Few figures in popular culture have been as polarising as Yoko Ono. For a certain cohort of Beatles fans she is an interloper, a talentless, mercenary fraud who latched onto the leader of their favourite band, turned him weird and broke up the group. Some of those who think this way have made racist and misogynist remarks or jokes at Ms Ono’s expense. (She acknowledged the vitriol by releasing an album in 2007 entitled “Yes, I’m a Witch”.) As recently as 2020, Craig Brown’s well-received book, “One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time”, avoided such ugliness but implied that Ms Ono was a shrewd manipulator.
For another set of enthusiasts, however, Ms Ono is a heroine and an avant-garde musical godmother. They might point to Peter Jackson’s recent documentary series, “Get Back”, as evidence: it quietly demolishes the long-standing myth of Ms Ono as a baleful, disruptive presence at the Beatles’ recording sessions, abhorred by Lennon’s bandmates. More support for Ms Ono has arrived in the form of “Ocean Child”, a new tribute album, and a podcast of the same name. Benjamin Gibbard, the frontman of Death Cab For Cutie, a popular American indie-rock band, is the driving force behind these releases. “This is an artist whose output has run the gamut from avant-garde to bubblegum pop, often across a single album,” he has said. “For years, it has been my position that her songwriting has been criminally overlooked.”
These points of view—Ms Ono the canny operator and Ms Ono the daring artist—are not always as incompatible as they may seem. To most of the world, Ms Ono is now best known as the custodian of Lennon’s legacy. Her efforts in that regard have been an effective (and profitable) form of hagiography, presenting him as the secular saint he very much wasn’t, smoothing over his many and profound flaws, making him more benign, more bland and a great deal less interesting. Yet this has no bearing on the merits of her own music, always unjustly overshadowed by the oeuvre of her late husband—even in his lifetime and despite his best efforts.
Ms Ono had no greater artistic advocate than Lennon, and this wasn’t mere uxoriousness. She was a visual and performance artist of some repute when they met. She had staged the notorious “Cut Piece” in 1964, in which the audience would gradually shred her clothes with scissors, sometimes leaving her all but naked—startling enough in any context, but truly audacious at the time in her hidebound native Japan. Her fearless approach to her work transformed Lennon’s own attitude and influenced his finest solo music.
She had studied music extensively: first classical and opera (like her late father, Ono Eisuke, she is a talented pianist), as well as traditional Japanese forms, then avant-garde composition under its leading light, John Cage. Not until she and Lennon joined forces did art-rock become her primary focus; what her detractors considered intrusive opportunism, her admirers saw as imaginative adaptation. Finding herself in the company of major rock musicians, she threw her energies into this new milieu. In one early manifestation she joined an impromptu ensemble, The Dirty Mac, as part of “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus” (1968). Alongside Lennon, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and a classical violinist, Ivry Gitlis, she generated her trademark unearthly keening that, at the time, was derided as unmusical indulgence and in hindsight prefigures successive waves of experimental sounds.
As a visual artist, Ms Ono has often been prone to whimsy and this attribute would reappear in some of her music. The selection of songs on “Ocean Child” highlights this tendency, while also illuminating her gift for the impressionistic and the intimate. The album’s contributors include such established artists as David Byrne, Yo La Tengo, Sharon Van Etten and The Flaming Lips, and notable female Asian or Asian-American performers such as Thao, Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast, and Satomi Matsuzaki of Deerhoof.
To hear Ms Ono’s music at its sharpest, you should go back to the source, in particular the four powerful, adventurous and wildly varied albums she released within a three-year period at the start of the 1970s. The influence of that work resonates in the output of Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Lydia Lunch and Nirvana, among others. “Season of Glass”, a solo album released in 1981, as well as “Walking on Thin Ice”, a dancefloor single released that year, also deserve a hearing. A year after “Walking on Thin Ice”, in 1982, Steve Miller Band would have a huge global hit with “Abracadabra”, a jaunty number which bears a remarkable resemblance in style and sound to Ms Ono’s daring, eerie track. This was neither the first time nor the last that another artist would achieve greater commercial success with an idea Ms Ono had pioneered.
Much as her famous performance-art piece jolted the art world, Ms Ono’s music shocked pop with its stark and unnerving nakedness. Lennon was her earliest disciple, but any artist willing to confront their rawest fears and emotions, then to vocalise them with visceral, almost childlike abandon, is following in her footsteps. ■