Gimme Some Truth
| "Gimme Some Truth" | |
|---|---|
| Song by John Lennon from the album Imagine | |
| Released | 9 September 1971 (US) 8 October 1971 (UK) |
| Recorded | June–July 1971 Ascot Sound Studios, Surrey |
| Genre | Blues rock, hard rock |
| Length | 3:18 |
| Label | Apple |
| Writer(s) | John Lennon |
| Producer(s) | John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Phil Spector |
| "Gimme Some Truth" | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
||||||||
| Single by John Lennon | ||||||||
| A-side | "Love" | |||||||
| Released | 15 November 1982 | |||||||
| Format | 45 | |||||||
| Length | 3:16 | |||||||
| Label | Geffen | |||||||
| Writer(s) | John Lennon | |||||||
| Producer(s) | Phil Spector, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono | |||||||
| John Lennon singles chronology | ||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
"Gimme Some Truth" (originally spelled "Give Me Some Truth") is a protest song written and performed by John Lennon. It was first released on his 1971 album Imagine. "Gimme Some Truth" contains various political references emerging from the time it was written, during the latter years of the Vietnam War.
Work on the song began as early as January 1969 during The Beatles' Get Back sessions, which would eventually evolve into Let It Be. Bootleg recordings of the group performing songs that would eventually go onto the members' solo recordings feature a few performances of "Gimme Some Truth".
The song expresses Lennon's frustration with deceptive politicians ("short-haired yellow-bellied sons of Tricky Dicky"), with hypocrisy, and with chauvinism ("tight-lipped condescending mommy's little chauvinists"). The song encapsulates some widely held feelings of the time, when many people were participating in protest rallies against their governments.
"Gimme Some Truth" uses a reference to the nursery rhyme "Old Mother Hubbard" (about a woman going to get her dog a bone, only to discover that her cupboard is empty) as verb. The song's mention of "soft-soap" employs that slang verb in its classic sense − i.e., insincere flattery that attempts to convince someone to do or to think something, as in the case of politicians who use specious or beguiling rhetoric to quell public unrest or to propagandise unfairly.
...
Wikipedia