- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- Following John Lennon’s senseless killing, Double Fantasy became a worldwide hit album and won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono – Double Fantasy (1980): John Lennon was the de facto bandleader of the Beatles and famously retreated somewhat from the band after meeting the love of his life, avant garde artist and musician Yoko Ono in November 1966; they married in 1969. Looking back on it, the unending vitriol that was directed by Beatles fans toward Yoko Ono as being the reason for the breakup of the band was likely due in no small part to their being a biracial couple (she is Japanese American). John Lennon and Yoko Ono held many high-profile peace activism events in the early 1970’s, and they were also active recording artists in this time period. By 1975, John Lennon had left the music business in order to raise the couple’s son, Sean Ono Lennon; he was often somewhat derisively called a “house-husband” in this time period.
The retrospective album Shaved Fish (1975) was the last album released by John Lennon or Yoko Ono for more than five years. As the 1970’s drew to a close, John Lennon was beginning to write some new songs and noticed that much of the new wave music sounded a lot like Yoko Ono’s earlier work, particularly “Rock Lobster” by the B-52’s. This realization fired his inspiration to get a new album out. The couple produced dozens of songs, enough to fill up Double Fantasy, as well as a second planned album, Milk and Honey that was ultimately released in 1984. Initially, Double Fantasy was not well received, either by the critics or the public. On December 8, 1980, just three weeks after the release of Double Fantasy, John Lennon was assassinated in the archway of the landmark apartment building where the couple lived, the Dakota along Central Park West in the Upper West Side of Manhattan (this date was about 100 years after its construction as it happens). The murderer is a professed Beatles fan and a professed born-again Christian who didn’t approve of this album and some of John Lennon’s earlier songs, such as “Imagine” and “God”. Following this senseless killing, Double Fantasy became a worldwide hit album and won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. The three singles from Double Fantasy were all hits: “(Just Like) Starting Over” (a #1 single in the U.S. and the U.K.), “Woman”, and “Watching the Wheels”. The songs on Double Fantasy mostly alternate between John Lennon songs and Yoko Ono songs. For myself, I was never hostile toward Yoko Ono or her music that I can recall, although some of her more out-there recordings I didn’t and don’t really get.