Mentions of fools can be found in the songs of many bands. However, some rock musicians went much further and staged April Fool's Day pranks that had the most extraordinary consequences. Among such prankster musicians, it is worth highlighting John Lennon, who, as everyone knows, had a particularly subtle sense of humor.
An attentive listener, having put on John's album “Mind Games” from 1973, will notice at the end of the first side of the record a few extra silent seconds, which last longer than is intended for the separation of tracks. Someone will say that this is just the end of the previous song, “Bring On the Lucie (Freda Peeple)”, which slowly fades away. But no! These four seconds of silence are highlighted as a separate composition and are even indicated on the album cover as “Nutopian International Anthem” – “International Anthem of Nutopia”.
What is this mysterious silent hymn? And what does Nutopia have to do with it?
To answer this, let’s go back six months to the release of “Mind Games.” On April 1, 1973, John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged another, typical performance of theirs — they founded a fictional virtual country called Nutopia. The next day, they announced it to the world at a press conference in New York, reading a declaration of the founding of the new state that they had signed the day before (and later included in the album cover along with the lyrics).
“We announce the birth of the conceptual country of Nutopia. Citizenship of the country can be obtained by declaring your awareness of Nutopia. In Nutopia there is no land, no borders, no passports, only people. Nutopia has no laws except cosmic ones. All people who live in Nutopia are ambassadors of the country. As two ambassadors of Nutopia, we request diplomatic immunity and recognition in the United Nations for our country and its people.”
The name of the country was a combination of two words: “new” and “utopia.” Thus, Notopia became a living embodiment of Lennon’s vision of an ideal society, so vividly described by him two years earlier in the song “Imagine,” a state without religion, government, or territory; where anyone could freely accept or reject citizenship.
True, at that time the only neo-utopians were John and Yoko themselves, but by all other standards, Nutopia could be described as a completely normal microstate.
The country's flag consisted of only one color – white, by analogy with the cover of the Beatles' “White Album”, which symbolized freedom. However, journalists saw this as a symbol of surrender, to which Lennon, waving a white cloth at a conference, replied to them as follows: “We surrender to the world and love.”
Nutopia also had its own seal. On it, John depicted a seal holding a ball with yin and yang symbols on its nose, which can be explained by a clever play on words (the English word “seal” means both “seal” and “seal”), or a reference to another pinniped, which Lennon once declared himself to be in the song “I am the Walrus.”
You've heard the national anthem before. It's the most minimalist and original composition of all time, recorded for the album “Mind Games” in the summer of 1973.
To top it all off, the Lennons opened a Nutopian embassy in their New York apartment in the Dakota. The sign was not near the main entrance, but near the black kitchen entrance to the apartment, but that didn't stop anyone from finding the embassy.
Here's a hilarious May Day joke. Or maybe John Lennon wasn't joking at all?
Having moved to the United States at the end of 1971 and having, from the point of view of the American authorities, a dubious reputation as a political activist, Lennon was unable to obtain permanent residency in the country for a long time.
Indeed, a week before the press conference at which Nutopia was presented, the musician was served with a deportation order. Therefore, the creation of a fictional state in which John would be an ambassador with diplomatic immunity became the only, albeit very naive, way to end this immigration red tape and at the same time ridicule the actions of the American government.
This explains why Nutopia lasted only 3 years.
After John Lennon received his green card in 1976, the urgent need for Nutopia as a tool for pressuring the US authorities disappeared. Attention to it from Lennon and the media naturally faded.
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