John Lennon's Walls and Bridges (1974)

The idea of what the world was like when I was around but too young to remember it is fascinating for me, so I’ve decided to write a series of posts on music from 1974, the year of my birth. I hope the blend of music, history and memoir will be interesting for readers, and I would love to hear others’ reflections on the times and the music, either in the comments section below or via Twitter here. I’ve been picking up vinyl from 1974, and I’ve decided to start with John Lennon’s Walls and Bridges.

 

Lennon’s fifth studio album was released in September 1974. That was four years after The Beatles broke up and one year after the last U.S. troops left Vietnam. A month before, Richard Nixon had resigned as president, and a month later Muhammad Ali would defeat George Foreman in the “Rumble in the Jungle.” Those were the times and they outline a cultural matrix that has since faded as new scandals, new wars and new superstars have come to dominate our immediate cultural background.

As far as Lennon albums go, Walls and Bridges is more on the personal than political side, with lyrics inspired by his separation from Yoko Ono (“Going Down on Love”), girlfriend May Pang (“Surprise, Surprise”), and feelings of personal weakness (“Nobody Loves You”). Accordingly, the album artwork features an excerpt from a book detailing the Irish origins of his last name, drawings he did as a child, and pictures of him making funny faces.

Foldable flaps allow the listener to join in the fun.

Musically, Walls and Bridges has a disco-funky side which is on full display in “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” a song Elton John helped round out by stepping in to play piano. Later, the album presents quiet reflections like “Old Dirt Road” and occasionally turns dark, as in “Steel and Glass.” This last is my favorite song on the album. Actually, I first encountered it as performed by Candlebox on the 1995 tribute album Working Class Hero. According to legend, the song is about Beatles manager Allen Klein, but I hear a dirge for soulless, high-power professionals everywhere:

               There you stand

               With your L.A. tan
               And your New York walk
               And your New York talk
               Your mother left you
               When you were small
               But you’re gonna wish
               You wasn’t born at all…
               …steel and glass.

Another favorite is “#9 Dream,” which I seem to remember from my childhood. It’s a strange song based on a dream Lennon had and containing nonsensical lyrics like “Ahhh! Böwakawa poussé, poussé!” It’s also quintessential Lennon in its intimacy and beautiful, unforgettable melody.

 

Lennon has always been the Beatle who resonates with me most. Perhaps it has something to do with hearing the album’s songs as I was going through my early childhood drama. (“#9 Dream” was released as a single the day before I was born, so it may very well be the first Lennon song I heard, on the car radio on my way home from the hospital.) Or maybe I’m just a bit like Lennon. My parents named me John after John Lennon, I feel an affinity to his creativity and sensitivity, and I have similar views on social issues. I’m even married to a Japanese woman, which has always made Lennon's final studio album before his death, Double Fantasy (1980), especially poignant for me.

Lennon wasn’t the only ex-Beatle to release an album in 1974, but I’ll get to the others when the time comes. The Seventies were a time when old masters evolved, but also a time when new masters, and new sounds, rose to prominence. Next stop: E.L.O.’s Eldorado.

 

Are Woody Allen's Films Really That Sexist?

The other day, I ran across an opinion piece on The Huffington Post about Woody Allen’s latest film, Café Society. The headline declares a destination: “How Woody Allen Still Gets Away With Writing Sexist Movies.” And the subhead plots a course: “Café Society is set in the ’30s to match the director’s retrograde views on women and love.”

This take on Woody Allen is nothing new, so at first I gave it little attention. But then I watched Magic in the Moonlight (2014) and saw in the two main characters an example of the views in question. Emma Stone plays Sophie, a poor American who claims to have clairvoyance. At first glance, she conforms to the pretty, young and dumb archetype. Colin Firth plays a rich Brit named Stanley, a famed debunker of charlatans. He’s older and believes he’s wiser, and at one point vows to take Sophie under his wing. Central to the film’s themes is the dichotomy between reason and magic, and here too the characters conform to stereotypes. Sophie is emotional and full of wonder at life, while Stanley sees everything in the stark light of reason.

 

Thus, Magic in the Moonlight would seem to support criticisms that Allen’s work is sexist, because, among other things, it employs outdated gender stereotypes. And if Magic in the Moonlight is sexist, then much of Allen’s work is sexist, because these themes, even analogues of these very characters, run throughout his work.

However, the kind of criticism that casually declares Allen’s work sexist is usually the kind that begins with a number of assumptions--about gender, sexism and Allen himself--and simply applies them to the work in question without listening to what the work says. This approach rules out, before interpretation has even begun, the chance of the critic hearing anything but an affirmation of preexisting convictions, such as those under which feminism tends to labor.

Feminist critique is certainly necessary and interesting--and it has the potential to be enlightening when applied to Allen’s oeuvre--but it all seems cut by the same cookie cutter these days, especially online. We all know, upon seeing the headlines, what we’re going to read and could tick off the main points without even reading them. At this point, the same old lines of attack are boring and obfuscate more than they disclose. There’s more to any work of art than any ideology will allow.

You could also try looking at Allen’s work this way: The typical Allenesque neurotic male is always the fool in the drama. Male rationality is not elevated to a virtue but rather ridiculed--and not just by supposed female irrationality. The men themselves are always shown to be confused romantics and the women to be shrewder, smarter and more capable. Allen purposely subverts the very stereotypes he employs. On the surface, the characters are one way, but just underneath they are another way, and this isn’t hard to see.

In Magic in the Moonlight, Stanley sneers at others’ fanciful notions and he mocks Sophie for being uneducated, but his overbearing rationality leaves him cold and empty, unable to see anything in a starry sky but a vast, menacing universe. His fear that his orderly world will fall apart blinds him to Sophie’s love for him and his love for her, leaving him a clown who is victim to his emotions. The voice of wisdom eventually comes through conversations with acquaintances, most notably Sophie and his aunt, who function like psychoanalysts by providing the “talking cure” that leads to self-realization.

 

Allen’s films do often speak an older language when it comes to the tug-of-war between the sexes, but that language was--and in the works of great artists and the lives of many regular people remains--often more egalitarian and sophisticated than our current polemical narratives regarding gender will admit. We shouldn’t abandon forward-thinking narratives for “retrograde” ones, but we do stand to learn from throwing more than one narrative at a work to see to what degree they all stick.

And we might try no ideology at all.

The dictates of ideology will only get us so far, but probably not very far. This is exactly Sophie’s--and Allen’s--point in Magic in the Moonlight: Thinking outside the constraints we impose on ourselves is liberating.

 

 

Previous post on Woody Allen:

Myths About Woody Allen's Oeuvre