Anglo For Your Ear: John Lennon’s “How Do You Sleep?”

In Tracey Ullman‘s video for “They Don’t Know,” which we posted yesterday, Sir Paul McCartney makes a surprise appearance at the end, looking just as jolly and likable as we’d expect. Today, we post one of the most excoriating songs ever written about a person, John Lennon‘s “How Do You Sleep?” from his 1971 Imagine album. Is it about Paul? Is it, as John repeatedly claimed, a self-loathing rant? To put it lightly, John had a throbbing hate-on for Paul at the time, which is understandable given the circumstances of The Beatles‘s bitter split a year earlier. Sample lyric: “A pretty face may last a year or two/But pretty soon they’ll see what you can do/The sound you make is Muzak to my ears/You must have learned something in all those years.”