On January 4, 2022, fans of John Lennon woke up to the news that a special commemorative edition of the 50th anniversary of the album ‘Some Time in New York City’maybe the most controversial album recorded by the exbeatle after the dissolution of the group. The announcement came through a website created specifically with the official endorsement of Lennon’s heirs: “Sometime in New York City. The Ultimate Mixes (2022)”. That was all the website said. Enough for the expectation to skyrocket in the Lennon and Beatleman forums.
It wasn’t a big surprise either. Released on June 12, 1972, ‘Some Time in New York City’ is the third album in John Lennon’s solo career. The two previous ones, ‘Plastic Ono Band’ (1970) and ‘Imagine’ (1971), had already been reissued in special editions, with remixes, unpublished songs and fragments of interviews, when they turned 50, so it made all the sense of the world that the ‘Ultimate Mixes’ project Continue with the next albums. But June 12, 2022 passed without any new news about the announced launch. Not only that. Shortly after, the website that promised the imminent arrival of ‘Some Time in New York City. The Ultimate Mixes’ mysteriously disappeared from one day to the next. Entering the month of January 2023, there is still no trace of the album.
Universal Music Groupthe record company that is in charge of marketing John Lennon’s recordings through the Calderstone Productions sublabel, has not given any explanation to date about the cancellation of a project that, on the other hand, It hadn’t been officially announced either.. There is, however, little doubt that the extras reissue of ‘Some Time in New York City’ was ready for release and was shelved at some point and for some reason. Own Sean Lennon, the only son of John and Yoko Ono and the main custodian of his father’s artistic legacy, has indirectly confirmed this by giving his approval to various messages that appeared on social networks that assured it. But why did the release of the album stop?
political correctness
In the absence of an official version, different theories circulate. Some point to a rights issue of the pieces that Lennon and Ono recorded with Frank Zappa y The Mothers of Invention and that were originally included in the double LP. Others stress that the dubious commercial expectations of the launch (‘Some Time in New York City’ is the least-selling album of songs by its author) advised to let it run. But the most consistent explanation (which is also the most surprising) suggests that the whole problem stems from a matter of political correctness.
This was revealed by those responsible for ‘Nothing is real’, probably the most popular (also the most recommended) of the many podcasts dedicated to informing about the Beatles. According to her version, Universal had resisted giving luxury treatment to an album whose opening song, the feminist anthem ‘Woman is the nigger of the world’includes in its title the very offensive word ‘nigger’, while the Lennon estate was radically opposed to any possible form of censorship. The disagreement between both parties would have finally led to a stoppage of the project.
an old polemic
It would, then, be the continuation of a controversy that arose 50 years ago, when Lennon decided that the first and only ‘single’ taken from the album It was going to be, precisely, ‘Woman is the nigger of the world’. The musician then justified the presence of the ‘n-word’ –a term loaded with racist connotations if the person who uses it is a white- alleging that the song tries to equate the oppression that women suffer daily with which blacks suffered in the southern United States in the days of slavery.
His explanations did not prevent numerous American radio stations from refusing to play the ‘single’, but even so the album was published without altering the title or the lyrics of the song at all. In fact, the inclusion on the album cover (which imitates the aesthetics of a newspaper) of an image in which they appear Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong dancing naked. Many copies of ‘Some Time in New York City’ were sold with a sticker announcing that it was a double album; In all cases, the sticker was strategically placed to cover the image of the two leaders.
The ugly Duckling
Half a century after its publication, ‘Some Time in New York City’ remains the ugly duckling of Lennon’s discography. Credited to the John & Yoko / Plastic Ono Band, the double album contains 10 studio-recorded songs (three of which are Yoko Ono compositions) and a further six recorded live. With his defiant allegations on issues such as sexism, racism, colonialism, the suppression of dissent and prison policy, it is the most openly political album by its authorwho here adopted a language and sound much more crude than those he had used in previous ideological manifestos such as ‘Give peace a chance’, ‘Imagine’ or ‘Happy Xmas (War is over)’.
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The pamphleteering tone of the lyrics and the self-indulgence of the live recordings angered critics, who gave ‘Some Time in New York City’ rather unforgiving reviews (‘Rolling Stone’ magazine called it a “incipient artistic suicide”). The public did not respond much better and sales were very disappointing (in the United States, it did not go past number 48 on the charts). Dismayed at the failure, it took Lennon over a year to re-enter a studio.
In the summer of 1973, the ex-beatle began recording his fourth solo LP, ‘Mind games’, which was published on October 29 of that year. So the 50th anniversary is coming up. We’ll see then if the ‘Ultimate Mixes’ project has been definitively shelved or if what happened with ‘Some Time in New York City’ is just an unfortunate exception that consolidates its reputation as a cursed record.
