John Lennon: The Cult of Personality

By Greg Panfile
Copyright 1998, All Rights Reserved

As some of you readers of my rantings may have noticed over the years, about this time of year I always seem to issue some sort of diatribe somewhat related to the topic of John Lennon and his death.

Even as I write about that event, on one hand I feel the tug of restraint; it is far too easy to make too much of such things, often on the basis of things that can best be described as "personal" rather than artistic. The central point is, there is serious danger for all concerned, fans and icons, in going too far from the music into the realm of reputation, personal life, and the rest. It is clear that as a culture our little adventure into the elimination of personal privacy, for whatever reason, is producing diminished and even negative returns, and it's time to stop.

Certainly the Lennons were major players of this game, perhaps invented by Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. in the forties. He was one of the first people to realize that some merger of The Great Gatsby and newsmagazines could produce a new form of personal propaganda that could be cashed in later, for example in the form of political power. In some ways, and I am a Kennedy Democrat writing this, the JFK phenomenon was a product of manipulative personal publicity hype.

The success of this approach led to its adaptation in other fields.. now of course one could say that the entertainment business invented it, referencing forties films about movie stars and their agents trying to stage publicity stunts in order to get mention in gossip columns which would then land people choice roles or whatever. In many ways all the Beatles and Epstein did was move this phenomenon into the electronic media, much like JP Kennedy Sr. moved it from show business into politics.

All one need to do, to see the results of this behavior now almost completely out of control, is look back over the last few years at the OJ Simpson case or the DC sex scandals, to see where it all leads. And as is often the case, the Beatles and Lennon were leaders in this pack... they rode the media hype bandwagon into riches and prominence, transferred their prestige/accumulated attention with sporadic effect into other fields (political, social, artistic, spiritual and otherwise)... and in some ways, were eventually rendered mostly ineffective by the nearly chaotic results.

There is a rub of course, in that, for example, it was accepted long before any analysis of the modern media hype phenomenon took place, literary critics used biographical information to illuminate works of art, and in certain areas such as Romantic poetry did so on the basis of statements by the artists themselves about their personal lives and the relevance of same to their work. It's also obvious, to some extent, that there is some public right to know about crimes committed by the famous, or potentially committed by same, and so on. The argument toward "no trespassing at all" is clearly a dog that won't hunt.

What we are clearly left with, then, is a question of measure. In a pluralistic, relatively free society as this, where there is no single, official, orthodox religious standard to control everything, nor even a dominant ideology to prescribe how far to go... it seems as if the question of measure has not been raised or discussed in any objective way, with the results we see around us even now.

What is perhaps most interesting is that this basically Pavlovian cycle of idolatry and debunking, of worship in a sense followed by some real or symbolic human sacrifice to some extent, is completely value-neutral. Setting the Kennedy argument aside, one can make the argument that Hitler was the true master and innovator in this realm of media propaganda and personality cult. Yet if you examine the views of those who have used it, and suffered from it, as major subjects in the years since Hitler, you find people all over the map with every possible political, religious, or esthetic agenda you can imagine.

The methods used to sell the Beatles were just as effective for the New Kids on the Block... the latter with little talent and less content. Ronald Reagan and his people were as adept at these skills as Hitler or Kennedy... find me an odder triangle of politicians who have their core operating methods in common, and I haven't even mentioned serious left-wingers there.

In the end of course people are unknowable through the prism of these media, the interaction we have with them is like a kiss sent by messenger. And while there is something gained by any addition of true information, there is also a lot of false information, a lot of speculation and opinion, which has its own deleterious effect... not only on the putative idols attempting to manipulate the media and public toward this or that end, but on the buy-side participants, the public and consumers. There is no free lunch, and the more of this stuff you eat, the more you end up indigested and paying the attendant costs.

The costs to the consumer, to us, include focusing on minor and nebulous details about people whom we shall never meet, who actually have nearly nothing to do with our real lives... lost opportunity to actually do something real and effective in those realms where we are empowered to do so. We build mental castles, internal virtual realities and world views, based on the information and images provided by both the media and the content providers... and given the partiality and impurity of that information, plus its frequent irrelevance, those mental castles are based in sand and destined to fall, and demand significant repair, in the next rainstorm or after the next wave.

The entire concept of art as a consumer product, and of the artistic personality as an important and media-enhanced component of artwork, is a very recent one. One has to laugh about strict legalistic pronouncements related for example to bootlegs, when one considers that up until the Renaissance, and for much of the time following that until the 20th Century, artists worked mostly anonymously. To Plato and Aristotle, and to the builders of the pyramids, I am fairly certain that the notion of connecting fame and popularity to art and craft would be unthinkable, absurd demagoguery and an inappropriate mixture of things better kept separate, like adding laxative to champagne.

John Lennon, poet, thinker, and musician... the entire story took place in the media to some extent, the buildup, the teardown, the resurrection, the assassination. As a myth it certainly is Christlike in shape, is it not, almost like the stations of the cross... and that image itself was promoted by Lennon himself and by admirers at one time or another, whether in song (The Ballad Of John And Yoko) or by convening the Apple Board of Directors to announce a literal incarnation.

But that myth, while attractive and capable of analysis and refinement and so forth, is ultimately the shadow of a mirage, and as real. The person cannot be known through this means... indeed can best be known to strangers at this point through the work itself. The value of "data" based on anecdote and hearsay, always and everywhere corrupted to some extent by the agenda (overt or hidden) of the information provider, in illuminating that work is limited at best, and can even and easily obscure and distort that work and its meaning.

This is in some ways realized to its best extent in the matter of the "wife thing." It is to laugh. Could anyone have imagined, in let's say 1964, that so much would eventually be written and even issued on CD related to the chosen mates of the two lead Beatles? The number of women with more musical talent than either of these people is staggering. To compare their singing voices is absurd... the issue only arises because of who they slept with, and the post-breakup media manipulation of their husbands who seemed to have some odd agenda of proving to the other guy that their girlfriend was an equal or better songwriter or somesuch nonsense, ludicrous on the face of it.

Now the above can be considered bashing those women, which I have no interest in doing on a personal level. I don't know either of them, and have no qualifications to evaluate people on a personal level even if I do know them. Musically, I think they both stink, as we used to say in college, out loud. Someone else may like their records or contributions and they are entitled to that opinion and its expression. However, any attention paid to these people rather than to talented ones like Kate Bush in the seventies, given there is a limit to the attention the public can pay to female (or any) musicians, strikes me as being misplaced and wasteful. A bad musician married to a great one is less musically significant than a good musician, regardless of the latter's marital status.

But because of what has been done to us, and our collaboration in it, the cultural momentum of the cult of personality has rendered it impossible to do justice to artists, politicians, literally anyone involved in the entire sick circus. Anyone who doubts, for example, that publicity and media images played some role in activating the lunatic who assassinated Lennon... setting off yet more personality-cult orgiasm... just hasn't been paying attention. As has not anyone who believes that the entire absurd exercise is reasonable and not at a point of near-total dysfunction.

In some ways this entire phenomenon goes to show that the road to nowhere can be a two-way street. The damage to the deified is obvious... it's all too easy for the mob to shout "Fly higher, Icarus!" from the safety of the ground, ignorant of the nature of wax. Although, now and again, the falling idol happens to land on one of them in some manner... even the Judas figure can be viewed as just another victim of the whole sick game, while not absolved in any way of personal responsibility for his actions. While John's cult-of-the-month period definitely helped lead some people astray, they went there of their own free will... and while following his lead and urging him on, chose to ignore the real wolf of oppression at their own door, in the form of oppressive governments, churches, corporations, and the like. This particular box lunch is far from free. "You've got to serve yourself, ain't nobody gonna do for you."

Another interesting case is the deification of Elvis Presley. His cult is far more religious in form than anything currently associated with John Lennon; we have John himself to thank partly for that, because he worked so hard to debunk his own personal mythology in the early Seventies. Elvis had no such awareness. We are thus spared of the Dakota being a shrine where you can purchase souveneirs, thank goodness.

It's very ironic, too, that Elvis has become so much bigger in death than John. Consider that John wrote songs infinitely better, sang at least as well, made better films, sold more records, and had much more of an impact outside of music in terms of politics, religion, and ideas. Yet Elvis has won the post-mortem cult battle. Hmmm...

Perhaps it has something to do with fan age and social orientation... clearly Lennon fans are much less likely than Elvis fans to be members of this or that Christian church. If you look at the shape of the Christ myth... historical uniqueness, obscurity followed by adulation/superstardom, martyrdom, and then cult worship... it seems as though people brought up with that belief have almost a compulsion to impose that structure on any figure they admire, historical or musical or otherwise. Looks a lot like the operation of Pavlovian rather than divine principles from where I sit.

Of course the fault is not in our (rock/movie/political) stars, but in ourselves. Trivia, let it be remembered, as a word originates in gossip exchanged where three roads cross. It predates the media and originates in human nature. None of this would sell if people were not willing buyers. From the way we brainwash people with simplified, emotionally exciting myths, to our ignorant acceptance of the results when we agree with them, we are complicit in our unjust imprisonment, and until we actually do something about it, nothing will change.

This article is one of a series analyzing The Beatles' music by Greg Panfile. Greg has been writing essays on popular music that inspired him and the people who made it. Many have been published in such publications as SongLink, Beatlefan, Open Sky, Excitations, Off the Beatle Track, and the 910. His writings have been cited as reference works in Wikipedia and elsewhere. Email Greg or visit his Virtual Greg Panfile homepage.

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