The snake ate its tail in 1969

This video is an amazing example of how media can be art. The audio alone, of course, is amazing: a star struck 14 year old kid sneaks a tape recorder into John Lennon's hotel and catches a lucid, flowing stream of conciousness interview from one of the most famous people in the world at the time. The clip's greatness lies most in the interaction between them; frank, candid, and on equal ground. The visuals added a few years ago take it to another level of expressive eloquence and turn this simple interview into a piece of art.

John Lennon was a pop culture icon that became extremely media savvy early on in his career. That savvy was hard won. As young men the Beatles were thrust into the international spotlight; recorded, quoted, photographed constantly. Until them, few had gained such an international popularity on TV and in film and in the press and as such The Beatles had had little to no PR training. Celebrities today tend to have entire teams of people looking after their public image but in the mid 60's John and the Beatles were still naive, still young, and still said exactly what they thought.

On March 4, 1966, this quote of John's was printed in an interview by reporter Maureen Cleave, John's friend, in the London Evening Standard:

"Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."

Five months later, in the U.S., Datebook reprinted part of the quote as a part of a front cover story. It was completley out of the context of Cleave's article.

The sound bite that caught was: "We're more popular than Jesus"

In the divided and tumultuous America of the 60's this misconstrued statement from a British pop star caused a major stir. Southern radio stations banned Beatles music, rallies were held, albums were burned, John recieved death threats, and the KKK protestsed in front of a Beatles concert in Alabama.The backlash was immense...BUT a whole lot of Datebooks got sold that month.

Many pop stars today that command the popularity and dollar amount that The Beatles did are careful with what they say. They have to be, million dollar corporate endorsements hang in the balance.

John Lennon had frustrations with fame of course. He is quoted as saying "The postman wants an autograph. The cab driver wants a picture. The waitress wants a handshake. Everyone wants a piece of you." Certainly in his case it was true. The Beatles were the biggest musical act and arguably the most famous people in the world at their peak, and for better or worse John was always the most quotable. He struggled with the ironies of the press and of tabloid culture, "Newspaper people have a habit of putting you in the front pages to sell their papers, and then after they've sold their papers and got big circulation's, they say, 'Look at what we've done for you."
But, as he matured within the media as a constant in his life, he seemed to become aware that fighting it was pointless. Lying down and taking it did no one any good, but, if you could harness it...it could be a powerful tool for change.

What distinguishes John Lennon from other celebrities, and the reason we are discussing him here and now, was his uncanny ability to exploit the media and turn it against itself. Warhol did this to an extent, turning art into marketing and vice versa, but Warhol used it to promote himself and his own interests. In 1969 Lennon decided to exploit his own image and his own celebrity to sell world peace to the masses. In 1969 he and his wife Yoko began their famous "Bed-Ins"

 These "protests" were really publicity stunts wrapped up in a nice neat press conference, all with the goal of making peace a topic of discussion at the dinner table. At the time Lennon had been hounded by the press, his every move was followed and reported, so he decided to put it to work for him.

The media has since changed immensely, as has our response to it. We are far more inundated with image and sound, there is far more advertising every new day than there was the day before, and we are far more jaded towards what we see and hear and read than in 1969. But, the media situation was more or less the same then as it is today- a few corporate sponsored outlets funnel most of the news into our homes, ratings mean ad money, and we look to celebrities for leadership in taste and behavior. But if a singer were to sit in bed for world peace today we would probably mock them for being a self important douche. It just wouldn't work in 2010, even if the point was just to stir up discussion.

Maybe this is because the media is even stronger and marketing is now a huge part of our daily lives, maybe we're just numb to it. We know everyone is selling us something, even if it is peace, and we have ceased to be influenced. Consciously anyway.

John Lennon saw a way to exploit the media in a way that no one had done before. Maybe there is a way for someone to do it on today's scale, the internet affords a lot of new terrain. Maybe the next revolution won't be televised but there's a strong chance that, whatever form it takes, it will go viral.

Share the video at the top, or share this whole article. Ask your friends to share it if they like it. Get behind something and give it a little shove onto the interwebs and see if it goes somewhere. See what comments it gains. The seeds of change are more quickly distributed than ever before in the history of man. The question that remains is whether or not the soil they land on has become too hardened to grow anything new.

What do YOU think?