Some songs are written with emotion at the forefront: love, anger, and joy, all universal and timeless. Other tracks are more of a reflection of their time, and this applies specifically to protest songs. Many musicians hesitate to write about something of their time because they don’t want to date their music. However, protest music is essential – it provides a voice to those who are often unable to speak up for themselves, and no one wrote it better than John Lennon.
Lennon became much more political during his solo career than in The Beatles. He wrote ‘Imagine’ as an ode to potential peace on earth, and then he penned ‘Power to the People’, which was also intended to be a political rallying cry. While his passion for politics and trying to right injustice was at the forefront of this song, he also created it out of guilt.
Lennon didn’t create the term ‘Power to the People’ but was undoubtedly pivotal in popularising it. It started to be used frequently in the 1960s and ‘70s and indicated a need for people to take back control from the government. When asked about the song, Lennon said: “I wrote ‘Power to the People’ the same way I wrote ‘Give Peace A Chance’, as something for the people to sing. I make singles like broadsheets. It was another quickie.”
The song tied in with the filming of the Imagine documentary, and as a result, Lennon and Yoko Ono always had cameras surrounding them. Offering a little more insight, Lennon gave a more concise meaning behind the song to the cameras when he said, “The people are the government, and the people have the power. All we have to do is awaken the power in the people.”
Despite being passionate about politics and attempting to give a voice to the people, there was also guilt playing on Lennon’s mind when he wrote the material. During an interview on BBC Radio One, he spoke about the British Pakistani activist and writer Tariq Ali. Lennon said: “[He] kept coming round wanting money for Red Mole or some magazine or other. I was thinking, well, I’m working class, and I am not one of them, but I am rich, and therefore, I have to.”
This posed a dilemma in Lennon that he faced frequently: “Any time anybody said something like that, I would fork out,” he said. “He was hustling for whatever he was hustling for and I wrote ‘Power to the People’ as a sort of guilt song. It’s like a newspaper song, where you write about something instant that’s going on right now.”
In his fame and solo career, Lennon became much more in tune with the world around him; however, with that added knowledge came a guilt. The former Beatle obviously could not change the world on his own, but he made an effort to do so through donations and his music. ‘Power to the People’ is the perfect example of that.
