Initial works from John Lennon in the light of a post-Beatles split were more about the protest and performance than the listening experience. Where Paul McCartney’s charm poured through his self-titled debut and George Harrison made waves with his Pandora’s Box of writing on All Things Must Pass, Lennon was moved by empowering the everyday person. Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, banks heavily on the name associated with the project, and rightly so. This is just noise. It may be a reductive take, but it stands true. Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins is chatter, chimes and explosions of the Revolution 9 variety. The experience and your reaction to it, could be argued as the purpose of the project. Whether such a notion holds weight is entirely based on perception of art. As a listening experience,e it is reductive and often unmistakably trying to kill those with state-of-the-art Bose headphones.
But counter those near-death experiencers with tinnitus and bird chirps and consider the impact. We should, to some degree, be fond of the concept. Lennon as an artist, huge as he may be, wants reaction. His public appearance, his stance and longevity with music not as a one sense experience is admirable, even if the results are, at best, carnage. There is a carnal presence to it and that is not just because of his wife, Yoko Ono. She influences far more here than Lennon would have mustered on his own. There is an odd route into Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins now, especially when those who work from home search for background noise. There is something about the opening tracks, the out-of-tune piano and Lennon’s vocal interjections, which are a fine blur of distracting noise and footnotes for adamant listeners of The Beatles and their post-split projects.
Lennon and Ono’s work here amounts to noise and tape experimentation. Is the purpose of art not to see where it can take us? One for the Captain Beefheart camp, this. But this is by no means derogatory. Art is protest and it does not have to spell out the reaction for one to be felt. An album to experience, to be horrified by, and then appreciate. Those howls and screams are guttural, the unexpected next steps are what keeps it fresh and, oddly enough, rather charming. A sound collage with the express purpose of dividing those who listen, yet the outcome is much the same. It is hard not to get carried away with the idea of art as protest, reaction being the goal, without there being solidity within it. Where it is reductive to say Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins is just noise, it is equally as facile to suggest it is a piece of work which will change your stance or style.
There is a worthwhile listen buried deep within Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. Even if it is just the once. Even through gritted teeth and wild eyes, frothing at the mouth as Lennon coaxes the fire. Experimentation is key here, from the slow instrumental pan from one ear to another to the occasional snippet of at-the-time contemporary sound, the suggestion of culture as noise. Not everything we watch is art, not all of what we see and hear is going to stick with us – but something as out there as this will, at the very least, make us question what is worth our time. It slots in somewhere between Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and Albert Brooks’ Real Life. Irrespective of its message, the actual tones, as tuneless as they are, do not grate the ears as many would suggest. These are experiments which occurred later, with the pleasant sounds which hide innovation. Hearing it laid bare is not as exciting when the message is built through your conscience.
