Video Description:

This is my rendition of John Lennon’s original ‘Working Class Hero’.

I feel Working Class Hero is a critique of how institutions shape people to comply in schools, workplaces, media, government etc. Decades later, the same dynamics are still playing out through tech monopolies, political theatre and manufactured division. It’s relevant because the power structures he pointed to never went away. If anything, this message is even more relevant now.

In the early 1900s, John Rockefeller donated hundreds of millions of dollars into reshaping a new education system. The local, creative, community learning was replaced with school bells, rows of desks, rigid grades and memorisation. A system built for efficiency, not imagination.

Instead of cultivating creativity or independent thought, the system was built to create predictable, compliant workers who could fit into factory style structures.

Frederick T. Gates, Rockefeller’s top advisor said “We shall not try to make these people philosophers or men of learning… We shall try to make them what the situation demands… obedient… and fit to do the tasks needed.”

Today, this factory model still shapes our education system. Absolutely wild.

Production / Guitar - Danny Duke, Chunky Luv Shot by ​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠‪@ThurstonPhotoTV‬

#johnlennon #coversong #activism #musicforthesoul #musicforpeace #truth #workingclasshero

Song Bio for Working Class Hero by John Lennon:

A drearily painted bleak song about the reality of trying to make it in a society filled with people who are constantly putting you down.

Tags:

Rock, In English, England, Protest Song Contemporary Folk, UK, Folk, Folk Rock

Working Class Hero by John Lennon Lyrics:

1. [Verse 1]
2. As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small
3. By giving you no time instead of it all
4. Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
6. [Refrain]
7. A working class hero is something to be
8. A working class hero is something to be
10. [Verse 2]
11. They hurt you at home, and they hit you at school
12. They hate you if you’re clever, and they despise a fool
13. Till you’re so fucking crazy, you can’t follow their rules
15. [Refrain]
16. A working class hero is something to be
17. A working class hero is something to be
19. [Verse 3]
20. When they’ve tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years
21. Then they expect you to pick a career
22. When you can’t really function, you’re so full of fear
24. [Refrain]
25. A working class hero is something to be
26. A working class hero is something to be
28. [Verse 4]
29. Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
30. And you think you’re so clever and classless and free
31. But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see
33. [Refrain]
34. A working class hero is something to be
35. A working class hero is something to be
37. [Verse 5]
38. There’s room at the top they are telling you still
39. But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
40. If you want to be like the folks on the hill
42. [Refrain]
43. A working class hero is something to be
44. A working class hero is something to be
46. [Outro]
47. If you want to be a hero well just follow me
48. If you want to be a hero well just follow me^[1]

About Working Class Hero by John Lennon, Song Facts:

1. This song caused a fair amount of controversy for John Lennon, as his detractors pointed out that he was raised in an upper-middle-class home by his aunt and had no right to call himself a working-class hero. In an interview with Rolling Stone just three days before his death, Lennon explained: “The thing about the ‘Working Class Hero’ song that nobody ever got right was that it was supposed to be sardonic - it had nothing to do with socialism, it had to do with ‘If you want to go through that trip, you’ll get up to where I am, and this is what you’ll be.’ Because I’ve been successful as an artist, and have been happy and unhappy, and I’ve been unknown in Liverpool or Hamburg and been happy and unhappy.”
2. The final take as it appears on the album is actually a composite of two different performances done at two different studios. If you listen carefully (it might require headphones) you can clearly hear the sound of the guitar and vocals change where the edit was made about halfway through the song.
3. The word f–king appears twice in the lyrics. On the printed lyrics that came with the album, the word was obscured. Why did Lennon curse in the song? Yoko Ono explained in a 1998 interview with Uncut: “He told me, 'That’s part of being working class. It won’t be working class if what you say is all very clean and very proper.”
4. The line, “If you want to be like the folks on the hill” is a reference to the Beatles song “The Fool On The Hill.”
5. This features Klaus Voormann on bass and Ringo Starr on drums.
6. Green Day recorded this for the benefit album Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur, and they also performed the song on the 2007 season finale of American Idol. In their version, the last two lines are from the original John Lennon song - John sings them.
7. Lennon told the January 1971 edition of Rolling Stone about this song: “I think its concept is revolutionary, and I hope it’s for workers and not for tarts and fags. I hope it’s what “Give Peace A Chance” was about, but I don’t know. On the other hand, it might just be ignored. I think it’s for the people like me who are working class - whatever, upper or lower - who are supposed to be processed into the middle classes, through the machinery, that’s all. It’s my experience, and I hope it’s just a warning to people. I’m saying it’s a revolutionary song; not the song itself but that it’s a song for the revolution.”
8. This song seemed to resist all Lennon’s efforts to record a satisfactory vocal. Tape op Andy Stephens recalled to Uncut magazine August 2010 that he watched the former Beatle obsess about it day after day, singing “an endless number of takes… well over 100… Probably 120, 130.” Stephens added that Lennon became more frustrated as each take passed. “If the mix in his headphones wasn’t exactly what he wanted, he would take them off and slam them into the wall,” he recalled. “he wouldn’t say, ‘Can I have a bit more guitar?’ He would literally rip the cans off his head and smash them into the wall, then walk out of the studio.”^[2]