Many feel this ballad is a touching hymn that gives voice to man’s yearning for a better world.  They are wrong.  “Imagine” is a cloying, boggy, sonic swamp of numb-skulled sentiments that sound like they were recycled from a bong-fueled, 2 a.m. bull session between a couple of pampered, credulous UC Berkeley lit majors.  It’s the national anthem of the hopey/changey crowd — all at once pretentious, smug, tiresome and intellectually bankrupt. 

“Imagine” should – no, must – be banned and all remaining copies of it destroyed.  Its continued existence makes mankind a stupider, more boring race.

Some shortsighted people might consider this assessment a bit harsh.  They are wrong.  Sure, it was a hit in 1971 and still today Imagine remains a radio staple.  It has sold millions of copies and inspired a legion of cover versions.  Rolling Stone even ranked it third on its roster of the Greatest Songs of All Time.

But these are not testimony to the song’s transcendent quality.  They are signs of the apocalypse.

The song begins with a dull piano chord progression that telegraphs to the listener that Something Waaay Profound is in-bound.  Then Lennon’s atonal voice pipes up.  Let’s leave aside the lyrics for a second – he sounds awful, like some over-earnest troubadour trying too hard to impress the four friends he guilted into coming out on a Wednesday to see him play his new tune over at the Common Grounds coffee house’s weekly open mike.

It’s so ponderous and booorrrinng, seeming to go on forever.  It’s the musical equivalent of passing a kidney stone, only not as much fun.

What was Phil Spector, who produced this mess, thinking?  Right now, he ought to be thinking that “Imagine” was the second biggest mistake of his life.

And the lyrics – give me a break.  Never have so many fawned so shamelessly over such utter nonsense.

The first lines are: “Imagine there’s no heaven/it’s easy if you try.”  No, it isn’t, because if there’s no heaven then there’s no hell, and we know that there’s a hell because when this song is playing we’re in it.

And how about “Imagine all the people/Living for today?”  Yeah, he’s put his finger on our problem – too many people planning ahead and preparing for the future.  This is the kind of powerful, incisive reasoning that led a guy who could take his pick of pretty much any woman in the world to shack up with Yoko Ono.  Let me put it another way for emphasis – this guy chose to see Yoko Ono naked.  Many times.  The only response to someone with that kind of judgment is to listen carefully to what he says and then do the exact opposite.

There’s also the gratuitous commie babbling:  “Imagine no possessions/I wonder if you can/No need for greed or hunger/A brotherhood of man/Imagine all the people/Sharing all the world.”  To quote a better song by the infinitely more talented Frank Zappa, a man with an admirable lack of patience for such treacle, gag me with a spoon.

I’m not sure of the Lennon timeline, but didn’t he write this nonsense about the same time he ditched England because of the tax bite he was taking to help pay for its socialist welfare state?  Sure, depriving a rapacious lefty government of revenue by moving to someplace with a more sensible tax rate is clearly the morally correct thing to do, but isn’t the transparent hypocrisy of this poser a bit much to stomach?

And if all that’s not insipid enough, we also get:  “You may say that I’m a dreamer/But I’m not the only one.”  Oh, please.

The most galling thing about “Imagine” is how it urges the listener to assume the mantle of that “dreamer,” thereby joining the ranks of the free spirits, bohemians and other assorted loafers, chislers and social parasites who are only too happy to belly up to the table that is our society but who are nowhere to be found when the check arrives:

“Sorry, I can’t be bothered to work to build something or to fight to defend anything – you see, I’m a dreamer, so you just let me know when you’ve gotten everything ready for me to enjoy.  Until then, I’ll be here relaxing on my parents’ sofa, pretending to read Gravity’s Rainbow. ”

The only bright spot is that so few folks actually seem to pay attention to its inane lyrics.  How else could one explain American Idol’s David Archuleta, the all-American Mormon kid, covering an ode to atheism that even Lennon conceded was pretty close to being the Communist Manifesto set to music?  Simon Cowell should have slapped him.  Several times.

Fortunately, there’s plenty of music out there that rejects this kind of hippie crap.  Sadly, for every one kid whose mind is opened by, say, The Clash or Husker Du, dozens more will sit slack-jawed and nodding vacantly at the moron-bait songs like “Imagine” dangle in front of them.

For me, I smile when I imagine a world without “Imagine.”  I guess that would make me a dreamer, except I have a job.

Back in the eighties – when popular music reached its pinnacle of achievement - I would be home from college, in my room, cranking cool tunes and my father would get home from work, peer in, scrunch up his face and ask how I could listen to that infernal racket.  The answer, of course, was that I had (and still have, dammit) really awesome taste in music.

–

I actually pitied my Dad for being unable to appreciate the Midwestern-inflected post-punk glory of The Replacements, or the sonic frenzy of their Minneapolis brothers-in-noise Husker Du, or the soaring, roaring guitar heroics of The Clash.  I don’t know what music he actually liked.  There were some LPs lying around the house – kids, you can ask your parents what those are – but they were things like the Kingston Trio and the Sound of Music soundtrack.  This last one was a particular sore point for me since my mom got the idea to name me Kurt, which is the German equivalent of Melvin, from the little Von Trapp twerp who sang “Fa.”

And now I find myself in a similar position to where Dad found himself a quarter century ago – hating, well, pretty much everything in the world of popular music and having it hate me right back.  Like my Dad, popular culture wrote me off well before I hit 40.  There is, however, an important difference between Dad and me, as well as between the younger generation and me.  My Dad was, and young people are, completely and utterly wrong about music, and I am unequivocally right.

Let’s review some of the popular music of today.  A group called the Black-Eyed Peas is kind of popular.  The woman in the group is named Fergie and she looks like she could take me in a cage match.  Their music is a kind of dance-chant mish-mash of various musical styles – all bad – combined with a visual sense that makes me wonder “Do you people look like that on purpose?” I have no clue what the hell they are singing about. I’m just pretty sure it’s not particle physics.

There are a whole bunch of rappers out there.  I know some of their names:  Jay-Z, 50 Cent and Flo Rida, who is apparently unaffiliated with the State of Florida.  They’re all badass gang-bangers.  Just ask them.  Oh, and they also sing, which seems to be an afterthought. 

There is someone named Lady Ga Ga.  She looks and dresses like a she-male George Jetson, which I mean in the kindest possible way.  She sings a song called Poker Face that does not seem to be about Texas Hold ‘Em, or anything else that I can discern.  It’s a really bad song.  After I pointed out that even I wouldn’t inflict it on a Guantanamo inmate, one of her fans countered that her hit “is really catchy.”  Yeah – so’s herpes, and I don’t want anything to do with that either.

Let’s be clear – I do not hate popular culture.  I like it.  I grew up marinating in it, and I even paid for a car using my experience to write TV trivia questions and jokes for that old pre-Internet computerized quiz game they used to have in bars back in the 90’s.  And when we would assemble the right wing newspaper at UC San Diego, I would play The Ramones really loud to annoy both the sullen Trotskyites lurking about as well as the dorky conservatives who thought you couldn’t be down with Reagan unless you wore a suit and tie to class.  Hell, most mornings in college I was lucky to just find my pants.

And I do like some recent good popular songs – Mr. Brightside by The Killers thoroughly and completely rocks, and U2 rose above their morass of suck with Beautiful Day.  And… well, I guess that’s about it.  That’s all the music I like since 2000.

It’s not just music that wrote me off at 40.  I also hate the movies hip young people seem to adore.  Remember how everyone loved Superbad?  Not me.  I like my comedies funny.  And remember how everyone thought Lost In Translation was so profoundly moving?  Well, I like my dramas unfunny – though it gets props for including the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Just Like Honey on the soundtrack.

 Perhaps it’s just time to accept that at age 44, ones’ views and opinions have absolutely no value or resonance within popular culture, despite their manifest correctness.  But I’m not going to do that.  I’m going to keep pointing out to misguided young people that everything they hold dear is wrong.  Because I’ve earned that right.  Because I’m older.  Because I am my Dad.

And now I have to go turn the hose on some kids who are playing on my lawn.