What Is the Relationship Between Art, Activism, and Personal Integrity?

They're inseparable, aren't they? I didn't start out thinking I was going to be an activist. I was just a musician. But then you wake up — really wake up — and you realize that if you have a platform, you have a responsibility. Staying silent is a choice too. It's just a choice to support the status quo.

The thing about art is that it's always political, whether you admit it or not. Even if you're singing love songs, you're making a statement about what matters. With the Beatles, we were just boys trying to make music, but the fact that we existed — four working-class lads from Liverpool — that was a political act in 1960s England. The way we looked, the way we sounded, the fact that we wouldn't bow and scrape to authority, all of that was challenging something.

But I was a coward for a long time. I said things in interviews but I didn't really commit to anything. I was worried about losing fans, losing money, losing credibility as a "serious artist." Then I met Yoko and she showed me what it actually means to put your body where your mouth is. The bed-ins were ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous — we were mocked, called naive, called frauds. But we were trying to use the one thing we had, which was attention, to say something about peace.

The hardest part is accepting that your art and your activism have to be integrated with your actual life. You can't sing about peace and then be a bastard to your wife. You can't sing about equality and then treat people who work for you like servants. That hypocrisy will eat you alive, and people can smell it.

Personal integrity means you're willing to be wrong, publicly, and change. It means you're willing to lose things — money, friends, respect — because you believe something. It means your private life and your public statements have to be aligned, or you're just performing, and performing is what we were trying to escape in the first place.