American Politics & Pop Culture

I knew quite a bit about John Lennon from a British stand point because he is a legend back home. However, I did not realize to the extent that he had affected people’s lives in America. He probably made more of a stand point in America than he did in the UK because of the times America going through.
John Sinclair, in the article Music and Radical Politics made this point and stated, “Rock music is revolution” and that “while the counterculture era may not have witnessed a huge number of songs that openly touted evolution, the entire gestalt of the rock music experience, which included high volume, drugs, sexual freedom, rebellion against authority, and so forth, symbolized the revolution that radical politics sought” (pg. 98).
This is a main point that I took from the film The US vs. John Lennon. John Lennon served as a great output for young people after the war. It was a great person to follow in the search for world peace. The younger generations were speaking out against authorities and making a massive standpoint. They used Lennon as a leader in a way. The lyrics in his songs all focused towards the theme of world peace. The question was asked, did Lennon save lives. He probably did not nut he definitely did something towards the cause. This was shown by Nixon trying to deport him back to the UK. If Nixon was trying to do that, as President, Lennon must have been doing the right things to help world peace and go against the American Government. I think one of the main reasons that Lennon was so popular with the American youth was because he was different to all other ‘authority’ figures.
As John Street said in his article, Rock Pop, and Politics, “pop and rock have achieved on thing: they have made popular music into a political issue, and they have invested it with the potential to endanger and disrupt the established order.” This I think sums up exactly what John Lennon managed to do in America. He was the one that started it all off.