John Lennon on Beatle music.
‘I suppose I’m so indifferent about our music because other people take it so seriously. It can be pleasing in a way, but most of it gets my back up.
‘It’s nice when people like it, but when they start “appreciating” it, getting great deep things out of it, making a thing of it, then it’s a lot of sh*t. It proves what we’ve always thought about most sorts of so-called art. It’s all a lot of sh*t. We hated all the sh*t they wrote and talked about Beethoven and ballet, all kidding themselves it was important. Now it’s happening to us. None of it is important
It just takes a few people to get going, and they con themselves into thinking it’s important. It all becomes a big con.‘We’re a con as well. We know we’re conning them, because we know people want to be conned. They’ve given us the freedom to con them. Let’s stick that in there, we say, that’ll start them puzzling. I’m sure all artists do, when they realize it’s a con. I bet Picasso sticks things in. I bet he’s been laughing his balls off for the last 80 years.
‘It’s sad, though. When we’re not laughing, we’re conning ourselves into thinking we are important. People won’t take anything as a laugh. If we said when we wrote “She’s Leaving Home” we were actually thinking about bananas, nobody would believe you. They don’t want to believe you.
‘It is depressing to realize
we were right in what we always thought, all these years ago. Beethoven is a con, just like we are now. He was just knocking out a bit of work, that was all.‘The thing is, do Beethoven and these sort of people realize they’re a con? Or do they really think they’re important? Does the prime minister realize he’s just a bloke? I don’t know. Perhaps he’s taken in by all this pretending to know what he’s doing. The drag is he sounds as if he really thinks he knows what’s going on, when he doesn’t.
‘People think the Beatles know what’s going on. We don’t. We’re just doing it. People want to know what the inner meaning of “Mr Kite” was. There wasn’t any. I just did it. I shoved a lot of words together, then shoved some noise on. I didn’t dig that song when I wrote it. I didn’t believe in it when we were recording it. But nobody will believe it. They don’t want to. They want it to be important.’
