Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
I was the hero of the young insurgent working class art movement.
They hit you at school, they hate you if your clever, and they despise a fool.
When they've tortured and scared you for 20 odd years, then they expect you to pick a career.
There's room at the top they are telling you still, but first you must learn how to smile as you kill.
A working class hero is something to be.
There's no hall of fame for that working class hero, no statue carved out of stone. And his greatest reward is the love of a woman and his children.
Receiving far less attention are the working class heroes, who go about their solitary work routines with quiet dignity, come home from another grueling day, yet still find time to interact with their children.
In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.
That's the choice they allow you - now the outlet is being a pop star, which is really what I'm saying on the album in 'Working class hero'. As I told Rolling Stone, it's the same people who have the power, the class system didn't change one little bit.
Whoever wrote Shakespeare is a working class hero be he an aristocrat or a peasant. Shakespeare is a great leveler. We're presented with kings, queens, emperors and giants who feel the same things as everyone else: jealousy, love, anger, bitterness, grief, loss.
Lennon's was one of the first voices I emulated when I began to sing. When we held tryouts in my pal's dad's living room for the singer in our band, I sang a Beatles song that Lennon sang. There is something about the timbre of his voice, something that it conveys, that still gets to me. The quality and the poetry of his lyrics. The wry sense of humor. And the boyishness, in the beginning. There are a great many things that touch me about him... Lennon was, to put it in his own words, a 'working-class hero.'
or simply:
