Curating a Legacy

John Lennon was always the most controversial Beatle. In 1966, he infamously declared, “We’re more popular than Jesus,” sparking a backlash that led to public bonfires of Beatles records. In 1968, he appeared nude on an album cover with Yoko Ono, leading retailers to be jailed on obscenity charges. And, in 1969, he starred in a short film focused on a single part of his body in varying states of tumescence—the less said about that, the better.

Even today, 45 years after his death, Lennon continues to ignite controversy. The latest surrounds a recently announced twelve-disc boxset, focused on Lennon and Ono’s recordings of 1971–72. These were their most politically direct songs, tackling specific issues of the time—from the Attica State Prison riots to the trial of Angela Davis. The songs came together on the double album Some Time in New York City. They also formed the backbone of the One to One concerts at Madison Square Garden, which were the subject of a recent documentary.

The new controversy stems from the boxset’s omission of a key Lennon-Ono song from the period: “Woman Is the Nigger of the World.” On the original release of Some Time in New York City, this provocatively titled track opened the album. It was also the centrepiece of the album artwork. Designed to look like a newspaper (with each song name as a headline), the cover featured that arresting title in the most eye-catching position possible. It was also the only single issued from the album.

Despite being the central Lennon-Ono song of that period, it does not appear a single time across the boxset’s exhaustive 123 tracks. The album it originally appeared on is now presented in a “reimagined” version, with the offending song removed and another track reordered into the opening slot. Likewise, three discs dedicated to the One to One concerts omit the song, despite it having been performed at the shows.

The press announcements for the boxset are silent on this absence. But the attempt to quietly sweep the controversial song aside has stimulated a Streisand effect: every social media post promoting the release is filled with comments about the missing track. “Why did you drop the first song?” asks one commenter on YouTube. “Gimme the missing track,” writes another on Instagram. On Twitter, one user lambasts the song’s exclusion as “a direct attack on John’s art and a deplorable smear on his legacy.”

In some ways, the omission is unsurprising. Several Lennon albums have had successful reissues in recent years. These have typically included new “ultimate mixes” of the songs, along with innovative packaging and a plethora of unreleased tracks. The recent reissue of Lennon’s 1973 Mind Games album even won a GRAMMY® Award. The reissue of Some Time in New York City proved more contentious, however. It was first announced with its own website a few years ago, before being quietly shelved. You can still see the landing page for the originally planned boxset, with a 2022 release date.

No official reason was given for the cancellation. But the rumour among Beatles fans was that the Lennon estate and Universal Music Group could not come to an agreement on the inclusion of “Woman Is the Nigger of the World.” The song had been reissued several times before, most recently as part of the John Lennon Signature Box in 2010 and 2015. But by the 2020s, it was clearly too offensive for modern ears.

In truth, the song has always been offensive—at least to some listeners. Indeed, part of its point was to shock. When it was originally released in 1972, it stirred such controversy that Lennon and Ono were forced to explain themselves in TV and radio interviews. They even took out full-page magazine advertisements to contextualise their message. Their song had no racial meaning, they argued. Rather, they wanted to reclaim that problematic word. They wanted to broaden its definition to include all disenfranchised people. And they wanted to use it to highlight the subjugation of women.

For some, this explanation was accepted, and the song stood as a valid political statement. For others, their title and lyrics remained clumsy and offensive—no matter their intentions.

But whether it was successful or not, Lennon and Ono’s song was a vital part of the artistic statement they were trying to make. To quietly remove it from a retrospective of this period erases a part of their history. It softens their characters too. It pushes Lennon away from his true position as the most controversial Beatle and moulds him into something blander. It might make him more palatable and more marketable in 2025. But it is ultimately dishonest—which is ironic, given the name selected for another Lennon boxset issued just a few years ago: Gimme Some Truth.

Writing a Song

The controversial song originated with Yoko Ono. She coined the title phrase during an interview with Nova, a British women’s magazine with a radical edge. It’s a sign of how different the times were that Ono’s phrase was emblazoned in all-caps on the magazine’s cover in March 1969.

John Lennon had been irritated by Ono’s phrase at first. “I was more of a chauvinist than I am now,” he explained during a May 1972 interview on The Dick Cavett Show. “I argued a lot.” Over the next few years, however, Ono eventually brought him round to her perspective on women’s issues. “I had to find out about myself and my attitude to women, and this phrase of hers kept coming through my head.”

Once he had been persuaded, Lennon insisted that they write a song based on that incendiary phrase, to protest the secondary position of women in society as “the slave of the slave.” His passion for the message is evident in the vocal he laid down for the recording, which straddles that unique Lennon register—somewhere between singing and screaming. Ono does not appear on the track, and Lennon is backed by Elephant’s Memory, a New York rock band, which the pair had recruited for the album sessions. The group bring a saxophone-heavy sound, creating a bombastic backing that mirrors the forcefulness of Lennon’s vocal. Produced by Phil Spector, the track also includes the obligatory string arrangement, though this is often drowned out by drums and guitars.

As for the lyrics, these largely consist of the title phrase repeated as a chorus. In between, Lennon shares various injustices women face in society: “We make her bear and raise our children / And then we leave her flat for being a fat old mother hen.” Finally, a coda repeats the phrase, “We make her paint her face and dance,” as the music fades out.

The importance of the song’s feminist message for Lennon and Ono was evident in their decision to issue it as the album’s only single in April 1972. But controversy erupted immediately. Indeed, even before the single had reached the Billboard charts, Lennon and Ono ran a full-page advertisement in Billboard to explain their message, drawing on a quote from US Congressman Ron Dellums. As a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus (which had been established the previous year), Dellums presumably had the right credentials to excuse Lennon and Ono’s reinterpretation of a racial slur. In the advertisement, Dellums is quoted as saying:

If you define niggers as someone whose life style is defined by others, whose opportunities are defined by others, whose role in society is defined by others, then good news!—you don’t have to be black to be a nigger in this society. Most of the people in America are niggers.

Lennon was obviously pleased with this quote. During his appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, he described it as “fantastic” and read it out in full, drawing applause from the audience. “I think he put it very succinctly,” Lennon said.

The following month, a second advertisement was run in African American interest magazine, Jet. This time, Dellums was quoted as saying, “I agree with John and Yoko. Women are the niggers of the world.” While the first advertisement had taken some liberties with Dellums’ phrasing, this second quotation was a downright fabrication. This prompted Dellums to complain to the magazine’s editor. “I have never made any such statement,” he writes. “I appear to have been the victim of some over zealous promoting company’s efforts to capture a portion of the Black music market.” Dellums objected to his words being twisted, reiterating that his original statement had referred not only to the status of women, but to other marginalised groups too. And he stressed that his words were only a reflection of modern American society, rather than the broader “world” that Lennon and Ono’s song referred to. Dellums writes:

To the issue of women as niggers in this society, I have stated many times and will state again here: In a white male-dominated society that sees the role of women as bed-partners, broom pushers, bottle washers, typists and cooks, women are niggers in THIS society.

Following the marketing gaffe, Jet ran an interview with Lennon in which he emphasised his reverence for “Black music.” The article even ended with Lennon declaring, “Black music is my life.” In the last interview he ever gave, in December 1980, Lennon revisited the incident, claiming African American magazines “Ebony and Jet both say they [were] not offended” by his song with its reappropriation of the racial slur.

Nonetheless, amidst all the controversy and confusion, the single flopped. When it eventually entered the Billboard charts, it did so at number 76. It peaked three weeks later at 57—making it the worst performing single of Lennon’s lifetime. On the Cash Box Top 100 (an alternative to the Billboard charts) it appeared for a single week at number 93.

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This poor performance was partly due to some retailers refusing to stock the single. As one wholesaler put it, “I didn’t want to take a chance on getting involved. You’re dealing with both the black issue and women’s liberation, and using a derogatory title.” Another claimed that the single was “selling very well to both blacks and whites,” but added that many distributors seemed “afraid of it.”

If retailers were afraid of the song, then disc jockeys were terrified. Billboard claimed that only two Top 40 stations in the whole of the United States were playing it. Broadcasting Magazine was slightly more generous, identifying five stations that had added it to their playlists (although one later withdrew). Even those that played the song noted the risk of causing offence. “One girl protested that John Lennon was commercializing on the word ‘nigger,’ although she was for Women’s Lib,” said a radio director from Chicago. Another in Philadelphia said, “It’s really not so hard to imagine the song on the air. The difficult thing is trying to imagine the radio announcers saying the title.”

In addition to the retailers and radio directors, critics were also divided on the song. Record World remarked that it was, “Strong stuff, musically and lyrically.” Cash Box declared it to be the “[m]ost powerful epic to come out of the women’s movement so far.” They also praised Some Time in New York City as “one of the best and most accurate pieces of news reporting ever.” But other critics were less kind. In the United Kingdom, one headline asked, “Have John and Yoko finally gone too far?” The accompanying article decries the pair as “nobly-intentioned but perspectiveless.” Most damning, however, was Rolling Stone’s album review, which lambasts the lyrics as “witless doggerel” and “little more than sloppy nursery rhymes that patronize the issues and individuals they seek to exalt.” The reviewer singles out “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” for particular scorn: “There is no narrative development or explication of an idea; the song is simply a list of injustices clumsily set so that herds of syllables packed into each line make the whole thing unintelligible.”

In response, Lennon claimed that his critics mostly came from the same background. “Usually they were white and male,” he said during the Dick Cavett interview. On the subject of that difficult word, Lennon added, “All my black friends feel I have quite a right to say it.” (Such justifications had not yet become a cliché, it seems.) Likewise, in his final interview in December 1980, he reiterated that “the hullabaloo was from the white community, you know, not from the black community.”

In that same interview, Ono seemed to concur with Lennon. “They [‘the black community’] don’t think that they’re niggers, and that’s why they didn’t care. But the whites basically thought, ‘Well, niggers. Well that’s their word.’”

Ono’s point seems to hint at the crux of the controversy—who ‘owns’ a word that has historically been used to subjugate a group of people? Does it ‘belong’ to the targeted group? Or can anyone propose what happens with it next—whether it should be reinterpreted or consigned to the dustbin of history?

Lennon and Ono’s position seems to have been that the word did not belong to anyone and that its meaning was fluid. Thus, they felt, they had a perfect right to reclaim and reshape it for their own artistic and political purposes.

Rewriting History

In his May 1972 interview on The Dick Cavett Show, John Lennon made clear that he felt the word meant something different than it had historically. “I think the word ‘nigger’ has changed,” he said. “It does not have the same meaning as it used to.” But Lennon’s assertion doesn’t fully add up. If the word’s meaning had really changed, why would he have needed to go on TV to explain himself?

Rather, it seems that Lennon was part of an effort to redefine the word, knowing that it still had a provocative edge. And the backlash to the song might have had something to do with the presumptuousness of him leading that action—a white artist reinventing a slur on behalf of a race to which he does not belong; a male artist standing up for women, but doing so by reducing them to “the slave of the slave.”

It’s entirely possible that if Lennon were alive today, he would feel differently about basing a feminist song around that disempowering word. After all, other artists have come to regret their attempts to redefine that epithet. In 2019, Patti Smith dropped her song “Rock N Roll Nigger” from all live performances. A few years later, the track was quietly removed from streaming services. Similarly to Lennon’s, her song was partly an attempt at “reinventing” the word. But evidently, as the 2020s approached, something changed in her attitude towards that endeavour.

Of course, it’s equally possible that if Lennon were alive now, he would have stood by his song, despite the sensitivity of modern ears. After all, its potential offensiveness is part of the point. The song is meant to be confrontational—to force the listener to consider that title statement head-on. One of the recurring lines in the song is “think about it.”

We will never know what the Lennon of 2025 would have wanted. But in his absence, the artistic statement he made in 1972 should stand as it originally was—no matter how flawed it may sound to listeners today. (It could be argued that Yoko Ono, as co-writer of the song, may have decided against its inclusion on the new boxset, but this seems unlikely. At 92, Ono passed on management duties for the Lennon estate years ago and has withdrawn from public life.)

Removing the track not only alters Lennon and Ono’s original artistic statement—it also detracts from the new material being presented on the boxset. Among the wealth of content being released for the first time, are over thirty tracks of Lennon’s personal home recordings. These include his covers of songs by Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley, as well as four songs recorded with legendary New York folk singer Phil Ochs. With all the fan talk focused on the controversy surrounding the missing track, the release of these priceless recordings has been lost in the noise.

For those outside the Beatles fan bubble, all this fuss may seem like an overreaction. After all, the track is still available for those who want to hear it. It remains on streaming services and is available on CD and digital download. But the way it has been quietly omitted from this new boxset—completely unmentioned, as if it had never even existed—sets a worrying precedent for the future management of Lennon’s estate and the estates of other outspoken or controversial artists.

In the literary world, we have already seen a recent spate of curators sanitising the art they are supposed to protect. Works by Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, and Enid Blyton have all been rewritten or edited in recent years, in the name of minimising offence for modern readers. Each time an act of censorship like this takes place, it further normalises cultural vandalism.

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For the family members involved in managing artists’ estates, their decisions are inevitably entangled with the influence of powerful companies that hold significant control over what is released. In the case of the Lennon estate, that company is Universal Music Group. And many fans have pointed the finger of blame in the direction of that multinational corporation. “I bet it was UMG who blocked ‘the track’ from any new releases,” one user speculated on Twitter. “I know that the song being missing is not how the Lennons and the Lennon camp would have ideally presented this album,” one popular YouTube creator claimed. (No official statement has been released apportioning the decision to any one party.)

Corporations often see the artists whose works they publish less as individuals than brands. And every brand needs to be refreshed to keep up with modern sensibilities and tastes. These rebrandings, however, are a dishonest representation of the artists in question and an insult to the intelligence of their audiences. Most of those who listen to Lennon’s music or read Dahl’s books are smart enough to understand that artists can be more than one thing in their lifetimes—capable of both great insight and regrettable bigotry. They understand too that art comes from myriad times and contexts, in which language and perspectives may be different to those of the present day.

These acts of censorship and bowdlerisation create a sanitised version of artistic history—ironing out any parts that may seem ugly today. In Lennon’s case, this is particularly ironic, given that his song was always ugly. We can see that in many of the contemporary reactions. And that ugliness was central to the message. It was meant to create discomfort, to challenge people. If the song still sounds ugly today, maybe it’s because some issues within it remain unresolved, and we’d rather not think about them.

Of course, it may be equally valid to suggest that Lennon and Ono’s song was always ill-judged, patronising, and totally inappropriate. But we need to hear it (and to hear it in its context) to have that debate. Otherwise, we may find ourselves living in a fantasy world in which no artist in human history ever said anything offensive. Such a world might seem more comfortable. But it would also be a world in which no artist ever took a risk or pushed the boundaries; in which no artist ever stuck their neck out in an attempt to do the right thing; in which no artist ever stood up for the disenfranchised—no matter how clumsily.