A lot has been said and written this week about John Lennon and his music. Some of it is overblown, of course; he has been marketed as a twentieth century icon, something he'd have found really irritating. Currently it's trendy to say that he was hugely over-rated and a mediocre talent. This is rubbish!
His music has staying power. It's not to do with talent on an instrument or as a vocalist, but with being truly seminal. Nearly forty years after his best work, his singing is still imitated in so much guitar-driven indie music - Liam Gallagher's nasal snarl is the most obvious example. Songs like Tomorrow Never Knows, I Am The Walrus, Strawberry Fields, A Day in the Life, Cold Turkey and even Revolution were all, when they first appeared, utterly non-derivative and memorable experiments in sound which redefined the boundaries of pop music. Whatever Lennon's flaws as a human being - he had the narcissism characteristic of a lot of artists - these still startling songs deserve their impact on the culture. The less well-known Revolution no. 9 remains probably, as pointed out by Ian Macdonald in the definitive Beatles book Revolution in the Head, the most widely distributed piece of avant garde art on the planet.
In other songs, he pioneered the genuinely, sometimes painfully, introspective lyric, subject matter hitherto reserved for poetry - and jazz, of course. While Dylan laid claim to the first surreal pop lyrics, you never got such a show of soul from him. Personal experience became one of the standard subjects a pop song, but it's easily forgotten that, before Lennon, pop music was nothing more than a distraction. Kurt Cobain in the 1990s acknowledged Lennon as his biggest influence.
Lennon's bold originality was rare at the time, and is even more so today.
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