John Lennon Wasn’t Your Friend
My friends and column-readers have often seen me tool on Steely Dan, a duo whose music I call frat boy pseudo-jazz, but I stopped hating them a little today when I read that their tune “Only A Fool Would Say That” (from their first LP) was a diss against John Lennon for releasing “Imagine.”
A mega-rich celebrity preaching anti-materialism in the early 70s (an era like ours, when working people were getting hammered by job losses and wealth inequality) didn’t sit well with Fagen and Becker, and in fact Frank Zappa and Paul Simon also gave Lennon crap for preaching about abandoning materialism in a time when people were struggling to get by, “which was at best unrealistic and, at worst, insulting.” (credit: Facts Verse)
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Quite fitting that proud Zionist activist Gal Gadot made that stupid video of the song, featuring her rich celebrity buddies singing (off key) about how “hard” it was to “survive” the Covid lockdown while everybody else gladly welcomed the time off from scrambling to gain an inch. She hasn’t been taken seriously since.
It’s perfectly okay to want to have fun stuff. Rich people are the ones who want it in excess. Like I wrote once before on this app, they’re not your friends.
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My second book, My Year In The Online Left, is out now. Meantime, if you want to be fully, genuinely informed about the political troll/bot invasion of Election 2016, 2020, and Elections-Yet-To-Come, buy my previous book. There’s the tiniest bit of technical stuff in those books, but you’ll get it, I promise. My Twitter is @esaeger, my Mastodon is @esaeger@universeodon.com (I’m spending a lot more time there now), my BlueSky is @esaeger.bsky.social (ditto) and my cursed Facebook is eric.saeger.9 (I do visit it daily).
