Is John Lennon the Best Beatle?

Like so many things, it's easier for girls.

If you're female or homosexual, it's easy to decide your favorite Beatle, because you can just pick the cutest in your own humble opinion. And they're all cute, even a straight guy like me can appreciate that, so you can't really make a wrong choice. (Unless you pick the unofficial fifth Beatle, Sir George Martin, which is sorta twisted since even when the real Beatles were young and plucky, he was forty.)

Once the cute factor is cast aside, you're basically left with four divergent personalities. At that point, I think it becomes a matter of which Beatle you identify with the most, the one you use as an entry point into the Beatle experience. Are you the quiet playful passenger who plays cards with Neil Aspinall while the other three bicker about arrangements? Are you the workman Beatle who cranks out seminal guitar solos with astonishing ease? Are you the adorable peacemaker who wants the Beatles to be all things for all people at all times, who can squeeze out heartbreakingly gorgeous melodies in his sleep?

I'm none of those things. No, I'm the smart Beatle, the acerbic Beatle, the one who must love the taste of shoe leather for the number of times he stuck his foot into his mouth. I'm the Yoko-lover, the political activist, the party-freak passenger on a nearly-endless Lost Weekend. I'm the cynic who tempered Paul's saccharine tendencies with a healthy dose of reality. I'm John Lennon.

John is the prism through which I view the Beatles. When I watch A Hard Day's Night, sure I laugh at all the antics, but it's John's maddeningly obtuse humor that always catches me off-guard, every time. When I see old interview clips, I can appreciate each Beatle's approach to fame, but I'm always most excited to hear what John had to say. He could disarm with one sentence and then aim for the jugular with the next.

And when I listen to Beatle records, I realize that Paul's melodies will endure far beyond any other music of the past fifty years--they'll be humming "Let It Be" on the Moon Colony in 2567--but it's always John's words I connect with. You can hear his struggle to grow over the course of the albums; he's obviously trying, especially from "Help!" onward, to communicate his own experiences and feelings through song. There's a real dichotomy that grows between John's writing style and Paul's as the group continues its creative progress forward. Paul seems to constantly aim for the common denominator; he wants everyone to identify with his songs and with the feelings he's trying to express. That's why he'll always be the master of the Beatle love song.

John, on the other hand, wasn't trying to universalize his own thoughts and feelings; he was simply trying to communicate from his own point-of-view, irregardless of whether his listener could understand him or not. In his solo work, he'd start to reach out more in his songs--"Imagine" is one of the most universal songs ever--but even then, he'd write to express what he was feeling, not to appeal to his listeners.

There's also his beautiful love affair with Yoko, which is mystifying to consider--here's the angry Beatle, the one who snarled out "Revolution" and "Run for Your Life," the one who'd later pen such vicious and acerbic tracts on his solo records, and yet he's also capable of such a deep and abiding love for a woman. You can blame the Yoko/John affair as the catalyst for the end of the Beatles if you want, but really, wasn't it inevitable anyway?

I think it becomes almost impossible to retain any anger over their relationship as you watch the way they moved together through the seventies. It might be the most vibrant and pure love affair ever to have taken place in the public eye, and for that reason alone, it's an inspiration. Wouldn't we all love to find our Yoko Ono, one person who we can move with through our lives and know for an absolute fact that we've found our soulmate? We truly should all be so lucky.

But more than anything else, I love John the most because he's the Beatle I'd most want to be. I wouldn't want to be the quiet one, the clueless one or the cute one. I'd want to be the smart, funny and brutal one, the realist with a dreamer's heart. I'd want to be John.