Imagine

Half great half meh. John Lennon is my favorite beatles member but its not his best album. Slightly overrated.

Maybe it was the Roxy Music version of “Jealous Guy” that nested in my early consciousness, but returning to that melody today was rhapsodic vertigo. This marriage of rawness in subject and delivery with swoon-worthy tune anticipates swathes of the indie behemoth. He was unashamed of his edges, his cruelties, hypocrisies, failures and petulance; he knew how to offer it up to see.

Softer than his preceding magnum opus, but the material comes from the same place. Yes, the title track may stick in your craw but it's only 3 mins ffs and you probably liked it the first time you heard it. So much to enjoy: Nicky Hopkins's jangle piano on "Crippled Inside" and his masterful accompaniment of "Jealous Guy", Lennon and Harrison letting loose, playing hard and bitter in response to McCartney angst, the joyous blast that is "Oh Yoko!", hell even our favorite matricidal maniac makes a guest appearance. Doesn't quite match JLATPOB, but very little does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAVImvzFhXI

Yeah, I know this one! Imagine→10/10 Crippled Inside→10/10 Jealous Guy →10/10 It's So Hard→6.5/10 I Don't Want to Be A Soldier→7/10 Gimme Some Truth→9/10 Oh My Love→9.5/10 How Do You Sleep?→10/10 How?→9/10 Oh Yoko!→9/10 best→ Imagine worst→ It's So Hard overrated→ How? underrated→ Crippled Inside overall→81/100 MUST HEAR This clearly dragged a bit in the middle cause it's weird and long, so it’s not as perfect as the critics say, but it’s still an outstanding album. “How Do You Sleep?” grew on me and Also “Oh Yoko!” is genuinely underrated.

i always sorta dismissed this one but on a revisit it's actually got a lot of good stuff. forgot about the straight up paul diss track. and the sweet yoko song :)

very good eclectic album with one of the most important songs on it

TAK JOHN LENNON IMAGINE!!!!!!!

Не все песни хорошо.Сначала тяжело слушать,но потом втягиваешься

The Beatles are my favorite band of all time by far. With that said, this one starts off with one of the most iconic songs of all time, followed by the equally excellent Jealous Guy, however the rest of the album is pretty hit or miss. Musically, there's plenty to appreciate, but Lennon's solo songwriting can be a little too simple and his lyrics a little too literal for my taste. A few songs are enjoyable enough, but most aren't anything I'd go out of my way to listen to again. It's not a bad album by any means, just not a particularly great one.

Boring

The presence of "How do You Sleep" on this invariably causes me to make comparisons to Paul, but I kind of did so on my review of "Band on the Run" I think. My experience listening to this as a fan of the Beatles is one of bittersweet melancholy. I don't want these guys to fight. I don't want the innocent weirdness of the Beatles to give way to the realities of the world. At least, the childish part of me doesn't want this. Because at the same time, I understand it. I understand why John had to take these next steps. But..... All in all I'd still rather be listening to the Beatles. Or even Paul's solo stuff, "square" as it is.

Title track is an amazing song for sure but the rest doesn't live up to it, Jealous guy is good too

There's something that really makes this album an evergreen in my eyes, you can hear it's from a previous Beatle, and I love it despite its flaws.

John Lennon shouldn't have been let near anything resembling blues. I listened to this twice to make sure I wasn't being contrarian but I think this is all sort of...bad. The song 'Imagine' can just do one, always hated that patronising dirge. Not sure what's going on with the horns on 'It's so hard', and the production on 'I don't wanna be a solider mama' is really odd, it's like it was mixed from the bottom of a well. And the whistling on 'Jealous Guy' is really irritating. Picks up a bit in the second half (How do you sleep) but then hits you with 'Oh Yoko', which makes the rest of the album seem lyrically interesting. 2 stars feels very generous, but, it is objectively better than Trafalgar by the Bee Gees.

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. I always liked Oh Yoko because of the movie Rushmore. But John whining on about giving away all possessions when he was rich is a little over the top for me. 7.5/10 Top song... Oh Yoko

Gimme Some Truth is a banger. 4. Repeat Listen: 10/16/2026

Wat een heerlijke eikel moet dat toch geweest zijn. Imagine all the people living in harmony zingen in t begin, en dan de disstrack how do you sleep. Faut le faire

iconic

Wowza. Only knew Imagine but the whole album is great!

It hard to imagine this being any different...

It’s solo John, which is a mixed bag. I think his solo career is the most disjointed of the Beatles. There are some of the greatest songs ever written paired with some of the worst. This album is thankfully more on the great side with only a couple of stinkers. Looking at you Crippled Inside, I Don’t Wanna Be A Solider Mama, and Gimme Some Truth.

The whiplash from “Oh My Love” to “How Do You Sleep?” Is insane.

Not quite sure I see the magic.

Imagine is great... the rest....

I've always liked the bluesy quality of solo Lennon.

Honestly way more mid than expected. Lennon is good but most of these songs are hella forgettable besides the heading Imagine

Quite good.

A bit bitty

Sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe sh1t

mid

Osea es la canción Imagine y un par más. Tiene un temón y el resto está ahí por estar. One hit wonder album, pero es un temon ese. 7.5/10

What the fuck happend after the first song?

Lennon at his best. Complicated Lennon. Finding his path. With a wild cast of beautiful musicians. Kind of an asshole (how do you sleep?) Kind of meh (oh yoko)?

Highlights: Imagine How Do You Sleep?

Lovely

TL;DR: You can turn it off after side 1 and you won't miss much. BEFORE: I know Imagine and Jealous Guy. Imagine is tainted by that awful celebrity lockdown video. Jealous Guy is maybe Lennon's best song as a solo artist. AFTER: The highs are high but there just aren't enough of them, although the album is very well-produced and played. HIGHLIGHTS: Imagine and Jealous Guy are deserved classics. The real surprise here was the psychedelic I Don't Wanna Be A Soldier, with its mantra-like repetition and reverb- and echo-heavy production. Oh Yoko is surprisingly sweet given that Lennon was such a POS husband and father and Gimme Some Truth packs a good amount of venom. LOWLIGHTS: How Do You Sleep pairs petulant lyrics with mediocre music, with George Harrison's fantastic slide guitar not enough to save it. It's So Hard is an underwhelming blues boogie. The other tracks are just kind of there. VERDICT: 3 stars. I think it's here because of the big singles, but as an album it is inessential. Might have been a light 4 without How Do You Sleep.

More less.

Best Track - "Imagine"

Good album, I like it.

Ну а як же ж? Ось і він) Знову)

I love the Beatles but the solo albums by the boys are sadly uninspiring. Imagine is a great song and Jealous Guy is ok too but the rest is terrible. Apart from George Harrisons 'All Things Must Pass' I don't think any of them do it for me.

Imagine is one of the best songs ever written, but if it wasn't for that song, I'm struggling to find reasons for this album to be on the list. Jealous Guy and How Do You Sleep? are solid tracks, but there's little beyond that. Crippled Inside is a decent music hall / rockabilly jaunt and Oh Yoko! treads a fine line between annoyingly catchy and just straight up annoying. The rest of it is forgettable bluesy tunes and just plain forgettable ones. The sentiment isn't forgettable though. I might not be keen on the musicality of I Don't Wanna Be A Soldier Mama or Gimme Some Truth, but the lyrical message is clear and hasn't been listened to by too many people. John Lennon must be spinning in his grave. Imagine pushes the album from a high 3 to a low 4 stars.

"When the night..." got me. Listen again.

It’s fine. Some decent songs. “Imagine” tries a little too hard. Feels like it was deep into the John-being-up-his-own-ass era.

Olipas todella hyvää musiikkia kerrankin

Was nice to listen to.

Paul won the breakup.

"How Do You Sleep" makes me deeply uncomfortable, but I have to admit it fucking rocks. Some really great songs on here. A big step up from the Plastic Ono Band record.

I absolutely can't dispute the fact that this album belongs on this list; it's Solo Lennon in its purest form. We've got the protest and political sides, the hapless romantic and sentimentalist, the acerbic and aggressive wit, the heavy focus on abstract and evocative lyrics, pretty much all the elements that make up our image of John Lennon as a musician. It's just not the Beatles unfortunately. Right now we seem to be in the backlash period against Lennon, a resonse to the fawning adulation he previously enjoyed, and I swear if I see another 'beat wife' joke, I'll go mental. I'm just looking forward to the backlash to the backlash, maybe in another 30 years, because there's no doubt that Lennon and this album as a whole will last that long. 29/09/26

First two tracks havent gripped me yet. Imagine is a classic but I felt luewarm hearing it today Jealous guy..controversially, ive always preferred the roxy music version Its so hard was surprisignly boring. Did nothing for me. Generally, im just not enjoying it. Gimme some truth really saves this album for me. Already familiar and like it a lot. Love the message as well as the melody and earnest vocals. Best song on there. Oh my love was a gentle contrast to the previous song. Sad and melancholy. Didn't mind it. There's an nice guitar riff on "How do you sleep?" but generally it was just an ok song. How? Was an emotional song, dipped with nihilism and desperation. On the better side, but mostly so-so Oh yoko - I love imagining how much this song will trigger the Yoko haters. The song is bright; a more positive one from the album. Almost sweet, but I can also see how it might be puke-inducing. Mostly, I'm just relieved it is over. There are mostly so-so songs in this; songs I'd skip over gladly. However, there were also standout tracks. It's just not an album I'd willingly listen to all the way through again. Also, I prefer Lennon's more snarky, cynical songs (like Gimme some truth, or everything he showed in Rubber Soul).

John Lennon once described the accessibility of Imagine as a kind of sugar coating: difficult ideas could reach people if they were presented attractively enough. That seems to me one of the most useful ways into the whole album, because Lennon was unusually alert to the problem of delivery. What form will get this idea through the door? What degree of simplicity makes something portable? When does directness clarify and when does it merely make conviction sound like truth? The title track has suffered from two readings which both seem to miss what it is actually doing. One turns it into a generic peace anthem, shorn of most of what makes its proposition remotely challenging. The other treats it as autobiography and reaches immediately for the obvious gotcha: wealthy man living very comfortably asks everybody else to imagine no possessions. But Lennon is not describing his own life, still less presenting himself as the finished citizen of the world he imagines. “Imagine” belongs much more naturally alongside Lennon and Yoko Ono’s WAR IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT campaign and Ono’s instruction pieces. It is advertising for a thought experiment. Remove heaven and hell. Remove countries. Remove religious division. Remove possessions. Now look again at humanity and ask what has happened to some of the structures around which we organise conflict. You don’t have to believe this world is practicable, desirable or even internally coherent. The verb is the point. Imagine it. Perform the operation mentally and see what happens. The simplicity of the music makes perfect sense in that context. Lennon takes a potentially radical proposition, removes nearly all the theoretical machinery, puts it over a piano figure nobody is likely to forget and sends it into mass culture. Millions of people who would never knowingly volunteer for a piece of conceptual art end up performing one in their own heads. There is some irony in Lennon arriving here after having mocked the quasi-hymnal quality of McCartney’s “Let It Be” as “Hark the Angels Come”. He could distrust that sort of musical directness when McCartney used it for consolation, but he plainly understood its power when he wanted to smuggle an idea into popular consciousness. McCartney uses the hymn form to console. Lennon uses it to infiltrate. That relationship between form and delivery runs through Imagine. Again and again Lennon seems less interested in demonstrating mastery of a musical idiom than in discovering what the idiom can carry. “It’s So Hard” is nominally a blues, but I hear it almost as a little radio play taking place inside Lennon’s head. The verses leave his voice relatively naked, an unusual choice for somebody who so often disliked hearing himself untreated. This is the nagging internal Lennon, the driver constantly insisting that you’ve got to do this and you’ve got to do that. Then the chorus expands him with that Elvis-like slapback and the private irritation becomes public declaration: it’s so hard. When he gets to the counterargument, the moment where life is good because he is holding Yoko, the language becomes less certain. The vocal is almost loosely doubled, as though two versions of Lennon have stopped quite coinciding. Then King Curtis’s saxophone says rather more than the words manage. The blues is not the destination. It is the apparatus. “I Don’t Want to Be a Soldier Mama” takes that instinct much further. It is one of the records on Imagine that made immediate sense to me long before I had any critical language with which to explain why. I bought the album as a teenager, from a run that still contained the photograph of Lennon holding the pig by the ears, needling McCartney by parodying the cover of Ram. I knew none of the clever ways of talking about the album that I know now. When I reached “I Don’t Want to Be a Soldier Mama”, all I could really think was: yes. Obviously. What is supposed to be revolutionary about this? It makes complete sense. I simply fell into its logic. The song is swampy, repetitive, hypnotic and almost wilfully reluctant to travel harmonically. There is something of “Baby You’re a Rich Man” in the construction: groove carrying a great deal of the structural weight while the harmony barely moves, the song becoming somewhere you inhabit rather than a route towards a destination. The lyric is ridiculously simple, but the simplicity is doing the thinking. Soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, doctor, lawyer: things a child is told he might one day become. Lennon answers from somewhere before that process of socialisation has quite taken hold. I don’t wanna. And, crucially, he also doesn’t want to be a failure. That word changes the song. He is not simply rejecting a menu of jobs and identities. He is refusing the bargain by which adulthood says you should choose one of the available roles, strive successfully within it, and accept “failure” as the verdict if you do not make a sufficiently good job of becoming whatever you were supposed to become. This feels entirely continuous with the teenage Lennon and his contempt for “Brummer Striving”, the world of proper jobs and respectable expectation. Before greater ambition transformed the Beatles into something considerably larger, being in a band was also a remarkably effective way of postponing a proper job. Lennon got out, spectacularly, but never seems to have lost the suspicion that the adult world might be selling you a very poor deal. I am increasingly interested in Lennon’s use of the childlike, not as regression into childishness but as an alternative intellectual position. A child has not yet learned which absurdities everybody has agreed not to notice. The child can still ask why. The child can still say no without supplying a dissertation in respectable adult justification. I had arrived at something similar artistically without having a name for it when I was much younger. In 1988-89 I devised a stage version of Ivor Cutler’s Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, Volume Two in which the actors played both children and adults, except that the Ivor figure remained a child. The children could simply turn and talk to the audience. The adults were trapped behind a fourth wall. I didn’t then have my current tentative word “Britchedelia” for this use of childlike British logic, but the principle was there: childhood as a position from which the supposedly sensible arrangements of adulthood become visible as constructions. Whether that term belongs in a review of Imagine is another matter, but the underlying idea certainly does. Lennon repeatedly reaches for childlike clarity because simplicity can expose something that sophistication has learned to rationalise away. The difficulty is that Lennon also places enormous moral value on directness. This is where the album becomes much more interesting than a collection of effectively delivered propositions. “Gimme Some Truth” had existed in substantial form during the Get Back period, including its attack on Nixon, but by 1971 Lennon’s definition of bullshit has widened. Politicians remain there, but now so do chauvinists, condescending people, egocentric prima donnas and varieties of personal evasion. The demand has spread from politics into relationships. Stop mediating everything. Say what you actually mean. Given what follows on the album, the placement matters. Albums do not assemble themselves accidentally. “Oh My Love” offers one version of directness: tiny, delicate, almost childlike in the clarity of its emotional statement. The two keyboard textures, Harrison’s guitar and Lennon’s voice form a sort of filigree miniature. Nothing pushes forward unnecessarily. Love has altered perception; Lennon says so without building much rhetorical machinery around the statement. Then “How Do You Sleep?” gives us another version of directness entirely. As an act between human beings, it is Lennon at his most petty, ungenerous and vindictive. As record-making, it is absolutely superb. I have no desire to solve that contradiction. The lyric has attracted so much attention that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary piece of music it is. The band is loose, seductive and almost funky. There is very little of the clenched aggression that rock music usually uses to announce anger. George Harrison’s slide guitar curls around Lennon rather than stabbing at him. The rhythm section sits back. The melody nags instead of exploding. The strings are especially good because here they are not sugar coating anything. They climb anxiously underneath the relaxed band, a restless ascending figure constantly destabilising the apparent poise. The groove says composure. The strings reveal the nervous system. Even the harmonic language is very Lennon. One of his recurring habits is to create movement without moving the whole harmonic structure very far. He holds much of the chord in place while one internal voice moves chromatically. In the downward version, the tonic can descend internally through its major seventh towards the flattened seventh. In the other direction, the fifth sharpens towards the sixth. Eventually the apparently stable object has changed function underneath you. You can hear forms of this in “This Boy” and “Yes It Is”, through “Strawberry Fields Forever”, and still in “(Just Like) Starting Over”. It is less useful to say that Lennon likes augmented chords or major sevenths than to recognise the deeper instinct: hold the harmonic frame still and move one constituent voice until the emotional meaning changes. Lennon often does not move the room. He moves one wall. That is almost absurdly appropriate to “How Do You Sleep?”, where the grievance itself seems unable to move on. I am much less interested in dismantling every insult to demonstrate that I understand the Beatles references than in what Lennon is trying to do to the history of Lennon–McCartney. “The only thing you done was Yesterday” and “you must have learned something in all those years” are extraordinary claims about a partnership which was plainly reciprocal. Lennon emotionally rewrites it as two separate careers which happened to occupy the same band, with perhaps even the suggestion that McCartney’s years alongside him constituted some sort of education. This is not reliable history. It may be extremely good evidence of how Lennon needed to see that history in 1971. There is a further possibility which I cannot prove but which makes psychological sense to me. Lennon is trying to establish a separate artistic identity while the economic machinery of Lennon–McCartney continues materially asserting their connection. Songs which were effectively McCartney compositions continue generating money through an entity bearing both names. Every royalty payment becomes another small reminder that the supposedly dead partnership remains alive in accounting. Perhaps that makes the need to repudiate more intense. The myth can be declared dead while the accounting department keeps resurrecting it. The important thing is not whether that explains Lennon. I do not know that it does. The important thing is the tension it exposes between emotional truth and factual truth. “How Do You Sleep?” may tell us something painfully true about Lennon’s anger while telling us something much less trustworthy about Paul McCartney. That matters because Lennon has spent the album treating the removal of mediation as something close to a virtue. But sincerity and accuracy are not the same thing. Saying exactly what you believe does not transform belief into fact. A perfect delivery system can carry distortion just as efficiently as insight. The sequence afterwards is fascinating because Lennon’s certainty collapses almost immediately. “How?” is built largely from rhetorical questions, and after the almost frightening certainty of “How Do You Sleep?” he suddenly sounds lost. This feels like a developed position from John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Lennon had talked about the acid years as a period in which the ego had been heavily dismantled, and primal therapy had encouraged him to go after the pain underneath his defences. Plastic Ono Band performs the excavation with tremendous force. Then you have to live there. “How?” is the less spectacular question that follows the great stripping-away. Fine. You have exposed the wound. You have attacked the old myths. You have said what you believe to be true. Now what? To Lennon’s credit, he resists the temptation to manufacture a complete therapeutic breakthrough. The song does not solve him. Even its moments of apparent wisdom feel more like propositions he is testing than conclusions he has earned. “Oh Yoko!” is, in its way, the resolution, but a wonderfully modest one. It is goofy, repetitive, affectionate and conspicuously free of grandeur. In some ways it is the good-natured, heroin-free counterpart to “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”. Lennon once defended the extreme simplicity of that earlier song by invoking the drowning man: somebody drowning does not compose an elaborate polite request for assistance; he cries out what he needs. “Oh Yoko!” works on the same principle with completely different emotional chemistry. Lennon keeps repeating what he requires because elaborate language would be beside the point. But where “I Want You” makes desire feel narcotic and almost annihilating, “Oh Yoko!” makes attachment buoyant and inhabitable. Lennon does not solve himself. He finds somebody towards whom he can orient himself. Then he wanders away on that deliberately Dylan-ish harmonica, sounding almost like a man walking down a corridor amusing himself and his wife. There is plenty on Imagine I would change. The Flux Fiddlers arrive too early on “Jealous Guy”. Later in the track their suspended harmonies are gorgeous, but the emotional cushion appears before Lennon, Nicky Hopkins and that unusually generous Lennon melody have quite been allowed enough naked space. Roxy Music’s later cover inadvertently makes the problem clearer by reaching immediately for the synth pad: once you hear that sustained harmonic bed as a structural device rather than simply “beautiful strings”, you start wondering whether the song needed it quite so soon. Lennon’s theories of authenticity are also repeatedly disproved by his own art. He could disparage songs which were not sufficiently autobiographical, yet “Jealous Guy” itself takes a melody written years earlier for “Child of Nature” and discovers a completely different emotional truth inside it. “Crippled Inside” uses a jaunty country costume to examine hypocrisy and self-disgust. “It’s So Hard” uses the blues as a theatrical frame. Again and again artifice gets Lennon closer to something real. That is part of why I give Imagine five stars. Five stars do not have to mean that every decision is correct. Rubber Soul provides a useful comparison for me. Somebody can perfectly reasonably call it their favourite Beatles album while acknowledging that claiming it is objectively their best requires a much harder argument. What makes it lovable may include its strange contradictions, questionable decisions and moments where the people making it reveal their limitations. Imagine works like that for me. Its flaws are not pieces of grit surrounding an otherwise perfect object. They are among the things that keep it alive. Lennon understands, probably better than most rock musicians of his generation, that ideas need forms capable of carrying them. Sometimes he gets the delivery exactly right. Sometimes the coating arrives too early. Sometimes childlike simplicity cuts through decades of adult rationalisation. Sometimes a gorgeous musical object carries something petty and unfair with terrifying efficiency. The title track demonstrates enormous confidence that art can take a difficult proposition, make it memorable and get it through the door. The rest of the album leaves me with the much more interesting problem of what happens next. Once you have got something through the door, how certain can you be that what you delivered was true?

Not a big fan of many of the other tracks on the album. Imagine works fine on its own. Don't really need to have listened to the rest of the songs. Just ok. 3.5/10

John Beatle... This is nice. It didn't grab me, though. That's all I have to say. Favs: Imagine, Jealous Guy, Oh My Love

So, obviously the song Imagine towers over everything else on this album. Great song, simple but effective, sure. The rest is kind of charming in showing just how much of a wife guy John Lennon was. I know that was like his whole thing (eventually) but it really all comes down to that. Simple music but not unpleasant.

>"Nothing to kill or die for" >Dies what did John Lennon mean by this

The actual goat omgg

🥞

The title track might be one of the most overrated songs ever made. I just find the super dystopian lyrics of the song super corny in it's naïveté and they make even less sense if you consider John's behaviors, which stood against everything he is saying. So annoying that it became THE song that people associate with world peace and pacifism. It leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth as an opener, but most of the album is much better. Obviously Jealous Guy is great, I love the gentle, mellow instrumentation on that song which makes space for John's soft, full of regret vocals. It's a beautiful moment that has also aged really well. I also really enjoy Oh My Love, How Do You Sleep? And Oh Yoko. Sadly the rest of the album is really inconsistent. The country sound on Crippled Inside does the song no justice at all. On It's So Hard he is singing with this super annoying and tacky vocal impression that sounds terrible. Then the instrumentation on I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier sounds weirdly out of sync with itself, something is very off about it. The other songs are pretty okay, typical Lennon stuff. This is really not on the level of his Plastic Ono Band album, but has enough quality moments to get by.

There is no imperfect moment here. You are missed, John.

Pre Listen: That's unbelievable, I got this album right after reviewing Abbey Road. What a leap that'll be. I used to have a few songs from this album on my playlist, but after having listened to them a couple of times, I found myself growing absolutely sick of them. From memory, this album is John making an ass of himself for 10 songs, while using half of them to throw a temper tantrum over the Beatles' split. Notable Tracks: Imagine - The most popular track of the album, for mixed reasons. The message it carries on a surface level is understandable, acceptable even, but coming from the mouth of John Lennon, it comes across as unbelievably hypocritical. I keep this song on my playlist, because the dopamine I get from skipping it every time is better than anything I got from listening to this album. Gimme Some Truth - Closest thing to a favorite track I have on here. It goes on for too long to the point it gets repetitive, but if it was shorter, I might've actually really enjoyed it. How Do You Sleep? - Embarrassing to listen to. My god John's such a fucking crybaby man. Oh Yoko! - Least favorite track. I really, really don't want to hear about how much John wants to turn Yoko on. He also clearly didn't even really love her all that much, because he cheated on her multiple times throughout their relationship! Post Listen: I don't know why John, and other UK rock musicians around this period, were all so obsessed with attempting to replicate American blues-and-bar style rock. It sucks. They really chose the worst of American music from that time to try and copy, and they don't even do it well. Piss poor sound aside, this album reeks of an insecure narcissist. Every song on here is filled to the brim with "I, Me, Mine" type statements. It's all about John, because John Lennon is the only thing John can imagine in his walnut-sized head. It's regrettable because I do think John was a musical genius, greater than the rest of his contemporaries in his heyday, but all the Heroine, LSD, Cocaine, and Pot completely melted his faculties. All of his work post-Beatles is just so boring, repetitive, lame or gross. The ramblings of a borderline schizophrenic man. Don't do drugs kids. 2/5

Don't have much to say except that I think I don't wanna be a soldier mama had elements of or partially inspired industrial music. Very generic Highlight - Imagine No honorable mentions 3/10 stars

Nothing stands out past the 2 famous tracks (Imagine, Jealous Guy). I find his voice is just too reedy on his own, tried to like him but just can’t do it - and ai can remember where I was when I heard he’d died as well!

Are the Beatles Lennon music? Or is Lennon Beatles music? Because they sound exactly the same. Whereas there is a distinct difference between Paul albums and Beatles albums, this just feels like a Beatles album. In that, there are some songs that are cool but nothing special. Highlight: Imagine

something something “more personal and political” something something “scathing Maccattack” something something [hilarious “imagine” joke]

One half of a genius pairing in the decade before. And even if it’s overplayed, Imagine is a beautiful song in its simplicity. As is Jealous Guy. So top marks for those. The remainder here though are fairly forgettable.

Go back to bed John, this is embarrassing.

This is a poppier affair than its predecessor ‘Plastic Ono Band’. The songs are good not great, and John the petulant asshole makes an appearance on “How Do You Sleep?”, his slap at Paul. 3.5 stars, grudgingly rounding up, as this was his last coherent statement before he spent the rest of the 70s up his own ass.

My favourite Beatle.

A tough one to separate music from musician given the magnitude of the artist and the lyrics, but it is a well crafted album with some decent tunes. No hysteria or hyperbole here! Though Billy Bragg's use of Oh Yoko gives a better result with Waiting for the Great Leap Forward.

favs: imagine jealous guy it’s so hard how do you sleep? rating 2/5

hands down, the worst lennon album, not only to put on this list, but of his solo career. the title track was always uncritical, rich person liberal garbage. no wonder my pre-teen self loved it so much. i’d realize as a young adult how much crap was in that song. there are some moments of good on this album, but give me any of the plastic ono stuff over this. _mind games_ and _walls and bridges_ are far superior to most of the mediocrity of _imagine_. i mean, when haven't we mostly been "living for today," john? that's the problem

Imagine is one of those iconic songs that deserves the love it gets. Jealous Guy is my favorite from the album. The rest is kind of all over the place for me. Without those two songs it’s probably a 2.5 but both of those songs rate solid 5’s. Going middle of the road because the album isn’t a masterpiece even if one of the songs is.

This album is nothing less than nice, but it's massively held up by several brilliant songs in Imagine and Jealous Guy. While the rest are pretty decent, they're not really the kind of thing I'll come back to or spend any time thinking about. Imagine is obviously a classic and kind of timeless. Jealous Guy is such a beautiful song. There's lovely production there, with the piano and strings, and even the whistling really bringing something different to it. Both songs are quite direct and open in their messaging, but it's so effective. 3.5 rounded down.

Not every track on this album is equally memorable, but it does demonstrate an excellent range of Lennon’s songwriting (and personality): from the poignant “Imagine,” to the remorseful “Jealous Guy,” the scathing “How Do You Sleep?,” and the exuberant “Oh Yoko!” Lennon is a complicated man, but backed by a powerhouse band, these traits make for a very dynamic record.

The more I learn about John Lennon the less I respect the man. It gets harder and harder to remove those feelings from these timeless albums. But I can’t deny the feeling evoked here. From the title track to the diss track, it’s a great collection of songs and great piece in music history

Not great, much preferred John as part of the Beatles. Some of you guys are rabid with the reviews on this album though. ‘I don’t like his music so I’m happy he got murdered’ come on mate look yourself in the mirror.

It was okay. I love John but am definitely more of a Paul guy. Love hearing the music but just doesn't compare to Lennon- McCartney stuff.

There's a reason why they all needed each other to be truly great

A canção título é muito boa e famosa mas o álbum é muito mais do que isso. Ele tem músicas variadas e muito bem executadas. Vale muito a audição! CVJ Aria.

Bought this album when it came out, I think 1970 or 71. Forgotten how great it was. Must be 25 years or more since I listened to it

Imagine (the song) really is very boring. A lot of this album is very boring run of the mill music. How Do You Sleep? is probably the first track that grabs me. 1.9/5

This album was really good, it was better than I expected, at first I thought it wasn’t living up to John Lennons other work, but nope, this was fantastic, might be biased because I love the Beatles and Lennon, but their were standouts you’d expect like imagine, but hidden gems too, overall a great album, wish the production was better tho

This is an enjoyable album, but like Wings, I always preferred the Beatles over their solo work. Great record though.

This was pretty good, I liked the sound

eh

Хорошая приятная музыка, на удивление сильно американская, но, как говорится, минусы будут? Хотя сольники Пола мне нравятся больше, там помимо общего качества и стабильного уровня всегда есть какие-то хиты, а здесь кроме Imagine не хватает ярких и запоминающихся песен.

Боже… Джаст шат ап. Лириксы просто рофл и кринж. Чел ты… просто чел. Ты… почему-то в ласте стоит сердечко на песне oh yoko. Дошла до нее, и реально оказался бенгер! Но 4 слишком много для Джона Леннона.

творчество в его прошлой малоизвестной группе мне нравилось больше - 3 (и это несмотря на imagine, остальное скучно)

Some great songs here like Imagine and Jealous Guy. Lennon really explores topics that he is passionate about here. Even with the remastered version I found online, it still sounds muddy in a lot of places. I want this to be a 4 but I don't know that I can justify it in my mind.

Still think George came out of the Beatles swinging the hardest.

imagine i jerked my dong

não é o melhor álbum de alguém que já não é o melhor beatle e, olha só, ainda assim consegue ser excelente tirando uma faixa ou outra. bom demais.

imagine as pessoa tudo vivendo em paz. also veja toda a raiva e ressentimento que tenho pelo ex-colega! muito louco que o john pode ser muito gênio e às vezes ter uma vibe muito como-assim-seu-pai-comprou-ben&jerrys-pra-você-eu-nem-tenho-pai

Fantastic album cover. The remastered 2010 version had quality sound, and captured John Lennon's voice pretty well. Not much to say about the album except its pretty predictable from him. This album is exactly as I imagined. Hahahaha!!!!! It is though. Best song: Imagine. Worst Song: How do you sleep?

Imagine you wrote a song that is still globally recognized 55 years later. Imagine, the song is the stand-out song on this album.

Yeah, he’s a Beatle. John Lennon’s Imagine features premium vocals and glorious production. Lennon’s musical proficiency is at full display on this solo album; shown in excellent tracks, such as “Imagine,” “Jealous Guy,” and “How Do You Sleep” which make this an enjoyable listen. However, this project is not devoid of misses, including “I Don’t Wanna Be A Soldier Mama,” and “Oh Yoko!” I feel that the issues with these songs, that being either poor vocals or uninspired composition, could be remedied with the judgement and advice of the other Beatles.

Sitähänse oli, lennujonnia.

Epäilyttävästihän se John Lennonilta kuulostaa. Mielenkiintoista, että ainakin kaks Beatlesia on soolouraansa alotellu jollain kantrintyngällä. Levyssä ei paljoa vikaa, Imagine ehkä kuultu kerran kaks liikaa, loppulevy aika kädenlämpöstä.

Some of the best of all time on this. And some duds. So just like a Beatles album! The boogie-woogie rock and roll songs are by far the worst part of John Lennon’s oeuvre. But the piano ballads are some of the best!