Imagine raises the question how much further John can progress with the vocabulary of concepts and feelings laid down on John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band.

POB's importance lay not in the fact that it is the culmination of certain tensions which can be seen in John's work since the beginning (the lyrical directness and vocal intensity, for example), but that it was also their solution. As an early adolescent, John chose rock as both his artistic and therapeutic medium. Rock and roll's way of solving problems is simply stating and restating them ("I Can't Get No Satisfaction" is the classic example) and through the resulting emotional and physical exhaustion, the pressure is temporarily alleviated. However, the intervention of the primal therapy experience forced John to redefine his approach in a subtle but decisive way. Where he had sung "Twist and Shout" with the urgency of someone who had to get something off his chest, he sang the songs on POB as a final recreation of his original traumas, and as a document of their cure. POB is a profoundly "ultimate" album, because it unbends the mainspring of at least one man's rock and roll career….

The problem of following an album as perfect as POB is of course more than a stylistic one. POB took an individual course. Where the trend of rock over the past few years had been one of increasing complexity and sophistication (certainly John, with songs like "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "I Am the Walrus" is as responsible for this as anyone). POB represented a return to rock's most visceral, and still implicit origins. Of course, it was not done naively, but with a full regala of theoretical justifications. But it is a style which, because it is so bound up with a particular experience at a moment in time, is obsolete once it is expressed.

On the evidence of Imagine, I don't think John has resolved the manner in which a masterpiece and an artistic dead-end like POB can successfully be followed. In its technical sloppiness and self-absorption, Imagine is John's Self-Portrait. Most of it centers around issues which have already been dealt with on POB, only here handled less passionately and, strangely, less fastidiously as well….

"Imagine," for instance, is simply the consolidation of primal awareness into a world movement. It asks that we imagine a world without religions or nations, and that such a world would mean brotherhood and peace. The singing is methodical but not really skilled, the melody undistinguished, except for the bridge, which sounds nice to me.

I first heard "Crippled Inside" on my car radio. I didn't know right off who it was …, but was convinced that only someone very famous, in this age of banal competence, would dare put out something so haphazard. The song's refrain and theme is "One thing you can't hide / Is when you're crippled inside," and is another pitch for John's personal outlook. It sports an Ed Sanders-type vocal.

It is not clear whether "It's So Hard" came before or after John's primal therapy experience. "It's so hard, it's really hard / Sometimes I feel like going down." John sings, and the words can have the most general meaning, or, applied to John's own past, the most specific….

In sheer viciousness, nothing on the album surpasses "How Do You Sleep." It begins with the orchestra tuning up, a la Sgt. Pepper, and proceeds to lay waste to Paul's character, family and career. John is still a wicked punster, and lines like "The only thing you done was yesterday" hit their mark. But beyond the cruelty of it, it is offensive because it is unjust. Paul's music may be muzak to John's ears, but songs like "Oh Yoko" or "Crippled Inside" are no more consequential than anything on McCartney or Ram. And while a song like "It's So Hard" is more "serious" than much of what's on those two albums, it is certainly no better.

The motives for "Sleep" are baffling. Partly it is the traditional bohemian contempt for the bourgeois; partly it is the souring of John's long-standing competitive relationship with Paul. When they were both Beatles their rivalry was channeled towards the betterment of the Beatles as a totality. Apart, it is only destructive.

Most insidiously, I fear that John sees himself in the role of truth-teller, and, as such, can justify any kind of self-indulgent brutality in the name of truth. In "Gimme Some Truth," John complains, "I've had enough of watching scenes / Of schizophrenic-egocentric-paranoic-prima donnas"; who is he speaking about now? Personally, I'm interested in John the man, his personal trials and dramas, because he has revealed them to us as John the extraordinary artist. If he does not continue as such, his posturings will soon seem not merely dull but irrelevant. It seems to me that John is facing the most extraordinary challenge of his career, both personally and artistically. But then, great artists, of whom John is one, are nothing if not resourceful. (p. 48)