🎵 Lennon’s “Rehash” Theory: The Honest Truth About Musical Influence cover art

🎵 Lennon’s “Rehash” Theory: The Honest Truth About Musical Influence

🎵 Lennon’s “Rehash” Theory: The Honest Truth About Musical Influence

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 In his final major interview—the September 1980 Playboy conversation with David Sheff conducted just months before his death—John Lennon stated plainly: “All music is rehash. There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme.” This statement perfectly captures Lennon’s pragmatic, anti-pretentious view of musical creation that he maintained throughout his career. For Lennon, music wasn’t about revolutionizing anything—it was about loving the sounds that came before, replicating what moved you, and being honest about the fact that you’re working with the same twelve notes everyone else has been using, ever since someone figured out how to divide an octave. This philosophy shaped not only how the Beatles created music but how Lennon understood his own place in rock and roll history: not as an inventor, but as an enthusiastic participant in a continuous cultural conversation that’s been happening since Black musicians in America created the sound he spent his life trying to recreate. 🎶What “Rehash” Actually Means (And Why Lennon Thought it Was Fine)When Lennon said “all music is rehash,” he wasn’t being cynical—he was being honest about how music actually works. New songs aren’t truly original in the sense of inventing something from nothing. They’re blends, remixes, variations on existing themes, notes, and styles. Every generation borrows from the past, building on the same simple musical elements that have been around forever. And according to Lennon, that’s not a bug—it’s a feature. 🎵Music history backs him up completely. The Beatles borrowed from blues, folk, and early rock and roll. Led Zeppelin built entire albums on blues progressions that were old when Robert Johnson was playing them. R.E.M. took Byrds-style jangle and made it their own. Creativity doesn’t lie in inventing entirely new elements—it lies in how you combine the familiar ones. The skill isn’t creating something from nothing; it’s putting a fresh spin on old ideas. Like the Bee Gees reinterpreting Beatles-esque harmonies for the disco era, or the Ramones stripping rock down to three chords played faster and louder than anyone thought possible. 🎸The math supports this too: there are only twelve notes in Western music, and only so many chord progressions that human ears find pleasing. Most music is variations on themes because there’s a limited number of themes to vary. Artists consistently build on their predecessors—rock and roll built on blues, pop built on rock, hip-hop sampled everything that came before and made that sampling explicit. As TED speaker Kirby Ferguson explains, creativity is fundamentally about “copy, transform, and combine.” Remixing isn’t cheating—it’s how music has always worked, and in the digital age we’ve just become more honest about acknowledging it. 💿Lennon understood this intuitively: musical lineage isn’t about plagiarism, it’s about conversation. You take what moves you, you transform it through your own voice and perspective, and you pass it forward for the next generation to remix. Innovation happens in the variation, not in pretending you’ve invented something nobody’s ever heard before. 🌟Music as “Love In,” Not “Rip Off”: The Beatles’ Transparent ImitationLennon was remarkably transparent about the Beatles’ initial focus being imitation rather than innovation, and he never apologized for it because he didn’t see it as something that required apology. In letters and interviews discussing the band’s early influences, he made the argument that homage is not plagiarism—it’s celebration, it’s love, it’s the most honest form of flattery when you’re trying to sound exactly like the records that changed your life. The early Beatles repertoire was essentially a covers band’s setlist: Black American R&B and rock and roll songs like “Money (That’s What I Want),” “Twist and Shout,” “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Please Mr. Postman”—songs written and originally performed by Black artists that four white kids from Liverpool were attempting to recreate with varying degrees of success and complete sincerity. 🎤Lennon stated in defense of this approach: “It was only natural that we tried to do it as near to the record as we could... The one thing we always did was to make it known that these were black originals, we loved the music and wanted to spread it in any way we could. It wasn’t a rip off, it was a love in.” The Beatles weren’t trying to invent new notes or discover harmonies that nobody had used before—they were trying to capture the feeling they got when they heard Chuck Berry or Little Richard or the Shirelles, and if that meant using the same three chords those artists used, that was perfect. The idea that this made them less “original” would have struck Lennon as missing the entire point of rock and roll. 🎵Rejecting Complexity as PretensionThroughout...
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