when it's not at it's best (and at the Wichita concert, as indecipherable as many of the words which came out of his mouth were, its sometimes wry, sometimes wistful, always gentle tone was quite engaging). But still, the point stands: he can write incredible songs, but there will always be someone (often many someones) who will be able to do those songs better than he. Examples? Oh man, don't get me started; I could list a couple of dozen. "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"? Joan Baez. "All Along the Watchtower"? Jimi Hendrix. "Boots of Spanish Leather"? Nanci Griffith. "Chimes of Freedom"? Bruce Springsteen. "Desolation Row"? Robyn Hitchcock. "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright"? Dolly Parton. "Forever Young"? The Pretenders. "Girl from the North Country"? Rosanne Cash. "Gotta Serve Somebody"? Shirley Caesar. "I Shall Be Released"? Joe Cocker. "If Not for You"? George Harrison. "It Ain't Me Babe"? Johnny Cash and June Carter. "Just Like a Woman"? Nina Simone. "Like a Rolling Stone"? Michael Hedges. "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"? Warren Zevon. "Masters of War"? The Staple Singers. "Mr. Tambourine Man"? The Byrds. "Positively 4th Street"? Bryan Ferry. "Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)"? Manfred Mann. "What Was it You Wanted"? Willie Nelson. "With God on Our Side"? The Neville Brothers. Just accept that, save for the towering exception of the Lennon-McCartney due (who only had about 12 years of collaborative production, whereas Dylan has been producing consistently for over 60), there simply isn't another English-speaking artist in the recording era that has written as many great songs as Bob Dylan has. You don't have to grant that he was the definitive interpreter of all these songs too!

6) Oh, and as for politics? Well, by all available evidence, the man's favorite president was Jimmy Carter. As another great story-teller once commented, 'nuff said.

Minding Laurie Johnson’s Gap

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic] 

President Trump has been in office a month as of today, and the maelstrom of orders and actions which he has taken has elicited delight, horror, and/or confusion from many. In the midst of it all, I find myself still thinking about the Never Trumpers. I live in a mostly conservative state, and am a life-long member of a mostly conservative church; hence, the relatively small number of Republicans I know who still dissent from the faux-populist posturing, paranoid postliberal muttering, and borderline criminality that has overtaken most of what passes for politically “conservative” thought these days tend to really stand out. They’re honorable folk, these teachers and police officers, filmmakers and military veterans, farmers and parents and good friends, and the criticism they receive from their supposed ideological allies when they refuse to celebrate the latest mad (or Musk-influenced) order from Washington DC is painful to watch.

I don’t know if recommending Laurie Johnson’s fine book, The Gap in God’s Country: A Longer View of Our Culture Wars, to them would provide them with much solace, but it certainly couldn’t hurt. Johnson identifies herself at the start of the book as “an early ‘never Trumper,’” a registered Republican who broke from her party as she saw the conservative movement she’d long identified with turn into a “right-wing capitalist-friendly ethnically based populism” that idolized “an ill-equipped, seemingly unbalanced nationalist” (who also just happened to be a “narcissistic and unstable reality TV star”—p. 11). If you find such language describing the current occupant of the White House inaccurate or indefensible, then Johnson’s book probably isn’t for you. But that would be unfortunate, because the book—which was written and came out before the 2024 election—actually gives a pretty balanced assessment of Trump’s appeal to the sort of culturally conservative and rural voters whom Johnson (who, like me, lives in Kansas; she teaches at Kansas State University in Manhattan, while I teach at Friends University in Wichita) knows well.

Johnson’s book is sometimes meandering, but always thoughtful; as she writes at the outset, she thinks that the time for “narrow but safe and sure scholarship” (p. 12) is past, at least for her. Her overarching aim is to sketch out the long history of intellectual developments which have, in her view, turned inside out the positions she once held to, positions which most long assumed were deeply rooted in the cultural practices and perspectives common to our shared home in the Sunflower state. In turning to radical thinkers both right and left, Johnson's account of these developments turns primarily on, first, a process of “dislocation”—both material and moral—which has uprooted the cultural foundations for diverse, stable lives and sustainable living environments which were built up over generations, and second, a process of “strong-arming”—both ideological and religious—by which we submit to or participate in a collective attempt to paper over deep disagreements or deeply inhumane assumptions about the lives we live. I think her account is, ultimately, a wise one—but as someone who thinks Trump’s presidency was and will be appalling, I would think that, wouldn’t I?

Johnson is a complicated thinker and a careful writer; those looking for facile diagnoses and easy prescriptions also won’t find this book to their liking. She interchangeably employs both political psychology and political philosophy in building her arguments, making use of everything from sociological examinations of cults to complex agricultural economic data to the history of Bible translations to reflections on television sitcoms along the way. But consistent throughout her analysis is the attention she pays to “domination,” and particularly the cultural and social effects of economic dominion.

Johnson does not frame that domination in terms of class; she’s no Marxist, though she thoughtfully explores what she thinks his philosophy both got right and got wrong. Rather, the domination that she feels far too many of her fellow citizens have chosen not to see or have failed to see clearly is primarily ideational. American individualism, she argues, has been led to its current alienating and disempowering state by the way market-oriented and technology-obsessed thinking has come to permeate even the most basic institutions and practices of ordinary life—in our schools, churches, families, and communities. The domination of the calculating liberal individualist model has not only pushed us away from one another; it has cramped our appreciation of the real-world diversity and richness which open cultural engagement and collective action ought to allow. The omnipresence of “free-market liberalism,” in Johnson’s view, has reached the point that it “shares some of the totalitarian aspects of more openly apocalyptic revolutionary regimes,” with its insistence that “marketplace thinking works equally well for all people in all times and places” (p. 33).

The alarm she expresses at the effects of the homogenizing success of the so-called “American way of life,” as she has come to understand it, is present in every chapter, whatever its specific focus. She sees our valorization of this image in “the imperative to be efficient in the making or acquiring of …goods and services” (p. 99) when writing about human anthropology and psychology; and she sees it in the “politicized Christian opinion leaders” that focus parishioners solely on “worldly ends” (p. 228) when writing about political theology. Near the book’s conclusion, she puts forward a lengthy jeremiad that perhaps comes closer than any other single passage in the book to being an overall thesis statement about how she sees this constrained notion of liberal freedom and economic success as having warped American life:

Let me be perfectly clear. If you are concerned about the current state of our culture because of its contentiousness, seemingly amoral nature, the way it breaks up families, our loss of community, and the every-swifter march of secularization, look no further for the cause than the economy that thoroughly dominates us. Our “freedom to choose” does not stop at our toothpaste brands, though it apparently increasingly does stop at being a small businessperson or a small farmer. We are also free to choose to stay married or not, depending on how we feel. As we have less real choice due to our mounting social stratification and precarity, our “freedom to choose” necessarily gets more and more intensely expressed in our personal moral choices and lifestyles, as well as our stylistic choices. If you don’t like the way the kid down the street dyes their hair purple and wears tattoos, remember that they’ve been taught that the pinnacle of American freedom is in accumulation and personal expression. In effect, we are all in a constant state of flux, and yet we are taught to fear the actual trans person, the one who has the courage to disregard the superficial freedoms most Americans “enjoy” every day because they feel in their interior person that they are not what their exterior says they are. Before we launch any more assaults on our trans neighbors, we need to consider the largely life-frittering ways in which the rest of us are inauthentically fluid, and change our own ways if we do not like what we see (pp. 274-275).

The language by which Johnson condemns the consequences of liberal capitalism--its competitive demands, its expectations of constant change, its condescending charity, its mentality of disposability, its victimizing of those who fall behind, and most of all (echoing Wendell Berry here) its stultifying assumption of “inevitability”--has many echoes, and she does a superb job integrating the many facets of this sort of non-Marxist (though clearly Marx-influenced) cultural critique together. While her analysis mostly bypasses recent integralist critiques, Johnson is clearly respectful of those Christian thinkers who have called for a collective retreat from our corporatized capitalist state. However, reading through her broad-ranging assessment of how the dominance of market values and personal choice has warped American life, and torn a “gap” in structures of community life—a gap which, in her view, Christian churches and those who populate them have overwhelmingly failed to sew back together—makes it pretty clear that she has no interest in fleeing towards some reactionary religious position. (Some of this is plainly personal; twice in her book she details ways in which church communities she was part of simply failed to address the needs of suffering parishioners or to even understand what those needs were, in ways that both involved and affected her directly.)

Johnson’s training as a political philosopher was grounded in the classical liberal tradition, and it’s one she holds to. As such, she blanches at the idea of “a return to some sort of benevolent aristocracy/oligarchy” (p. 231). For her, religious strong-arming and economic domination have mostly developed in tandem, in opposition to a proper articulation of the rights we can exercise in communities built through work and cooperation, free from the worship of political saviors or Silicon Valley “innovators.” That freedom—a small-scaled civic one—won’t be achieved through revolution; as much as she clearly appreciates Marx’s assessment of power under capitalism, she’s not looking for any new vanguard (much less new government programs) to lead us forward.

Rather, Johnson’s hopes—to the extent they exist; her writing is more realist than romantic, and she is better at providing information than inspiration—lay in a different sort of movement, one more focused on recovering habits of work and association than affirmations of identity or authority. Her concluding chapters look closely as distributism and the Catholic Worker movement; she has praise for both, but also gentle criticisms, partly because she is clear-eyed (in ways that more than a few of their advocates are not) about some of the bottom-line realities of exploring these alternatives to capitalism: that is, having less money, less resources, less “stuff” all around. But making due with less is one thing that Johnson can speak to as something more than an academic and critic.

Johnson was instrumental in setting up the Maurin Academy, a multifaceted organization which includes both a farm and a school, one which seeks to provide both content online and food in-person, all in a way which challenges both profit-mindedness and state dependency. Inspired by the legacy of Peter Maurin (the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, along with Dorothy Day), the idea is to provide a place for the kind of “persistent, often unglamorous work” that she believes—and, I think, has argued persuasively for in her book—is “real and compelling” in the way that life defined by our corporate capitalist and governmental masters is not (p. 269). She recognizes that what they are doing could easily be categorized—especially in the absence of shifts in the state and federal money which keeps our exploitive food systems operating as they have for decades--as just more “quixotic attempts at economic and social experimentation,” but what else, she says in her conclusion, can we do? “We can smile and talk all we want about the benefits of localism, farmers markets, and mutual aid, but how many of us even remotely approach consistently adopting those practices?” (pp. 286-287)

Johnson’s book may not be the antidote to the Trump years which her (all too rare) sort of small-c conservative might need. But she is at least living out, in part, her own retreat from the corporatizing of disruption that seems to be the American lot, at least for the next four years. She is walking her talk, and as much as there are ideas and arguments her book that I admired and learned from (including a few I strongly disagreed with), I find the person she actually is even more admirable still.