The song and the book that made Mark Chapman murder John Lennon
I hate to break it to you, but life is random, uncontrollable and completely terrifying.
If you didn’t know this already, then discovering this fact on a site like this is one hell of a way to find out, but we’ve all got to learn eventually. It’s just part of growing up. However, it’s a very difficult fact to hide from these days. Especially when an errant glance at your phone ruins your entire week, whether that’s from your last Hinge date deciding there’s better fish in the sea, a news story about the seemingly unstoppable rise of fascism in your country, or a famous person you’ve loved for years suddenly popping their clogs.
It is strange how that last phenomenon feels so recent, as though famous people only started dying in 2016. While there is something to be said for pop culture as we know it really coming into its own in the 1960s, and thus, this is the time that natural causes are beginning to take their toll, we should be a little more prepared for events like this. After all, arguably the most shocking celebrity death of all time happened all the way back in 1980, to someone who was in no way ready to go, who was arguably the world’s most famous person at the time.
I don’t think people who were born after it happened can really fathom just what an earth-shaking event the assassination of John Lennon was. There are vanishingly few people with the cultural footprint he has, so we can’t even imagine it happening to anyone else. Beyond that, though, I think there’s one crucial point that separates the murder of John Lennon from other celebrity deaths. Brace yourself, because we’re getting a little morbid here.
So, in most other cases of celebrity deaths, we can understand why it happened. It’s old age, or health problems, or drugs or any more of those old chestnuts. Even when it’s not one of them, it’s still normally something that happens to regular people every day, like a terrible accident. With the murder of John Lennon though, people have been waiting for a reason why for forty years. We still have no real understanding of why it happened.
Why won’t we ever understand why John Lennon was murdered?
The strange thing is that this is despite Mark David Chapman attempting to state why he did it multiple times. In fact, the copy of The Catcher In The Rye that he sat down and read after committing the crime had the words “this is my statement” written on the very first page and signed “Holden Caulfield”.
A few years after his incarceration, he sat down with the journalist Jack Jones for an intensive set of interviews that would make up the spine of the book Let Me Take You Down: Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman, the Man Who Killed John Lennon.
During these sessions, Chapman didn’t just point to actions that Lennon had (supposedly) did to invoke his wrath, but a specific song of his too, namely ‘God’ from John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. In one particularly enlightening interview, Chapman said, “I would listen to this music and I would get angry at him, for saying that he didn’t believe in God, that he just believed in him and Yoko, and that he didn’t believe in the Beatles. I just wanted to scream out loud, ‘Who does he think he is, saying these things about God and heaven and the Beatles?'”
So, is this the reason for it? Chapman might tell us that it is, but if that is the case, why did he also have plans to kill other famous people? David Bowie was on his list, as was Ronald Reagan, Elizabeth Taylor, and even Paul McCartney. No matter how many so-called “betrayals” Chapman can point to, no matter how much he despised “phonies” like his hero Holden Caulfield, there’s only one real reason that Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon.
He just wanted to kill a famous person. That was it. Life is random, uncontrollable and completely terrifying.