“John Lennon’s” Greatest Hit

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There was some excitement in my friend’s voice.  He had just stumbled upon what he described as a really extraordinary piece of rock music.  Even more interesting, it had been up on YouTube since November of 2019 and it had had only a little more than 1,400 views, which probably means that fewer than 1,000 people had listened to it, because many of those views had to be by people coming back for more.  The song is called “Don’t Believe,” and it’s rather deeply buried away as the tenth of eleven songs on an album called “Listen to the Picture” produced in 2010 by a band called Abracadabra.[1]

The songs are ostensibly taken from the soundtrack of an obscure little 2009 movie out of Toronto, Canada, entitled, suggestively, Let Him Be.  The lead singer is ostensibly “John Lennon impersonator and tribute artist,” Mark Staycer, who is the person ostensibly playing a long-in-the-tooth performer named “Noel Snow” in the movie, and credit for all the songs as well as for the writing and directing is given to someone named Peter McNamee.

Here is the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) summary of the movie:

Let Him Be is a fascinating film about two undergrad film students Tim Bennett & Kathleen Joyce who discover a long thought to be dead rock icon living in a remote part of Canada. It all begins when Tim discovers a clip of an old man playing guitar on a tape found jammed inside an old video camera his father gave him. The man in the video is older now but the resemblance to John Lennon is uncanny. Could it be him? It’s an absurd idea and one that Tim might have pushed aside were it not for the fact that the man also sounds so much like him. Kathleen thinks the whole concept is ridiculous. Was it possible that Lennon survived the assassination? Tim decides to document the whole story so that no one could question or doubt what he finds. He has to find out if it really is him. If it is he would have to have absolute proof. That would mean convincing Kathleen to help him and it would need lots of different cameras – hidden body cameras, wireless cameras, and surveillance cameras.[2]

As soon as I heard “Don’t Believe,” I agreed completely with my friend.  Both in its music and in its message, it’s very powerful.  I couldn’t think of anything in rock music that quite compares to it.  What jumped out at me right off the bat were the 18 repetitions of “Don’t believe,” each time with a different object in the sentence.[3]

The next thing I noticed was the summarizing sentence in each of the six verses, “It ain’t a revolution just to fight for the truth.”  In the word “revolution,” itself, there’s an apparent reference to the Beatles’ 1968 song by that name, and it also seems to reflect Lennon’s arm’s-length view toward revolution as expressed in the earlier song.  It shouldn’t be a revolutionary act just to stand up for the truth, something that, demonstrably seems to be in very short supply as practiced by the powers that be these days.

Just at first blush, the lyrics come across as a good deal timelier today even than when they were written.  In the introduction to his popular 2021 book, The Long Slide: Thirty Years in American Journalism, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson notes that the objectivity and credibility of the mainstream press have declined rather precipitously since 2009, when “Don’t Believe” was recorded.[4]

The public apparently agrees with Carlson.  In January of 2021, national trust in the media was reported to be at an all-time low.[5]   An even more recent poll found that only 10.2% of the public trust the news media when it comes to the subject of COVID-19.[6]

Not only is the song extraordinarily timely, but when it comes to journalism historically, the lyrics are considerably more timeless than the average person might realize.  The Catholic monk, philosopher, and poet Thomas Merton wrote in 1966, “Nine tenths of the news, as printed in the papers, is pseudo-news, manufactured events.  Some days ten tenths.”[7]

The unreliability of our primary source of information actually goes back a lot farther.  John Swinton, editorial writer for the New York Sun, is famous for having said in a speech at a press dinner in 1883, “The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon…You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an “Independent Press”! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”[8]

Immediately, I wanted to know more about the song and its provenance.  Even though the singer’s enunciation is quite good as rock performers go, my hearing isn’t what it used to be, so I went searching for a copy of the lyrics online and came up with nothing.  My curiosity about the movie had also been piqued, so I went to Amazon to see if they had copies of the DVD for sale, but I drew a blank there, as well.  There are little clips from the movie on YouTube, but generally it seems to have gone down the public memory hole.

I recalled having read a very intriguing piece by Miles Mathis some years ago that concluded that John Lennon’s assassination had been faked and that he was still alive performing sporadically as an “impersonator” of himself out in the Midwest somewhere.  That essay is still easy enough to find.[9]

I had not recalled how much of Mathis’s analysis is based upon an analysis of that movie.  He does spend some time picking apart the lyrics of some of the other songs to show, as he believes, that it almost had to have been Lennon’s work, but, curiously, he steers clear of “Don’t Believe.”  One would have thought that he would have wanted to call attention to it if for no other reason than that it reinforces what most of his writing is about, that is, that there are a number of important things that the media have told us through the years that are not true.

With no help from the Internet—not even from Miles Mathis—I set about to performing the public service of transcribing the lyrics.  I must admit that I had to enlist the services of a couple of friends with younger and sharper ears and possibly with better audio equipment.  Here is what we came up with:

Don't believe what you see.
Don't believe what you read.
Don't believe the TV,
'Cause there's nothing that's real.
Listen up I'm talking to you.
It ain't a revolution just to fight for the truth.

Don't believe what they say.
Don't believe what they sell.
Don't believe what they push.
It's all lies, can't you tell?
Listen up I'm talking to you.
It ain't a revolution just to fight for the truth.

All right.
Let's fight.

It's time to get some answers;
Yeah, it's time for a change.
You're either a solution or get out of the way.
Stand up and be counted and get into the game.
The truth we took for granted has been taken away.

What'd I say?

Don't believe what you hear.
Don't believe in their fear.
Don't believe they're sincere,
'Cause they really don't care.
Listen up I'm talking to you.
It ain't a revolution just to fight for the truth.

Don't believe that you're safe.
Don't believe in their hate.
Don't believe in their game.
You're just a number to play.
Listen up I'm talking to you.
It ain't a revolution just to fight for the truth.
????

Don't believe what they preach.
Don't believe what they teach.
Don't believe that you're free.
'Cause they're killing your dreams.
Listen up I'm talking to you.
It ain't a revolution just to fight for the truth.

It's time to get some answers;
Yeah, it's time for a change.
You're either a solution or get out of the way.
Stand up and be counted and get into the game.
The truth we took for granted has been taken away.

What'd I say?

Don't believe what you see.
Don't believe what you read.
Don't believe in their pills,
'Cause they're all made to kill.
Listen up I'm talking to you.
It ain't a revolution just to fight for the truth.
????



Is that prescient or what?  It’s enough to send a cold chill down your spine.  Notice that not until the last verse is any specific area of concern mentioned, but here he really brings down the hammer: “Don’t believe in their pills, ‘cause they’re all made to kill.”

Where did that come from in 2009?  But he didn’t say “vaccinations,” you say, only “pills.”  One could well argue, though, that the rhyme and meter requirements forced him to be more cryptic.  And what “pills” that are “all made to kill” could he be singing about, pills that it’s clear are being pushed by the powers that be, the “they” and “their” of the song?

Up to now, this punch line, as it were, of the song seems to have gone right past everyone.  It certainly went past me, even after I had listened to it several times, and until we had taken the trouble to listen carefully and transcribe the lyrics, it had apparently even gone past my friend who had excitedly introduced me to the song.

Now that we have called attention to the words in this last verse, we have to wonder how much longer YouTube will permit the album to stay up.  Aren’t they super sensitive to President Biden’s repeated calls for censorship of medical “misinformation” on the Internet?[10]

A Spook Production?

Even if it might be conceded that I am reading too much into that concluding verse, quite a few major questions about that song and the movie remain.  To my mind, the song is a work of rare musical genius.  It sounds very much like a Beatles song with an older John Lennon as the singer.  Can you imagine it being played on the airwaves enough times for it to lodge in people’s heads?  Even if it might have been deemed a good deal less appropriate for the times than it is today, had it been presented to the public as a Beatles song when they were in their prime, or just as a John Lennon song, say, in the wake of “Imagine,” surely it would have shot right to the top of the charts, and it would have been a major topic of conversation, as well.

Of course, quite a bit of imagination is required even to conceive of the notion that such a song would have ever been permitted on the national airwaves at any time, either then or now, when it is so poignantly critical of the people who control those national airwaves.

And now, even with the limited attention that the movie received in the first place, it has now been effectively “disappeared.”  What happened to the profit motive?  Why go to the trouble to make such a movie and to write and perform such remarkable songs if you’re not going to do anything to sell them to the public, in fact, after a short period of time, to hide them from the public?  Something very odd is going on here.

But, then, even as the standard “lone, crazed gunman” explanation goes, Mark David Chapman’s shooting of John Lennon in New York City on December 8, 1980, makes no sense whatsoever.  It’s not hard to see why many have concluded that Chapman had to have been a mind-controlled subject of the CIA, on the order of Robert Kennedy’s supposed assassin, Sirhan Sirhan.    With the danger of what he might expose about his brother’s assassination and his threat to their Vietnam War ambitions, it’s easy to see why they would have wanted to take out RFK, but why kill a guy who seemed to be little more than a pop music icon and long after the end of the Vietnam War, at that?  Here is one explanation:

The Beatles were also part of the mass experimentation that contemporary society was being subjected to by the CIA, Britain’s MI6 and the Tavistock Institute utilizing extraordinarily powerful mind-altering psychedelic/psychotropic drugs.

More than most of the other boys in the band, John Lennon became increasingly aware not only of the extent of corruption, co-opting and infiltration of the counterculture — most CERTAINLY including the rock music scene — by these same covert government intelligence elements.

Lennon was also aware than one of the “big guns” in the CIA/Tavistock/MI6 arsenalLSD, had been having effect upon the population groups to which it had been funneled so extensively that was most unexpected on the part of the social manipulators–and to a large extent the effect was rather positive and beneficial.

Shortly before Lennon’s death at the hands of what beyond the faintest glimmer of a shadow a doubt was a mind-controlled, “Manchurian Candidate” type assassin deployed by Tavistock/CIA/MI6, Mark Chapman to terminate a “loose cannon”, Lennon had the audacity to massively and blatantly “out” the aforementioned consortium in a Playboy interview — in which he made note of LSD’s completely unforeseen liberating impact upon human society and civilization–pretty much thumbing his nose at the whole bunch and their whole trip; AND indicating as well that he was aware of the extent to which he and other pop musicians had been set up–to be used as dupes in massive social manipulation scheme.[11]

More than anything, the lyrics of “Don’t Believe” reflect an awareness of profound and pervasive corruption at the top, an awareness of the sort that the writer, John Quinn, attributes to John Lennon.  Is it really more believable that the relative nonentity, Peter McNamee, wrote not just the remarkable words and music of the song, but also the script of the movie and directed it as well than that the song’s composer was a surviving John Lennon?

Perhaps neither one of them wrote the song.  Maybe the composer is the anonymous person or persons in the spook community who had a hand in composing songs attributed to the Beatles and to Lennon all along.  Another possibility is that Lennon composed that song quite a long time ago, but it sat in the drawer because there was no way he could get it recorded and played on the air when he was under the thumb of the record industry.

A clue to the theory that Lennon had been a good soldier who was growing fed up with it all might be found in an observation in the Mathis essay.

“The masters of propaganda behind [the Beatles],” he writes, “had made a big mistake with the ‘we’re more popular than Jesus now’ quote. That line had been no accident. Lennon didn’t just say it as a joke, off-the-cuff. It was an important part of the storyline, since part of the propaganda was the destruction of Christianity. Intelligence had been trying to destroy Christianity since at least 1875…”

Mathis also endorses the generally accepted view that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” from the “Sgt. Pepper” album is a promotional song for LSD.  He might also have noted, but doesn’t, that the song that precedes it on the album, “With a Little Help from My Friends,” also sounds like a promotion for drug use.  How else are we supposed to take that line, “I get high with a little help from my friends”?

Mathis goes on to opine that “Sgt. Pepper” is a reference to John Pepper, who was head of British intelligence in the 1940s, and that many of the people depicted on the album cover had been intelligence figures in one agency or another through the years, which sort of ties the spook world’s promotion of dissolute behavior, denigration of Christianity, and use of rock icons like Lennon and the Beatles up into one neat package.

He could have taken it one step further and added in Lennon’s most popular song as a composer and performer separate from the Beatles, “Imagine.”  It’s not a rock song but more like a hymn, or “anti-hymn” considering its words, which would warm the hearts of the strongest anti-Christian, anti-Western-tradition, anti-nationalist globalist.  “Imagine no possessions” comes pretty close to prefiguring the “You’ll own nothing and be happy” of the Great Reset.

Permitting myself to imagine that the writer of “Don’t Believe” is, indeed, an older but wiser John Lennon, I should think he would want to take those lyrics back and replace them with something crafted for his adopted country like “Imagine, the Remake”:

Imagine there's a free press.
It's easy if you try.
No talk of "conspiracy theories."
How did those people die?
Imagine no corruption.  That means the language, too.

Imagine there's no Deep State.
It isn't hard to do;
No three-letter agencies;
No Bilderbergers, too.
Imagine an establishment of complete transparency, you

You may say I'm a dreamer,
But I'm not the only one.
If more folks would join us,
My work would be done.

Imagine a reversion;
I wonder if you can;
To our founding principles,
To the natural rights of man.
Imagine a great country back on the freedom road, you

You may say I'm a dreamer,
But I'm not the only one.
If more folks would join us,
My work would be done.

David Martin

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDpoaloSnYE&t=1957s (Click on “SHOW MORE” and then click on “Don’t Believe” to go straight to the song.)

[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1463410/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_1

[3] It put me in mind of my poem, “The Lies,” inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, “The Bells,” with its repetitions and also with its message, https://www.dcdave.com/poet1/p030698d.html.

[4] Threshold editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.  One must wonder how Carlson got by with his short acknowledgment: “I’d like to acknowledge Jonathan Karp of Simon & Schuster, whose descent from open-minded book editor to cartoonish corporate censor mirrors the decline of America itself.  It has been a sad education watching it happen.”

[5] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9173711/American-trust-media-hits-time-low.html#:~:text=Trust%20in%20the%20media%20is%20at%20an%20all-time,hit%20an%20all-time%20low%20of%20just%2027%20percent.

[6] https://www.zerohedge.com/political/poll-finds-only-10-americans-trust-media-covid-30-trust-fauci

[7] See David Martin, “Is the American Press the Enemy of the People?” January 18, 2018, https://www.dcdave.com/article5/180118.htm.

[8] Enrico Carotenuto, “John Swinton’s Speech – The Twilight of the Independent Press,” January 6, 2020, https://consciousnet.org/john-swintons-speech/.

[9] “Proof that John Lennon Faked his Death,” August 3, 2014, with later addenda, http://mileswmathis.com/lennon.pdf.

[10] See New York Post, July 20, 2021 https://nypost.com/2021/07/20/bidens-attempt-to-rope-big-tech-into-censorship-is-downright-sinister/ and Free Speech America, January 13, 2022 https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/free-speech/alexander-hall/2022/01/13/president-biden-demands-big-tech-deal-misinformation.

[11] John Quinn, “Why Bush & the CIA Had John Lennon Killed,” October 10, 1999, https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_tavistock03.htm.  There’s lots more where that came from.  See “The Manufactured Invention of the Beatles, Stones, Grateful Dead, and the Birth of Rock n’ Roll by the Tavistock Institute; a Jesuit Corporation,” December 26, 2015 https://tabublog.com/2015/12/26/the-manufactured-invention-of-the-beatles-stones-grateful-dead-and-the-birth-of-rock-n-roll-by-the-tavistock-institute-a-jesuit-corporation/ and Russ Winter, “The Tavistock Institute’s Ties to the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” October 21, 2021, https://www.winterwatch.net/2021/10/the-tavistock-institutes-ties-to-the-birth-of-rock-n-roll/.  More reinforcement of the role of the spook community in the promotion of drug use can be found in “CIA Social Control through Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll,” December 30, 2013, though it takes a considerably more jaundiced view toward LSD than John Quinn attributes to John Lennon, https://21stcenturywire.com/2013/12/30/cia-social-control-through-sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll/.

13 Thoughts to ““John Lennon’s” Greatest Hit”

  1. Sweet Home Zimbabwe

    John Lenin and the Dung Beetles?
    Tavistock.

  2. Strawberry Fields Tripping

    “In the word “revolution,” itself, there’s an apparent reference to the Beatles’ 1968 song by that name… “, Yes, and blaringly obvious is the recognizable ripping refrains of the actual ‘Revolution’ song itself that they’re playing at that time.

    BTW, my You Tube viewing for Don’t Believe shows posted Oct 6, 2015, with 1,574 views.

    This is another controversial Lennon song, aimed at Paul Mc Carthy.
    How Do You Sleep? (Take 11 / Extended / Raw Studio Mix)
    John Lennon, The Plastic Ono Band

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Mez0kjniwk

    1. At the risk of my labeling as a “Mathisite”, which I likely deserve, though I affirm only that I read with comparative care and reasonable retention the array of essays published by Miles W. Mathis (www.mileswmathis.com), I don’t question whether Lennon aimed “How Do You Sleep” at Paul or his TWIN BROTHER Mike (http://mileswmathis.com/paul8.pdf). I merely wonder what drew John’s ire long after The Beatles as a group became living history.

      After all, John knew full well that Mike subbed for Paul, then “became” Paul, married Linda, and had fun with “Band on the Run”. As a bona fide portrait artist and student of photography, MM wrote, “That is the 1980s, and I think Mike has pretty much taken over public appearances from Paul. Paul has retired, but Mike still likes the limelight. He has also learned to play left-handed, though he avoids it when he can, staying at the mic or the piano. It is Mike who was in Wings and married Linda.” (p. 24)

      The Abracadabra “Listen to the Picture” album cover prominently features a prominent WALRUS looking right at you. Wasn’t John also the Walrus? How blatantly does the man have to hint before one realizes all one’s doubtings count for naught?

      Then, one can fairly ask, “Does it really matter?” I’d say no. Consider the tomfoolery entailed by The Beatles, the intelligence agencies and their LSD: All such plots went awry, didn’t they? The Power$ That Be (TP$TB) merely managed to wake up and set on a straighter path millions of MY GENERATION, a concept covered by The Who, early on!

      As Miles Mathis (again I mention that dreaded “notorious hoaxer” as someone recently catcalled) noted multiple times, TP$TB’s efforts then turned to “blackwashing” all things “hippie” — for example, the Manson scam — in an attempt to “take it all back”. Too late! The truth outed and ever since, like a cornucopia or a Pandora’s box (your choice!), has neither been erased nor completely neutralized.

  3. That’s strange what you’re seeing on YouTube, but from my experience it’s not all that surprising. When I make comments there I have to check with friends to see if they can read them. Usually they can’t, but I can. YouTube is consciously attempting to fool me into believing that they have posted my comment, like printing a letter to the editor that’s only in the newspaper delivered to my house. But then, as we know, YouTube is owned by Google and see http://heresy.is/?s=Google%2C+Tool+of+the+Deep+State.
    For the record, I just checked the Abracadabra album page and it still reads that it was put up on Nov 7, 2019, but now the views are up to 1909. It was put up by Jennifer M, who is said to have 239 subscribers.

    1. The remastered version of “Revolution” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZpKhjQh6rw is the best one for noting its similarities to “Don’t Believe,” by the way.

    2. Strawberry Fields Tripping

      Don’t Believe shows posted Oct 6, 2015 here…
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4TttAWacyM&list=RDU4TttAWacyM&start_radio=1

    3. What Strawberry Fields was watching on YouTube was the single song, “Don’t Believe” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4TttAWacyM&list=RDU4TttAWacyM&start_radio=1, not the one for the entire “Listen to the Picture” album referenced in my article. Notice the rise in viewers for the latter, while the former has hardly changed.

  4. Strawberry Fields Tripping

    Well, that was fun, but now it’s time to “Let It Be”….think I’ll just trip over to join “The Magical Mystery Tour” now ???? ????

  5. sticky

    I notice that an anagram of ‘Mark Staycer’ is:

    ‘Mac, R.Starkey’ – the (other) surviving Beatles.

    Staycer is a very uncommon surname – a site I looked on declared only 27 instances – which leads me to ask why the originator wouldn’t have chosen Mark Stacey (a much more common surname), which gives the simpler ‘Mac, Starkey’. But maybe this is ‘too obvious’?

    Another anagram is: ‘Mac, Starr – key’.

  6. Low Mileage Math-us

    You DO know that Miles Mathis is a known lunatic who claims to have proved that pi = 4 and has a theory about light and bicycle seats, right? Also a Carrolian fascination with young girls and that’s spinning it as positively as I can.

    1. That’s one reason why I try to hold Mathis at some arm’s length in my article. I don’t think that anything that I have presented depends upon his veracity.

  7. RecallCarlLevin

    You can get the movie Let Him Be at

    lethimbethemovie.com for $22

    1. Thanks. I was unaware of the movie’s web site. It’s kind of interesting that they provide the lyrics to five of the songs of the Abracadabra CD, but “Don’t Believe” is not one of them.

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