Wednesday, January 8, 2025
Time: 3:38 PM
Song: Give Peace a Chance
Artist: John Lennon
Mode of Consumption: MP3 – Drive to Springfield listening to MP3s on shuffle from my phone.
Link to song: https://open.spotify.com/track/5waa9MNixv8LTvb7I71V3x?si=54c8510cb9b84d69
When the song shuffles on, I think to myself, you know I used to like this song, but I could hit skip now and feel OK about it.
“Did Yoko write this one,” my co-worker Ty asked about halfway through? “Not a lot of content here.”
It’s almost reassuring to know that people still lean on blaming Yoko whenever they hear something from John Lennon or the Beatles that they don’t like. I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to her, but old jokes are like old dogs, sometimes it’s just nice to see them again.
The song certainly came about during the height of the John-Yoko experience, and it is unique in that it was a solo song released while the Beatles were still together in 1969. The song was released as part of the couple’s Bed-In honeymoon in Montreal.
The thing that caught Ty’s attention is that other than a couple short versus in the first half the song, it basically repeats the chorus “All we are saying is give peace a chance” over and over for the entirety of the four minutes and fifty-two seconds of the run time.
The most likely explanation is that Lennon and Ono wanted the message to be simple and clear, and that repeating it was the most logical way of doing it. When I first encountered the song as a child, I think that worked. Like I said, I remembered liking this song. At the time of its release,it probably was also an effective device.
The repetition is also something Lennon did from time to time – the song Revolution No. 9 – comes to mind. So, while maybe Yoko had influence, I think John probably said let’s just keep singing it.
It just doesn’t age all that well. Now, it seems to drag on for a minute or so too long, and I wish there was at least one more verse to break things up.
That’s the problem with repetition in song and writing, it can be purposeful, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it works.
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