Let me get straight to the point: John Lennon called god a cunt, and nobody noticed. I'm not saying he said it when he was a kid, or in Yoko's ear so that nobody heard, but on this record that he released in 1970 when he was the biggest music star in the world... and nobody noticed! That's just too far-fetched to be true, leading me to conclude that everyone noticed and that there must be a Truman Show-sized conspiracy to keep me out of the picture. You devious scoundrels! I've got your number now, oh yes!
The album is John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970), released just a few months after the Beatles split up, and the song is "God". It's actually an incredible record - and not just because Lennon calls god a cunt on it - and I do intend to write a bit more about it generally soon. For now, let's focus on the cunt. Just to check I wasn't going mad, I've handed my headphones to all my work colleagues and asked them the simple question: what does John Lennon sing at the start of this song? What are the first four words?
Pause it at 17 seconds and he's quite clearly said "god is a cunt", as all both of my colleagues heard too. Of course, officially the lyric is "god is a concept... by which we measure our pain". But that only becomes clear after he repeats the line, where the "concept" is far clearer. It's deliberately unclear, and we know this because the full first verse goes:
"God is a cunt(concept)
by which we measure our pain
I'll say it again
God is a concept
by which we measure our pain".
Listen to both times he apparently says "concept" - he enunciates it much more carefully the second time, and the backtrack is even introduced by an admission of ambiguity ("I'll say it again"). The first time, his "o" sounds awfully like a round "u", he barely whispers the "ep" part of "concept", and the soft c and t merge together phonetically, resulting in a clear "god is a cunt" with only a little bit of contextual disguising so as to not kick off World War III.
Nice one John, very cleverly done. You're right, he is. That's not the shocking part. The shock is that nobody seemed to notice. Compare and contrast:
Results 1 - 10 of about 17,400,000 for "john lennon" (0.14 seconds)
So yes, the internet does know who John Lennon is...
Results 1 - 6 of 6 for lennon "god is a cunt" (0.27 seconds)
and only 2 of those 6 are referring to the song!
What is going on?
No-one's even posted it to Kiss This Guy!
Now, either there's a massive conspiracy around this whole shebang, or a lot of people have dirty ears, or I've got a dirty mind. I know which one I suspect to be true, and I'm not happy about it - you treacherous, lying bunch of toe-rags.
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PS. This post was going to be titled John Lennon invented the Cookie Monster and called god a cunt, because in track 2 "Hold On" you can clearly hear Lennon go "COOKIE!" in his best gruff blue-puppet voice. Then I found out that the Cookie Monster was a 1967 creation! and not the child-of-the-80s that I believed. Still, as if Lennon's many musical talents weren't enough - and his calling god a cunt too, remember that! - he also does a Cookie Monster impression! Or did, rather. What a sad loss.
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