Rolling Stone ranked him the fifth-greatest singer and 38th greatest artist of all time. In 2002, Lennon was voted eighth in a BBC history poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. That year, he won the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. Double Fantasy, his second-best-selling non-Beatles album, won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. He was murdered by a Beatles fan, Mark David Chapman, three weeks after the album's release.Īs a performer, writer or co-writer, Lennon had 25 number-one singles in the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Following a five-year hiatus, Lennon returned to music in 1980 with the Ono collaboration Double Fantasy. He also had chart-topping collaborations with Elton John (" Whatever Gets You thru the Night") and David Bowie (" Fame"). Lennon and Ono separated from 1973 to 1975, during which time he produced Harry Nilsson's album Pussy Cats. Moving to New York City in 1971, his criticism of the Vietnam War resulted in a three-year deportation attempt by the Nixon administration. In 1969, he started the Plastic Ono Band with his second wife, multimedia artist Yoko Ono, held the two-week-long anti-war demonstration Bed-ins for Peace and left the Beatles to embark on a solo career.īetween 19, Lennon and Ono collaborated on many works, including a trilogy of avant-garde albums, several more films, his solo debut John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and the international top-10 singles " Give Peace a Chance", " Instant Karma!", " Imagine", and " Happy Xmas (War Is Over)".
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Starting with " All You Need Is Love", his songs were adopted as anthems by the anti-war movement and the larger counterculture of the 1960s. Lennon soon expanded his work into other media by participating in numerous films, including How I Won the War, and authoring In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, both collections of nonsense writings and line drawings. Through his songwriting in the Beatles, he embraced myriad musical influences, initially writing and co-writing rock and pop-oriented hit songs in the band's early years, then later incorporating experimental elements into his compositions in the latter half of the Beatles' career as his songs became known for their increasing innovation. Sometimes called "the smart Beatle", Lennon initially was the group's de facto leader, a role he gradually ceded to McCartney.
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In 1956, he formed the Quarrymen, which evolved into the Beatles in 1960. īorn in Liverpool, Lennon became involved in the skiffle craze as a teenager. His songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney remains the most successful in history. His work included music, writing, drawings and film. The musicians on this list were able to capture all of those hyper-specific but universally felt emotions, and then some.įrom classic tracks that will make you want to “party like it’s your birthday,” even when it’s not (a la 50 Cent), to deep cuts that have you questioning your own mortality (we’re looking at you, Sufjan Stevens’ “Happy Birthday”), check out Billboard’s ranking of the 30 best birthday songs below.John Winston Ono Lennon (born John Winston Lennon 9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English singer, songwriter and musician who gained worldwide fame as the founder, co-songwriter, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles.
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Along with all the cake, candles, streamers and presents come bittersweet, complicated feelings about turning one year older, from nostalgia for birthdays past to unbridled terror for the future, grief for one’s youth, confusion over what to do next and total happiness at the chance to live life to the fullest for another trip around the sun. It’s definitely a good thing that there’s such an abundance of birthday-themed music, because let’s face it - birthdays can be complex.
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Artists from Lesley Gore in the ‘60s to Stevie Wonder in the ‘80s to Katy Perry in the 21st century have all completely reinvented the long-established birthday singing tradition, with new and inventive melodies of their own. Whether you love it or hate it, it’s safe to say the tune and its many extended versions and comedic renditions aren’t going anywhere… but it doesn’t have to be the only song that defines your big day. In 1998, the Guinness Book of World Records even named it the most recognized song in the English language, more than a century after it was first written by sisters Mildred and Patty Smith Hill for the 1893 book titled Song Stories for the Kindergarten. Gathering friends and family around a candlelit cake to sing “Happy Birthday to You” has been a birthday tradition in English-speaking households for over a century.