Which is obviously quite fucked up. Not defending it, of course. If he was going to be an ass, he should have found a way to do it that wasn’t displaying a form of prejudice.

Oh, he was supremely ableist, too. There’s a whole lot of scenes of him from the touring days doing his version of a “spastic,” and it’s really quite atrocious. Of course, the audiences and the other Beatles all laughed. The worst part is that when it comes up in the Anthology, rather than saying “yeah, we were really quite awful, and I’d like to think that John would be embarrassed about that today because I sure am,” all of the Beatles defended it, attributing it to stress, goofing around, and not meaning to hurt anyone. This was the 90s. It’s absolutely appalling.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, I wanted to point out that in his last years, John seemed to at least partially overcome the homophobia thing. In All We Are Saying, he reacts quite casually to questions about Brian and his sexuality, acting quite blase about the whole thing, saying basically “yeah, Brian was in love with me, and we were really good friends, so what?” and shrugging it off when asked whether or not the rumors that they’d had a sexual relationship were true. As in, rather than being like “no, I don’t know how those rumors started, bullshit, I’m 100% straight” etc (like how Paul has valiantly defended John’s heterosexuality in years since), he seriously said that the two had a deep emotional friendship, but “the relationship was never consummated.” And that was that.

Of course, that could also be guilt over how he treated Brian when he was alive since Brian was then dead.

Don’t forget that John was horribly bad on all types of oppression—he was a straight-up homophobe and anti-semite years after his establishing a life with Yoko. Remember the horseshit he reportedly said to Brian Epstein about A Cellarful of Noise? Also, in his landmark 1971 interview with Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, he uses the homophobic f-word up and down to describe men he doesn’t like.

I’d like to think that if he were alive today, John would challenge his white hetero cis-male privilege in all its forms. But we’ll never know that, will we?

Also, possibly John figured it would be harder for people to accuse Yoko of racism than himself? But I don’t doubt there was an element of I’m-not-racist-look-who-I-married defensiveness there, too.

(And as for Dick Gregory, who allegedly gave Lennon his approval…er, isn’t this the guy who named his autobiography Nigger in 1964 and then said that from now on, when people said that word they were just promoting his book?)

But anyway, as someone who was actually alive and starting to pay attention to who was singing what when this song came out, and spent most of her teens neck-deep in music criticism, I can tell you that a big part of the reason JL didn’t get much shit for this number at the time was that when it came out, pro-femnist songs in rock, pop, and r&b almost didn’t exist; you could practically count them on one hand. (Sippie Wallace’s slut-shaming “Women Be Wise,” which was recorded by Bonnie Raitt in 1971, was considered a “feminist” song then — yikes. But that’s how novel a woman simply playing an electric guitar was then.)

And there wasn’t a single pro-feminist song by a male singer, not one ever. There were a few anti-feminist numbers to be sure, like Stevie Wonder’s hideous “Superwoman” (love Stevie, but I’m sure even he wants to put a bag on his head when he thinks of that one now). Lennon’s was the first, and it got some attention for its novelty value. But as I recall, most critics didn’t think it was very good, and the album it was on sold poorly, especially for an ex-Beatle offering in 1972. Possibly if Some Time in New York City had been more popular or critically acclaimed he would have caught more shit for it, but it had novelty value at best even then.

Even the Village Voice, a publication which published a great deal of criticism of racism as well as sexism and homophobia in music (and had quite a few black writers on staff) didn’t have a whole lot to say about it, or about Patti Smith’s similarly themed “Rock and Roll Nigger” in 1978 (in which Smith said Jimi Hendrix, Jesus Christ, Jackson Pollack and herself were all “niggers” — i.e. outsiders). Mostly the reaction to those numbers then was more like, “oh, puh-lease, give me a break,” than “How dare they?”

Not saying that was right. Just that that’s how they were able to skate by with it.

I think more songwriters are aware now that people can have very different responses to hot-button words than what they intended. I know even Randy Newman has had second thoughts about the “keeping the niggers down” part of “Rednecks,” even though it was meant as satire; in Joe Smith’s On the Record, he said a young black man had told him about being in an audience where the white people were all standing up and cheering that line as though it was delivered straight, and how uneasy it made him felt, and Newman said it really gave him pause.

Yah, I think that hits the nail on the head right there.