"Village Voice" critic Robert Christgau described "Instant Karma!" as Lennon's "best political song", while some other reviewers consider it to be the artist's finest post-Beatles recording. In their 1975 book "", Roy Carr and Tony Tyler describe "Instant Karma!" as a "snappy little rocker" that "owes as much to the skilful production of Phil Spector as to the vitality of the overall performance", on which "rummer Alan White excels." Carr and Tyler remark that "Who Has Seen the Wind?" "would have made a marvellous soundtrack for the movie of Henry James' 'The Turn of the Screw', being a somewhat sinister ditty sung "à la Wunderkind"". Another to highlight White's drumming amid the "collective genius" of all the musicians on "Instant Karma!", author Robert Rodriguez concludes of Lennon's activities on 27 January 1970: "Not many days in the history of rock and roll proved as everlastingly fruitful." In 1981, "NME" critic Bob Woffinden wrote of the single: "It was excellent. Lennon was characteristically simple and direct, but this time on a song with one of those magically catchy refrains."