By Odeisel

We all remember where we were when our idols fall. I sat in a barber’s chair when TMZ broke the news that Mike was gone.  In a college dorm wiping the cold out my eyes when I heard that Biggie Smalls died. Sitting on one of those bobforsaken plastic covered couches in my grandma’s house when we lost Marvin Gaye. For a generation of people, many of whom bore firsthand witness to Beatlemania, they remember where they were when John Lennon was murdered.

Many were watching Monday Night Football as Howard Coselle announced that Lennon was “shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital. Dead on arrival.” I can imagine how their hearts just sank; the empty feeling in your gut when you realize your world is shattered. By then, The Beatles had been supplanted by the Rolling Stones as the preeminent Rock band, but their place in history was cemented.

We don’t know these people personally, but they form a very real part of our collective identity; we mark places in time with their existence. As children we live unaware of the value of time and everything takes so long. “Are we there, yet?’ we ask on those long car trips. We clamor for our supper like we haven’t eaten in days. We never realize how swift these moments are and the only anchors we have sometimes are those instances we attach to the music. We may not remember where exactly we were going but we probably remember what was playing on the radio.

Lennon’s music, particularly his post group work, connected to a generation of youth disheartened by war, chilled to the bone by assassination and hardened by riots and civil unrest that had colored America during the latter half of the sixties. Gone was King. Gone was Kennedy. Gone were any vestige of apple pie Americana and the black & white aesthetic of the post war fifties. In its stead were uncomfortable shades of grey, with young men shuttled to a seeming war without end in Vietnam and a simmering class war at home. “Give Peace A Chance” became the anti-war anthem on college campuses, making Lennon both hero and pariah across the country.

In the end, Lennon was the soundtrack to the industrial world’s growing pains. His music represented at different stages the brash independence and idealism of youth, the innocence of love and the growing cynicism that manifests when we begin to grow up and see the world for what it is. Life is never static, and though we wish everything would remain as it was in our childhood comfort, it rotates; alternating between peril and promise, barely allowing us to stop and listen to the music. Four bullets from an assassin silenced that tune 30 years ago today. Imagine our lives if we never got to hear it.

[pro-player width=’425′ height=’344′ type=’video’]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lLs2dC9NaE[/pro-player]

If this sounds familiar to you, it’s because KRS interpolated the intro of “Hey Jude” for the intro to “Criminal Minded”

[pro-player width=’425′ height=’344′ type=’video’]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEKgYKpEJ3o&feature=related[/pro-player]

When you become bigger than music, when you become louder than gun shots and louder than bombs, you become immortal. You cannot be silenced by turning off radios or drowned out by sirens. Rest in peace John Lennon. We still haven’t given it a chance.

[pro-player width=’425′ height=’344′ type=’video’]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acb15JsCGSk[/pro-player]

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