No one envies the task that was set in front of the organizers of the 2022 Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony. The background geopolitical mood is grim, the ceremonies are always more low-key for the Winter Games, and it’s difficult to address the circumstances of the pandemic in a snappy dance number. Still, the show went on in the “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium, first built for the 2008 Summer Games, and it contained a rendition of the John Lennon and Yoko Ono song “Imagine,” as has become custom in these proceedings.
The song was a centerpiece of last July’s Tokyo Summer Games Opening Ceremony, as arranged by Hans Zimmer and sung by international pop stars John Legend, Angélique Kidjo, Keith Urban, and Alejandro Sanz. This Friday’s cover was more anonymous with no singer on stage, proof that it really has become an all-purpose Olympics anthem.
In general, the song has become a stand-in for a wish for a peaceful world. But for anyone who has actually listened to the lyrics of the 1971 hit, its real message of renunciation and spiritual unity is weirdly opposed to the existence of the Olympics, which is a competition for hunks of precious metal. What’s the point of saying, “Imagine there’s no countries,” when we’ve just spent 90 minutes watching a parade of flags?
The tradition seems to have started when Stevie Wonder sang “Imagine” at the Closing Ceremony for the 1996 Atlanta Games (after singing “Very Superstitious”) and was picked up again when Peter Gabriel contributed his rendition to the Opening Ceremony for the 2006 Winter Games in Turin. It was elevated to a real event for the 2012 Summer Games in London, and then made a comeback at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games Opening Ceremony, which was peace themed. It made the most sense in the U.K, where Lennon is still a national hero. That year, Ono premiered a short film called Imagine Peace at the sites throughout the U.K. where people could gather to watch the Games on large screens. Still, it drew some degree of controversy at the time, best seen in reports that Turkish state TV censored the “Imagine no religion” line.
Lennon himself had a pretty considered explanation for what that line really means. In 1980 he told Playboy, “If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion—not without religion but without this my-God-is-bigger-than-your-God thing.” It’s easy to appreciate his message in the context of the Beatles’ late-’60s forays into Eastern religion. But the song’s overuse as a global anthem has stripped it of Lennon’s extremely specific brand of spiritualism, and most listeners are not taking its implications very seriously. Stripped of that understanding, the opening line, “Imagine there’s no heaven,” is more foreboding than uplifting.
By the end of the ceremony, the misappropriation of enforced peace and secularism was hard to ignore. The proceedings concluded when the torch was lit by two Chinese athletes born in 2001, Nordic combined skier Zhao Jiawen and cross-country skier Dinigeer Yilamujiang. Yilamujiang is a member of the country’s Uyghur minority population, and commentators interpreted Chinese officials’ choice to have her light the torch as a response to criticism about the government’s human rights violations, included the reported policy of detaining and “reeducating” members of the Xinjiang Province–based Muslim community. When mixed with the treacly exhortations of “Imagine,” the choice is even more obvious as insulting propaganda.
We usually ignore all this because the simplicity of the song functions a bit like musical Esperanto. But if meaning really doesn’t matter, couldn’t we pick an Olympics anthem that isn’t quite so contradictory and lugubrious? What about “One Love” by Bob Marley or “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins? Or we could really go crazy and choose something motivating like UGK’s “Int’l Players Anthem” or “Bad and Boujee” by Migos? As Gal Gadot learned at the beginning of the pandemic, anything would be better than embarrassing ourselves with “Imagine.”
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