ABC net : All we are saying is give Yoko Ono a chance (by Al Newstead)

Is there a more misunderstood and maligned artist than Yoko Ono?

Despite being one of the most iconic names in music history, her actual music is often overlooked. Maybe John Lennon was right when he called her "the world's most famous unknown artist."

Her discography — a daring body of work spanning many decades and multiple genres – isn't the first thing people think of when they hear her name. Instead, it's probably the many nasty ways Ono has been described by the public and press.

The Japanese artist has endured decades of vilification — dismissed as a screeching banshee, a  homewrecker, "no-talent charlatan" (as NME labelled her in 1999) and shockingly, "John Rennon's Excruisve Gloupie" (by Esquire in 1970).

She's challenged possibly only by Courtney Love as the Most Hated Woman in Rock.

Find any Ono performance online and you're almost guaranteed to be met with a comments section rife with sexist and racist insults. Never mind the venomous routines from comedians like Norm Macdonald and Bill Burr (Google it if you must).

But to her credit, Ono has weathered it all, eventually embracing the character assassination in the badass strut of her 1997 song, 'Yes, I'm A Witch'.

'Yes, i'm a witch / I'm a bitch
I don't care what you say
My voice is real / My voice speaks truth
I don't fit in your ways'

Worst of all, her legacy is often reduced to spiteful (and let's admit it, tired) jokes that she was the reason The Beatles broke up.

Let's put that myth to rest.

The Fab Four were more than capable of doing that themselves, as Paul McCartney and Lennon have said on record several times. And as Peter Jackson's exhaustive Get Back documentary clearly illustrated, Ono's presence in the group's final studio sessions was vastly exaggerated.

It's a frustrating, unjust situation. And one that's motivated a long-overdue appraisal in recent years, as newer generations have come to separate Yoko Ono's artistry from the half-century of vitriol that surrounds it. 

Celebrating her 90th birthday in February, Ono has begun to be celebrated for being a trailblazing experimental artist, anti-war activist, and progressive feminist light years ahead of her time.

And musicians have helped lead the way in this fresh wave of appreciation for somebody who deserved a little more peace, love and understanding.

Ono holds the admiration of alternative darlings ranging from The Flaming Lips to Peaches, Sonic Youth and Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard.

"Like a lot of people, I had a misconception about what the scope of her work was," Gibbard told Double J's Zan Rowe last year.

"I think a lot of people when they think of Yoko Ono in music, they think of the more avant-garde, challenging elements."

That reputation owes to her collaborative albums with Lennon, beginning with 1968's deeply experimental Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins and eventually spilling over into the Plastic Ono Band and Lennon's other solo work.

In truth, Ono's music spans well beyond the avant-garde, into prototype punk, new wave, art pop, electronic music, and verdant singer-songwriter material.

Gibbard discovered this first-hand when he took a punt and picked up a second-hand copy of Ono's 1973 album Feeling The Space one day.

"Got it home and put it on the turntable and what came out the speakers was not in any way what I was expecting. It was very lush, beautifully produced songs, great lyrics. All the things that I love about what I would call traditional songwriting."

"Over time, I would get into conversations about Yoko's music and it was very apparent that most people had an opinion about her music but not actually heard it."

In an effort to correct course, Gibbard curated Ocean Child: Songs of Yoko Ono - a tribute album coinciding with Ono's 89th birthday featuring David Byrne & Yo La Tengo, Japanese Breakfast, Sharon Van Etten, and more.

"I tried to put people's focus on the records from the early 70s into the 80s," he said. "Records like Feeling The Space, Approximately Infinite Universe, Season Of Glass. Those records were good places to start if people are not familiar with the work."

All of the artists involved understood the mission statement, said Gibbard, which was to bring a new audience to music that's been ignored and left to dwell in obscurity for too long.

"She's completely fearless…"

That's the quality Gibbard admires most about Yoko Ono, who he hailed as a "true artist".

"Every once in a while, you run into these people who are just always doing something creative. It's almost as if they cannot not be creative," he explained. "And a large part of embodying that is a sense of fearlessness.

"For Yoko to be in a relationship with arguably the most famous musician on the planet, and then be like 'Yeah, I've got something to say too. And I'm going to make my own records…'

"It was very clear to me that she was carving her own path and she wasn't allowing any of the naysayers or the cross-talk to affect her ability to achieve the objectives creatively that she was taking on."

That bold streak is deeply ingrained in all of Ono's endeavours, not just music.

It's worth remembering that long before she became part of the public consciousness, Ono was a prolific and respected artist working in multiple mediums: sculpture, filmmaker, author, performance and instructional artist.

"To see someone so flawlessly weave through multiple disciplines, and not only do them but do them so well, is something that we don't see that often in music and art. It's so rare," Gibbard remarked. "And to do them without pretence and with beauty and grace. It's really astounding."

One of the few women involved in New York's avant-garde arts circles of the 1960s, she helped pioneer the conceptual art movement as part of Fluxus – a network of creatives who emphasised the artist's concept as more important than the execution or finished product.

When The Beatles' 'Eight Days A Week' was topping the US charts in March 1965, Ono was at New York's Carnegie Hall, staging 'Cut Piece'. She would sit stoically as audience members were invited to take turns shearing off her clothes with a pair of scissors.

The performance has since been regarded as groundbreaking, an early example of evaporating the boundaries between artist and audience in a powerful feminist expression on rape culture and misogyny, long before those concepts gained footing in pop culture.

Ono first met Lennon in 1966, where she was preparing a London exhibition of her art. 

She'd never even heard of The Beatles but reportedly gifted John a copy of her book Grapefruit, which complied over 150 haiku-like instructions ranging from the absurd to the defiant.

Two days before his death in 1980, Lennon acknowledged in an interview that Grapefruit had directly inspired "the lyrics and the concept" of 'Imagine', his best-selling and arguably his most well-known solo work.

"[It] came from Yoko, but those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution," he admitted.

In June 2017, the National Music Publisher's Association officially altered the credits to list Ono as the song's co-writer and awarded her the 'Centennial Song' Award.

"This is the best time of my life," she said, accepting the correction of authorship nearly 50 years after the song was released.

A year later, she recorded her own haunting rendition of 'Imagine' for her 2018 album Warzone.

"An incredibly brave, strong, fascinating woman."

One musician who never had issues getting credit from John Lennon was Harry Nilsson.

Rising to fame in the '70s for popular re-interpretations of others' songs (did you know 'Everybody's Talkin' and 'Without You' are covers?), the singer-songwriter made a splash when he was name-checked by Lennon and McCartney at a 1968 press conference to announce the formation of Apple Records.

"One of the questions raised was: who's your favourite American artist? Lennon said Nilsson," Harry himself proudly recounted in a 1984 interview with the ABC.

"A few minutes later, someone said 'Paul, who's your favourite group?' And he said Nilsson!"

He became a close friend and collaborator to The Beatles, but particularly to Ringo Starr and Lennon

"I stayed at John's house, in fact it was the night that Yoko moved in and Cynthia [Lennon's first wife] moved out. So, we spent the night talking about what it's like to be lonely and divorced and making a new move. That was our first long night…"

The pair's antics became mythical, drinking and drugging their away around Los Angeles (somewhat chronicled in their 1974 collaborative album Pussy Cats) during Lennon's 'Lost Weekend' – a period to describe his separation from Yoko Ono.

Despite it all, Nilsson and Yoko were very close, defending her against critics accusing Ono of cashing in on Lennon's death. 

"That's silly! Firstly, she's independently wealthy so she wasn't cashing in on anything," he said.

"All the time they were spitting on her… she never once complained. She sat quietly in the background, yet she was an artist in her own right. She's an incredibly brave, strong, fascinating woman.”

Nilsson featured heavily on Every Man Has A Woman, a 1984 tribute album commemorating Ono's 50th birthday. 

He told ABC he got involved after a "very tearful and joyous reunion" with Yoko at her New York apartment, two-and-a-half years after Lennon was murdered outside the Dakota building.

"We were crying and laughing and reminiscing, and we got around to 'what are you doing?' She says, 'Some friends have been popping by and each one is going to do a song of mine… Elvis Costello, Roberta Flack, Eddie Money, Rosanne Cash..."

The songwriter effectively came out of retirement for the project. "I went into the studio and did [three songs] – sort of a gift. She liked them so much she put all three on there."

Nilsson says he ended up recording 11 songs - "next March, look for an album called Harry Does Yoko" - though the project remains unreleased. But he had praise for Ono's songwriting, saying her "range is enormous."

"It's very hard to listen to a Yoko album unless you're a real buff. And I listened to eight of them trying to find songs, which I thought I could handle. A lot of them are about loneliness… but on the other hand, she's extremely funny," he said, quoting her Season Of Glass track 'No, No, No'.

"It ranges from there to the saddest song you've ever heard in your life."

The 1984 tribute album also features John Lennon's recording of 'Every Man Has A Woman Who Loves Him'. Nilsson empahsises it's "the only song he ever recorded of hers... I guess he wasn't a fan," he chuckles.

It's probably not entirely mean-spirited – the musician had a famously sharp sense of humour – but even Nilsson couldn't resist the temptation of taking a dig at Yoko.

After nearly 50 years, it's practically become a global sport, one that kicked off due to Ono's work being viewed through the prism of The Beatles; the tension between a convention-defying radical having ties with one of history's most beloved and significant architects of modern pop music.

It's human nature to be afraid of what we don't understand, but it's a slippery slope from there to tearing it down and indulging your ignorance.

Yoko Ono's music isn't for everyone, nor is it designed to be.

You don't have to love it. You don't even have to 'get it' but it is worth reconsidering how and why the vindicative, widely-accepted caricature of Yoko Ono has persisted for so long.

Because as Lindsay Zoladz wisely wrote for Vulture in 2015:

"Beginning to love Yoko Ono is a dangerous experience, because then you wonder: If Yoko Ono was something more than the woman who broke up the Beatles, then what other lies have I been told?"

Influencing everyone from Ben Lee to Wu-Tang

Ono's brand of disruption has made her an alternative music figurehead, reaching some unlikely yet impactful places in the world of pop music.

'Rock Lobster', the breakout 1979 hit for The B-52's "purposefully channelled" Ono, as singer Kate Pierson explained to The New York Times in 2016.

"The therapeutic-emotional power of her screaming and what she did with her voice were very powerful and paved the way for punk, new wave, noise rock and other later styles," she said.

Kathleen Hanna would agree. "She's considered the first punk singer by many," the influential Bikini Kill frontwoman told Pitchfork. 

"Whether harsh, angry or pleading, Yoko Ono's music speaks back to oppression with an empathetic optimism that seems impossible to achieve," Hanna added.

Published in 2016 to coincide with the Yoko Ono Reissue Project - an undertaking to remaster and recreate her output from 1968 to 1985 - Pitchfork lined up indie darlings like Hanna, Peaches, ANOHNI and Kim Gordon to share their admiration. 

"Yoko, the outsider, the interloper into pop music culture via the enormous world of The Beatles, their fans and all their expectations," said Gordon. "Though what position could be more natural for an artist? To be an outsider, experimenter, a risk taker, a poetess, a feminist, a survivor."

In 2012, alongside her Sonic Youth partner Thurston Moore, Gordon teamed up with Ono on YOKOKIMTHURSTON – a collection of challenging improvisational music that celebrated their shared status as outsiders.

"I think Yoko is someone who has continually returned to trying different ways to do the same thing, which is break open our heads and our hearts and get us to think differently," says Australian songwriter Ben Lee. 

The recent J Files subject tells Double J that the courage Ono has shown in standing her ground and continually walking her own path is an ongoing source of inspiration. 

"When you think about how easy it is to conform and play the game in an industry as fickle as the music industry, the more courage you realise it takes to be an artist like Yoko, who has continually followed their own inner compass of what they wanted to do... Her approach, her willingness to stand in the middle of culture and be a total outsider." 

Lee even wrote a song called 'Yoko Ono' for his 2007 album The Rebirth Of Venus. 

"The entire message of her work has seemed to be about opening up to the unknown and to being more connected to nature, to mystery, and to intuition.

"When I wrote that song 'Yoko Ono' I was just thinking about how that's what the world needs now. She was ahead of her time asking those questions, bringing those messages to culture and maybe now we're ready to receive them."

And if you find Yoko's music a turn-off, you could always try getting high with her son...

"When I was about 19 years old, I was actually staying with Sean Lennon in the West Village," Lee recalls. "I took some mushrooms one day - sitting in the living room - and Sean came down... pulled out one of mum's records and put it on.

"In that space I was able to truly hear it for the first time. I was incredibly grateful because that was the moment I really did connect to her music and her art."

"Yoko is not making art for it to be easy to digest. She's deliberately doing it to provoke and open you up, to give you an experience and take you on a journey: 'This is meant to take you somewhere that you have been afraid to go before'."

Just as Ono's work has been getting a more positive critical re-evaluation in the last decade or so, she herself has revisited her own music, interrogating and reworking it with a newer generation of artists that count her as a major inspiration.

On 2007 remix project Yes, I'm A Witch everyone from Cat Power to Australia's own Sleepy Jackson assisted Ono in re-imgaining her output. A second volume, released in 2016, brought in Moby, Sparks, Miike Snow and Cibo Matto.

Over two nights in 2010 at L.A.'s Orpheum Theatre, she shared the stage with Iggy Pop, Lady Gaga (for both 'It's Been Very Hard' and 'The Sun Is Down'), and RZA of The Wu-Tang Clan.

"Working with Yoko was magical," the rapper-producer told The New York Times. "Plus I appreciated her stand for peace, for humanity. She has struggled, too; what she has faced as a woman has been tough enough but she's still here."

Her 2013 music video for 'Bad Dancer' featured an all-star cast, including Questlove, soul legend Roberta Flack, and surviving Beastie Boys Ad Rock and Mike D, who co-wrote and mixed the track.

When the video went viral for the wrong reasons – vocal detractors unable to handle the sight of an 80-year-old in a top hat and sheer leggings busting a move and having fun – Ono responded gracefully.

"I was amazed. I thought I had conquered racism, I conquered sexism, and there was ageism. I couldn't believe it," she told the New Zealand Herald, exhibiting the same gutsy determination she's always had.

"I ignore it, stepping on all those prejudices and working as if there's no problem."

It's that single-minded attitude that's ensured her endurance, persevering where many people would've have long since crumbled under the kind of pressures and poisonous backlash she's experienced for decades.

"I won't stop. No, I never think that. Artists are obsessive, they want to keep doing it. And I'm an artist," she told The Guardian in 2016 about the possibility of retiring.

"My sole interest is in creating something beautiful [and] when I say beautiful… well, the maximum beauty can be ugly to some people."

Her public appearances may have slowed somewhat but her legacy only seems to be growing. And we're sure Lennon would get a kick out of knowing that Yoko Ono is still challenging minds and causing mischief as a nonagenarian.

After all, as she herself once prophesied in her song, 'Yes, I'm A Witch':

'I'm not gonna die for you/ You might as well face the truth
I'm gonna stick around for quite a while.'

Article published on https://www.abc.net.au