Originality is Just a Fresh Spin on Twelve Notes, and Trying Too Hard Misses the Point

In his final major interview—the September 1980 Playboy conversation with David Sheff conducted just months before his death—John Lennon stated plainly: “All music is rehash. There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme.”

This statement perfectly captures Lennon’s pragmatic, anti-pretentious view of musical creation that he maintained throughout his career. For Lennon, music wasn’t about revolutionizing anything—it was about loving the sounds that came before, replicating what moved you, and being honest about the fact that you’re working with the same twelve notes everyone else has been using, ever since someone figured out how to divide an octave. This philosophy shaped not only how the Beatles created music but how Lennon understood his own place in rock and roll history: not as an inventor, but as an enthusiastic participant in a continuous cultural conversation that’s been happening since Black musicians in America created the sound he spent his life trying to recreate. 🎶

What “Rehash” Actually Means (And Why Lennon Thought it Was Fine)

When Lennon said “all music is rehash,” he wasn’t being cynical—he was being honest about how music actually works. New songs aren’t truly original in the sense of inventing something from nothing. They’re blends, remixes, variations on existing themes, notes, and styles. Every generation borrows from the past, building on the same simple musical elements that have been around forever. And according to Lennon, that’s not a bug—it’s a feature. 🎵

Music history backs him up completely. The Beatles borrowed from blues, folk, and early rock and roll. Led Zeppelin built entire albums on blues progressions that were old when Robert Johnson was playing them. R.E.M. took Byrds-style jangle and made it their own. Creativity doesn’t lie in inventing entirely new elements—it lies in how you combine the familiar ones. The skill isn’t creating something from nothing; it’s putting a fresh spin on old ideas. Like the Bee Gees reinterpreting Beatles-esque harmonies for the disco era, or the Ramones stripping rock down to three chords played faster and louder than anyone thought possible. 🎸

The math supports this too: there are only twelve notes in Western music, and only so many chord progressions that human ears find pleasing. Most music is variations on themes because there’s a limited number of themes to vary. Artists consistently build on their predecessors—rock and roll built on blues, pop built on rock, hip-hop sampled everything that came before and made that sampling explicit. As TED speaker Kirby Ferguson explains, creativity is fundamentally about “copy, transform, and combine.” Remixing isn’t cheating—it’s how music has always worked, and in the digital age we’ve just become more honest about acknowledging it. 💿

Lennon understood this intuitively: musical lineage isn’t about plagiarism, it’s about conversation. You take what moves you, you transform it through your own voice and perspective, and you pass it forward for the next generation to remix. Innovation happens in the variation, not in pretending you’ve invented something nobody’s ever heard before. 🌟

Music as “Love In,” Not “Rip Off”: The Beatles’ Transparent Imitation

Lennon was remarkably transparent about the Beatles’ initial focus being imitation rather than innovation, and he never apologized for it because he didn’t see it as something that required apology. In letters and interviews discussing the band’s early influences, he made the argument that homage is not plagiarism—it’s celebration, it’s love, it’s the most honest form of flattery when you’re trying to sound exactly like the records that changed your life. The early Beatles repertoire was essentially a covers band’s setlist: Black American R&B and rock and roll songs like “Money (That’s What I Want),” “Twist and Shout,” “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Please Mr. Postman”—songs written and originally performed by Black artists that four white kids from Liverpool were attempting to recreate with varying degrees of success and complete sincerity. 🎤

Lennon stated in defense of this approach:

“It was only natural that we tried to do it as near to the record as we could… The one thing we always did was to make it known that these were black originals, we loved the music and wanted to spread it in any way we could. It wasn’t a rip off, it was a love in.”

The Beatles weren’t trying to invent new notes or discover harmonies that nobody had used before—they were trying to capture the feeling they got when they heard Chuck Berry or Little Richard or the Shirelles, and if that meant using the same three chords those artists used, that was perfect. The idea that this made them less “original” would have struck Lennon as missing the entire point of rock and roll. 🎵

Rejecting Complexity as Pretension

Throughout his career, even during the Beatles’ most experimental phases, Lennon always championed the simplicity and raw energy of rock and roll, which is built on familiar, limited scales like the five-note pentatonic scale that’s been the foundation of popular music across cultures for centuries. This commitment to simplicity supports the interpretation that he felt songwriting was inherently repetitive—and that this repetition wasn’t a flaw to overcome but rather the essence of what made rock and roll work. After the psychedelic period of Sgt. Pepper’s and Magical Mystery Tour, Lennon grew increasingly vocal about wanting to return to basics, to strip away the orchestration and production tricks and get back to the “same bit” he’d been chasing since he first heard Elvis. 🎸 He generally preferred “primitive” rock over “intellectual” rock, but he did remain proud of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I Am the Walrus” until his death, viewing them as personal “journalism” rather than mere orchestral fluff.

In a 1968 Rolling Stone interview that captures his thinking perfectly, Lennon pointed to a pile of 1950s records and said: “I dig them now and I’m still trying to reproduce ‘Some Other Guy’ sometimes, or ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula.’

He saw the complex, psychedelic period as “pretentious” in retrospect—pretentious not because it was bad music, but because it suggested that rock and roll needed to be dressed up in literary imagery and orchestral arrangements to be legitimate. The simpler, familiar structures of basic rock and roll were truer to what he cared about: energy, feeling, the sound of a voice and guitar cutting through without interference. 🎶

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Practicality Over Theory: Intuitive Music-Making with Inherited Tools

The Beatles famously did not read or write sheet music, a fact that shocked the classical musicians George Martin would occasionally bring into Abbey Road sessions. They understood music intuitively and pragmatically rather than theoretically, which reinforced the idea that they were simply using the established building blocks of popular music without needing to understand why those building blocks worked or what made them theoretically interesting. This practical, anti-intellectual approach to music-making is central to understanding Lennon’s philosophy about originality: he wasn’t trying to understand the music, he was trying to make it, and you make it by using the tools that everyone else uses because those tools work. 🎹

The Beatles relied heavily on familiar chord progressions like the classic I-V-vi-IV sequence (the progression behind “Let It Be,” “Don’t Stop Believin’,” and approximately 47% of all pop songs ever written), and they applied what might be called a “catchiness test” to their songwriting: if they couldn’t remember a tune easily after working on it, they abandoned it as too complicated or not immediate enough.

Lennon’s approach to lyrics followed similar logic: he valued directness over cleverness, emotion over wordplay (most of the time—he could be quite clever when he wanted to be, but he didn’t think cleverness was the goal). His best lyrics feel like someone talking to you rather than performing for you, and that conversational quality comes from using familiar language in familiar ways to express familiar emotions. “All You Need Is Love” isn’t profound because it’s saying something nobody’s ever said before—it’s saying something everyone’s said before, but saying it with conviction and simplicity that makes the cliché feel true again. The same notes, the same words, the same sentiments that have been there forever, arranged in ways that feel real. 💭

What This Means for Understanding Lennon’s Legacy

Lennon’s philosophy about musical originality—that it’s all the same notes, all repetitive, all building on what came before—has profound implications for how we understand his work and his place in rock history. If we take him at his word (and Lennon was remarkably honest about these things, perhaps to a fault), then the Beatles’ “genius” wasn’t about inventing new musical possibilities but rather about using familiar tools with conviction, energy, and emotional honesty that made old sounds feel urgent again. They were successful not because they did something nobody had done before, but because they did what everyone had done before with enough enthusiasm and skill that it felt fresh to listeners who maybe hadn’t heard those particular combinations quite that way. 🌟

This perspective also challenges how we think about “influence” and “originality” in popular music more broadly. If Lennon is right that all music is inherently derivative—that we’re all using the same twelve notes arranged in patterns that humans find pleasing, drawing on the same limited vocabulary of chords and rhythms—then evaluating artists based on their “originality” misses what actually matters. What matters is the feeling, the conviction, the honesty of expression, the ability to make familiar elements feel immediate and real. The Beatles didn’t need to invent new notes; they needed to capture the excitement they felt when they heard “That’ll Be the Day” or “Long Tall Sally,” and in capturing that excitement using the same tools Buddy Holly and Little Richard used, they created something that felt new to their audience even if it wasn’t technically novel. 🎸

Lennon’s philosophy is also remarkably democratic in its implications: if music is just using the same notes that have always been there, then nobody has a monopoly on creativity, and the kid in Liverpool who can’t read music has just as much right to make rock and roll as the conservatory-trained composer. You don’t need special knowledge or rare gifts—you need to love the sound, to chase it with enough dedication that you develop your own version of it, to be honest about your influences while adding your own emotional truth.