If Lennon thought “no possessions” were such a good thing, why didn’t he give away his own possessions? I read that he and Yoko actually had two apartments at the Dakota, one to live in and one to hold all their stuff. In an interview once, Paul McCartney said that when he and John sat down to write songs, John would say, “Let’s write a swimming pool,” or whatever he wanted to buy at that time. Nothing wrong with that, but then he shouldn’t have turned around and lectured others that they shouldn’t want possessions.
LOL! But isn’t that “their” MO? Eschew possessions while hoarding the crap out of stuff for them? “You sacrifice. We’re too busy saving the world. For us. Not you.” ;-)
That's just another manifestation of the ages old meme of 'I've climbed the ladder of success, now I want to pull that ladder up so no one can follow me'. See all the time in entertainers and politicians.
If Lennon thought “no possessions” were such a good thing, why didn’t he give away his own possessions?
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Probably because Imagine is just a song and most people, including the author only care what it sounds like. The words are little more than sounds that go along in harmony with the sounds of the instruments. I recently read that when “Imagine” was music only, Lennon was excited because he thought he’d written a melody equal to McCartney’s “Yesterday,” which was called “scrambled eggs” before McCartney came up with the actual lyrics.
I’m a huge fan of much of John Lennon’s music and have read just about everything that’s been written about him. Mostly what I’ve learned is that he was nothing if not a hypocrite. He preached peace and love, but beat women and treated Cynthia, Julian and many others like crap. When his friend Pete Shotton asked him how he could live in the Dakota yet write a song with the lyric “imagine no possessions” John replied, “Jesus, Pete, it’s just a fookin’ song!”