War Is Over
Mark Ronson, Miley Cyrus, and Sean Ono Lennon did Happy Xmas (War Is Over)
on SNL, and the thing that struck me was how unafraid they were of the material. It would have been easy to make it contemporary, sand it down, update it into something safer. They didn’t.
The song comes from John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1971, built out of a campaign they’d run two years earlier. They rented billboard space in major cities—New York, LA, Toronto, Tokyo, Rome, Berlin—with a single line: War is over! If you want it! Happy Christmas from John & Yoko.
This was December 1969. Vietnam was still happening. America was divided, increasingly reluctant but still committed. The song distills their message down to something almost philosophical: that peace depends on wanting it, that we’re complicit in the systems we claim we can’t control. John said it best later—as long as people believe they’re powerless, they are. The song isn’t a cheerful holiday wish. It’s an assertion against fatalism.
The Fray covered it in 2006 and got it onto the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time. Other artists have tried since. But covering Lennon carries risk, especially something this direct. You either understand why it works or you don’t.
This version understands. The arrangement stays intact, the restraint stays intact. Cyrus doesn’t oversell it, doesn’t try to make it hers. And Sean Ono Lennon—he’s the literal connection between then and now, between John and whatever this song becomes. It’s not sentimental. It’s just factually true. He gets to carry forward something his parents made, and he does it right.
The strange part is how the song cuts both ways now. Fifty years on, we know that War is over if you want it
oversimplifies how power actually works—we’ve watched the public reject wars that happened anyway. But the song was never pretending to be prediction. It was always assertion. A refusal to accept fatalism as fact. Maybe that’s all it ever needed to be.