John Lennon has found a new audience with the YouTube generation, and his songs, some done over with new edit videos, provoke plenty of comment and debate.
But out of all Lennon's Beatles and solo songs, it is the one above that appears to hit the youth of America and the UK the hardest, if the hundreds of comments beneath the clip on the YouTube page are anything to go by.
And no wonder. Lennon's lyrics are still scathing, and biting :
"They keep you doped with religion, sex and TV, and you think you're so clever and classless and free...but you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see."A working class hero is something to be.
"There's room at the top they are telling you still, but first you must learn how to smile as you kill...if you want to be like the folks on the hill."
The Green Day version of the song, played live to tens of millions of young Americans on an American Idol finale broadcast is almost as good as Lennon's original. Almost.
There are SuperGroups. And then there is THE SuperGroup, Dirty Mac, 1968 - John Lennon, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and Mitch Mitchell (drums) from the Jimi Hendrix Experience. They should have been called 'The Functional Junkies'.
The song is Lennon's Yer Blues, and the vid is from the Rock N' Roll Circus. One of the most spectacular, weird, awesome, psychedelic, and rocking musical variety shows ever made.
Rock 'n Roll Heaven, personified.
