The Ultimate Music Guide: Lennon

THESIS: This publication, one in a series of Ultimate Music Guides from the makers of the magazine Uncut, is a 148-page "John Lennon 70th birthday collectors' special" intending to review his complete discography, display rare photos, and long-unseen interviews.

Photo courtesy of zinio.com

FIVE FACTS: Uncut was launched in 1997 as "a monthly magazine aimed at 25- to 45-year-old men that focuses on music and movies." Former editor of the magazine Melody Maker Allan Jones edits for Uncut. It is owned by IPC Media. Each edition of the magazine comes with a free CD. The rate of a full-paged ad in Uncut is around £4,190, or $5,825.

BONUS FACTS: The Beatles signed 80% of their earnings to Apple Corps to avoid taxation in 1967. In a poll, Lennon was voted eighth of the Greatest Britons, between Queen Elizabeth I and Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson. Lennon was first inspired to get into rock after hearing Elivs's "Heartbreak Hotel." He was the last Beatle to land solo No. 1 hit. Lennon died after being shot four times by Mark Chapman on the 8th of December, 1980.

TRIUNE BRAIN: The neocortex and the limbic brain are given a good workout in reading this magazine. There are a lot of words for the brain to process, from long articles to quotes to small boxes featuring fun facts, accessing the neocortex. The 148 pages of content also heavily feature rare, limbic images of Lennon that are used to accentuate the articles, quotes, and stories about the man.

The small fun fact boxes are entitled "Gimme Some Truth!" to play off of one of Lennon's songs.

EIGHT TRENDS: This magazine issue speaks to an aesthetic shift. Instead of just looking at images of Lennon or just reading a singular article about him or just listening to one of his albums, it combines the experience. I can put on a Lennon song while the combined effect of reading about his death and looking at the accompanying pictures of his mourners for a really powerful combined, converged effect. It also references an epistemological shift. While the magazine features a lot of text, the photographs also receive a heavy focus and are even advertised on the front cover. Even when buying the magazine, I saw a woman pick up the magazine and flip through many of the pages just to look at the images before putting it back down, not appearing to have read any of the text.

SEVEN PRINCIPLES: Emotional transfer is a main principle utilized in this magazine. As a multimedia experience, the content speaks to the reader on an emotional level and, to quote the power tools, was "designed to transfer the emotion from one symbol or lifestyle onto another." Through the mixed media experience of photographs and different types of text about Lennon's solo career and eventual death, the reader truly feels like they know Lennon better by the end and are struck emotionally reading about his murder. Production techniques are also very important. Images, symbols, colors, arrangement, and font styles are all used to make an eye-catching, aesthetically pleasing, impacting magazine.

TWENTY-NINE PERSUASIVE TECHNIQUES: This magazine's most heavily utilized technique is nostalgia. It was put out to honor a musician who has passed on what would've been his 70th birthday by reviewing all of his solo albums (all released more than thirty years ago), showing rare photographs of him, and bringing back interviews that have gone "unseen for decades." It is all a nostalgic look on the career and impact he had when he was alive. In addition to nostalgia, the magazine makes use of testimonial - quotes from important figures in Lennon's life such as Yoko Ono, Jim Keltner, May Pang, and Lennon himself through former interviews.