Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

This evening, desperate for any distraction from what I am convinced is incipient frostbite in my toes, I found myself reading over Rolling Stone’s 2005 list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

Now, I realize this is an activity rife with potential for annoyance. For legions of musicians and music lovers, Rolling Stone occupies a top ten spot in The 500 Most Pernicious Developments & Influences in Music History, along with such profound debasements and abominations as the double-necked guitar, the umlaut, Scandinavia, jam bands, and sad white people without drug problems. I should have expected my ire to be raised, and to some extent I did - but I was unprepared for the sheer and unprecendented bankruptcy of Rolling Stone’s beliefs, the terrifying glimpse into the fetid depths of Hell I was afforded by perusing the magazine’s top ten.

Number one was of course “Like a Rolling Stone,” which I’ll leave alone until I someday produce my manifesto on how Bob Dylan’s canonization by a generation of chest-thumping burnouts reliving the glory days when they “stopped the Vietnam War” has obscured the fact that as his social relevance diminishes, his early music begins to resemble a whiny Jewish boy inflicting stream of consciousness poetry and wheezy harmonica playing upon an unwilling public. Number two was “Satisfaction,” which is a choice about as perfunctory as double-mitzvah Friday night sex.

But it’s number three I really take issue with. Now, keep in mind that this is supposed to be the number 3 best song thus far in thousands of years of human artistic development, a song that according to Rolling Stone is better than “Waiting in Vain,” “Spanish Bombs,” “Maggot Brain,” Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” and thousands more worthy musical masterpieces. This is a song that is merely two away from the very shining pinnacle of man’s creative potential.

The song: I-fucking-magine.

Yes, that “Imagine”, that insipid ditty marked by a hammeringly jejune piano figure and a breathtakingly childish vision for world peace, that banal ode to mediocrity that inspires hippies the world over to link hands, shed a few hopeful tears and sway (scientific research has recently discovered that this is how hippies, a hive organism, exchange genetic material), that mockery of all that is good and holy in rock and roll which should have served as the defense’s entire case in Mark David Chapman’s murder trial. That fucking “Imagine.”

Here’s what Rolling Stone had to say for itself:

John Lennon wrote “Imagine,” his greatest musical gift to the world, one morning early in 1971 in his bedroom at Ascot, his estate in Tittenhurst, England. His wife, Yoko Ono, watched as Lennon sat at the white grand piano now known around the world from films and photographs of the sessions for his Imagine album and virtually completed the song: the serene melody; the pillowy chord progression; that beckoning, four-note figure; and nearly all of the lyrics, twenty-two lines of graceful, plain-spoken faith in the power of a world, united in imagination and purpose, to repair and change itself.

…

Lennon knew he had written something special. In one of his last interviews, he declared “Imagine” to be as good as anything he had written with the Beatles. We know it’s better than that: an enduring hymn of solace and promise that has carried us through extreme grief, from the shock of Lennon’s own death in 1980 to the unspeakable horror of September 11th. It is now impossible to imagine a world without “Imagine.” And we need it, more than he ever dreamed.

Oh Jesus. It always has to be about September 11th. The fact that the song is an unmitigated assault on the ear, or that its writer was dead 21 years before the World Trade Center fell, or that it is arguably a greater crime against humanity than Osama’s most fevered of wet dreams, apparently provides no obstacle to the subjection of yet another generation to John Lennon’s pablum under the mantle of post-9/11 cultural shock. Aren’t terrorists scary enough? Do they have to a fucking theme song, and do I have to fucking sway along with it?

But the most offensive assertion is that “Imagine” is John Lennon’s “greatest musical gift to the world.” Now, I like much of the artistic output of John Lennon, and I mourn his passing as much as the next guy - only for me, John Lennon died in 1969, not in 1980. So since we’re in a bit of a listing groove, I’ve compiled a non-authoritative list of Ten of John Lennon’s Musical Gifts to the World That Rank Far Above “Imagine.”

1) “Yer Blues”

2) “A Day in the Life”
3) “Happiness is a Warm Gun”
4) “I’m So Tired”

5) “Sexy Sadie”
6) “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey”
7) His response of “it can’t get no worse” to Paul McCartney’s “have to admit it’s getting better, it’s getting better all the time” on “Getting Better”
The silly backmasking on “Revolution Number 9″
9) Onstage nose blowing, Hamburg, 1960
10) Vibrant post-Indian-food bowel movement at the Maharishi’s sleepaway camp, Rishikesh, India, 1968

I would go into my further outrage over “Hey Jude” squeezing in at number 8, but ever since the army informed me that I have an unusually rapid heartrate, I’ve decided to try to moderate my outburts of rage, justified though they may be. So I’m going to meditatively smoke nargilah, listen to Blue Lines, and stare off into space. Then I’ll go to bed.

Mmm…

Massive Attack with Horace Andy - “One Love” - from Blue Lines