"As I listened to John's voice on the tapes, I felt as though I was going through a time warp, and that John was actually in the same room as me, sipping coffee as we used to in the long sessions at home or in the studio...I couldn't stop the tears running down my cheek. It was so hard. It was so sad."

--Yoko Ono, in the liner notes to The John Lennon Anthology

We live in a bulimic culture, constantly starved for diversion, yet endlessly hacking up what we get as soon as it's digested. At our worst, we are insatiable in our desire for more, whether it be more news on the latest scandal or more dish on the pop flavor of the month. At our best...well, as soon as we reach our best, I'll let you know how things look.

I'm as bad as the worst of us. When I heard that Yoko Ono would be releasing four CD's worth of outtakes and demos from the archives of her late husband John Lennon, a buzz of excitement raced briefly down my spine. Until I finally listened to the eventual result, I never stopped to consider what The John Lennon Anthology really meant to Lennon fans, to Yoko, to our culture. It's more than just a collection of new music; this release literally represents a voice speaking from the grave, and at the same time a culmination of our pervasive hunger for every piece of an artist's heart and soul.

If there were just four discs of lost tunes, demos and oddities in this Anthology, it would be easy to dismiss as just a treasure chest for die-hard Lennon fans. It's certainly that no matter what. But when hearing Lennon's in-studio banter as well as stolen intimate moments between Lennon and his family, the box becomes anything but easy to consume. We gain a far deeper glimpse into John Lennon than any study of his music could offer. We can percieve him as an unadorned human being.

He lives anew in a succession of tiny moments, stolen glances often dwarfed on the box by the music itself. These range from the trivial to the profoundly moving. We hear Lennon count off tracks in bits that lead into most of the songs, and sometimes little quips are presented in those brief beginning segments. Some tracks consist entirely of Lennon's instructions to his studio musicians. Yet the box also contains a tender conversation between Lennon and his son Sean, in which Sean playfully sings "With A Little Help from my Friends" to his father and then asks who sang it. Viewed in whole, these little shards are heartbreaking reminders of the music and perspective the world lost when Mark David Chapman murdered Lennon in 1980.

They also embody the exorcism of John Lennon's ghost from out of a culture that is finally forced to surrender its grip on one of its most beloved sons. Until he willfully left the public eye in 1975 to raise his son, Lennon could never escape the demands of the media and public, both desperate to cling to him at all costs. He may have left the Beatles behind in 1970, but he could never avoid the public's continuing obsession with his past phenomenon. As he worked on his final album in the months before his death, Lennon began slowly to reenter the public eye, to offer himself up once again at the altar of pop sacrifice. Then he died, and now eighteen years later, these last remains of his creative life are exhumed for worldwide distribution.

"He did not want to disappear into myth." That's what Anthony DeCurtis writes in his essay from the liner notes to the Anthology. And keeping those words in mind, I can't criticize the motivations behind releasing this box. The music is fantastic, and the portrait of Lennon that emerges helps to fill out his existing body of work, humanizing him forever in presenting the simpler side of his at times glamorous lifestyle. I also can't criticize fans who enjoy this release, as I'm easily among their number.

I guess what I'm wondering is this: have we pushed as far as we can in remembering and enjoying those pop culture forces who have passed forever from the public eye? Can John Lennon now finally rest in peace, sure in the knowledge that with these new public offerings of his private utterances, he has satisfied the culture's hunger for his presence? Has he given everything he can? Is his battle with his own image and with the endless demands of his massive past now over?

It certainly sounds that way, especially on the most fragile and gorgeous track on Anthology, the demo of "Real Love" that appears near the end of disc two. "Real Love" is the song "donated" by Yoko Ono to the surviving Beatles for rebirth as one of the two "new" Beatles tracks featured on the Beatles' own Anthology project a few years back, and a demo version also appeared on the original soundtrack to the film Imagine. The Anthology cut is a pure and honest version of the song, featuring simply vocals and piano, both supplied by Lennon. As solo Lennon material goes, it's a simple song, just your basic pop tune about love. But in its confidence and wistful beauty, this demo reclaims the song from itself, shattering the butchered nineties version. It's as close as you can get to John rising from the dead and releasing his own version of the song, and it blows the "new" version of the song out of the water. More than any other track on The John Lennon Anthology, it seems to represent Lennon himself framing his own genius one last time--and finally snatching his self-image from the cultural grist mill and the surrender of myth--before trotting back to the grave with a wink.