Sean Lennon has collaborated with many artists, and Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger is his latest musical incarnation with his girlfriend Charlotte Kemp Muhl.
I became aware of this when I received an email advertising one of their future concerts in Hollywood at the end of September, but I don’t really want to spend another $25 just to see John’s son.
Looking for some infos, I stumbled upon this picture of Sean and his girlfriend doing their John and Yoko pose, and immortalized by photographer Terry Richardson for the 2009 fall issue of Purple Magazine. I know, this is old news, but I had never seen it.
The Rolling Stone cover, iconic picture of Lennon naked and curved around his wife taken by Annie Leibovitz just a few hours before he was shot, is in everybody’s memory and you have to wonder what were Sean and Charlotte’s intentions when they decided to create a mirror image of the famous shot: it’s interesting to see that Sean has taken his mother’s position and Charlotte, John Lennon’s. That was a smart idea, but at the same time, the picture is losing a lot of its original message.
But you have to ask yourself if you’d consider this picture as a homage, a recreation of a classic, or on the contrary as a cheap exploitation of his father’s figure? It is certainly very hard to escape John Lennon’s image for Sean Lennon, but why imitating your parents and adding fuel to the fire?
It is certainly not the first time exploitation would be associated with John Lennon’s image, as last March, some interview of his was used in a French TV commercial for the car maker Citroen, and I don’t need to tell you it was not exactly what Lennon originally meant by ‘start something new’
Sean defended his mother by saying ‘I realize why people are mad. But [the] intention was not financial,’ rather, his mother wanted to keep his dad ‘in [the] public consciousness.’
There are many other examples and Yoko has authorized Lennon’s image on everything from coffee cups to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, to JCPenney’s Christmas campaign, and has allowed his songs to be used commercially (Nike has used the song Revolution)
So when your mother even goes to the length to exhibit the bloodstained clothes and glasses of your father after his murder, you don’t even think twice when it comes to remake an old picture of his.