John Lennon’s most controversial song left off Power To The People

Music Related | 15th Aug, 2025 theBeat.ie

On August 30, 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band stepped onto the stage at Madison Square Garden for two legendary shows. This wasn’t just another night of rock history, it was Lennon’s only full-length concert after leaving The Beatles, and the last time he and Yoko would ever perform a full set together.

Now, decades later, those concerts are being celebrated in the new Power to the People box set, packing in 31 tracks from both performances. But there’s one song you won’t find in there, and its absence has fans talking.

When the box set was announced, Lennon diehards immediately started speculating: would it include the politically charged numbers from the era? Songs like the pro-IRA Sunday Bloody Sunday and Luck of the Irish? Or the ones calling attention to the Attica prison uprising, John Sinclair’s imprisonment, and Angela Davis’s incarceration? But looming over all of these was one track that stirred more debate than any other, Woman Is the N***** of the World..

The song was born from a phrase Yoko Ono had used in a Nova magazine interview, saying women were the most oppressed group on the planet. Lennon, inspired and mentored by Yoko’s feminist thinking, ran with it. He later explained that part of his inspiration came from Irish revolutionary James Connolly, who once said, the female worker is the slave of the slave.

When Lennon premiered the track on The Dick Cavett Show, Cavett actually apologized in advance to middle America for what they were about to hear, though he later joked that most complaints were about his apology, not the song. Feminist critics bristled at the song’s portrayal of women as passive victims, but the real controversy for most people wasn’t the message, it was the blunt, unfiltered use of the n-word. Unsurprisingly, most radio stations wouldn’t touch it.

Still, Lennon found an unlikely defender in Congressman Ron Dellums, the first African American elected to Congress from Northern California. Dellums argued that if being a n***** meant having your life, opportunities, and role in society defined by others, then most people in America fit that definition, regardless of race.

Whether you agree with Lennon’s framing or not, one thing’s clear: the song’s ability to spark outrage hasn’t faded. In fact, in today’s climate, it might be even more incendiary than it was back in 1972.