10 Greatest Diss Tracks In Rock History
1. How Do You Sleep? - John Lennon
It's really disheartening seeing how ugly the fallout of the Beatles became after the '60s. With their record label Apple tying them to the same spot and the rest of the group starting to fall apart due to business conflicts, it was time for the Fabs to go to their own corners and hash out their own musical ideas. Then again, John Lennon wasn't going to mince words when talking about his dirty laundry either.
After the primal release of emotion he brought across on his debut solo album Plastic Ono Band, Lennon took offense to Paul McCartney's song Too Many People, which called him out for being too preachy in his songs. Bringing on all the other Beatles except McCartney for his next album Imagine, How Do You Sleep? is a pure message of spite back at Lennon's former writing partner, with some lines that would make the Cute Beatles' harshest critics wince.
From one verse to the next, Lennon is savage in taking his collaborator to task, remarking that the only good song he had was Yesterday and that maybe the conspiracy theorists had a point in saying that McCartney was dead halfway through the Beatles' tenure, almost as if he had run out of quality material. Culminating in the rhetorical "How do you sleep at night?," this song is a heartbreaking picture of just how bitter it got in the early '70s. Though McCartney was going to write a follow-up called Quite Well, Thank You, nothing can compete with this savage assault on one of pop music's greatest writers.