John Lennon - Power To The People

(Apple 1971)

Well. I’ve been accidentally falling asleep on my couch every evening this week like a naughty, lazy fellow, thus the lack of John Lennon reviews. Luckily, the coming of the new year has directed pretty much all site traffic to the entry for “Ding Dong, Ding Dong,” so I suppose I can hide behind that fact and get away with some pitiful January sloth. And if it seems too obvious that I’m phoning it in on this one, please note that Lennon was doing the same when he churned out “Power to the People,” his second slogan-based political-pop single. Still, no matter how trite the lyrics, the huge, uptempo, sax-blare Wall-of-Spector backing sells the thing to an astonishing degree. Sonically and thematically, the song fits far better with the Sometime in New York City material of ’72 than with the more personal Imagine songs that were soon to follow, but it works as an over-earnest, one-off stopgap between albums and demonstrates, after Plastic Ono Band, that Lennon had in no way shunned the mass-appeal single-writing process.