Bill Maher wants listeners to imagine a world where they are more wary of the celebrities they idolize. His example: one of music’s most beloved icons.
“John Lennon, love him though we do, like you know, there is a lot of mythologizing there,” Maher, 70, said on his podcast, Club Random, in a conversation with John Mellencamp.
During the pair’s discussion of how easy it is to lie, Maher said how the rock icon fibbed to curate his public image.
“He had a song, ‘Working Class Hero.’ He was the richest of the Beatles—not rich—but he had a middle-class upbringing, and the other ones were much poorer: working class," Maher said to Mellencamp, 74, whose own music draws from his working-class upbringing in the Midwest.
For Lennon’s first solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, the former Beatle wrote the song, “Working Class Hero,” which championed society’s lower economic class. Lennon, 40, said in an interview afterwards that the song was inspired by his own blue-collar upbringing.
“I think it’s for the people like me who are working class, who are supposed to be processed into the middle classes, or into the machinery. It’s my experience, and I hope it’s just a warning to people,” Lennon told Rolling Stone following the song’s release.
Lennon’s claim over a working-class childhood sparked controversy because of his more affluent childhood than his bandmates’. While the other three Beatles—Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr—grew up in Liverpool’s post-war row housing, Lennon was instead raised by his Aunt Mimi, who lived a middle-class, suburban life.
Perhaps Lennon’s most famous song, “Imagine,” asked his listeners to “imagine no possessions.” All the while, the wealthy musician lived in his large, New York City apartment adjoining Central Park, where he could see the Macy’s parade pass by his window.
“Elvis Costello had a stinging line about him in his ‘Other Side of Summer’ song,” Maher added. In Costello’s song, the singer poked at the hypocrisy of some of music’s most recognizable tunes.
“Was it a millionaire who said, ‘Imagine no possessions?’ A poor little schoolboy who said, ‘We don’t need no lessons?’” Costello asked in his 1991 song.
Maher, who has interviewed Lennon’s first son, Julian, on his podcast, said the singer’s most famous song was steeped in hypocrisy.
“He’s quoting from ‘Imagine’ because they did have an entire floor of the Dakota, which was filled with just crap they bought,” Maher said. “Which is fine.”
But for Maher, the hypocrisy is distinctly human.
“We’re all hypocrites, and we’re all liars,” he concluded.
Maher’s pushback to Lennon’s immaterial song is not the first of its kind. In 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many of Hollywood’s most famous celebrities got called out for their out-of-touch rendition of Lennon’s song.
The Gal Gadot-led Instagram video featured 25 celebrities, including Jimmy Fallon, Natalie Portman, Mark Ruffalo, and Pedro Pascal, singing along to Lennon’s song. The video, which has over 10 million views, was unilaterally panned for its tone-deaf and cringey response to the pandemic’s isolation.
The New York Times called it “an empty and profoundly awkward gesture” that “is nothing more than perspective-fogged stars singing into a mirror.”
Mellencamp, who Maher called a “straight shooter,” agreed with Maher, if a bit half-heartedly.
“If somebody called me a hypocrite, I’d look at him and go, ‘Yeah, call me anything you like. I don’t give a s--t,” the Jack & Diane singer concluded.
