Yoko Ono is perhaps one of the most reviled women of the last 50 years. She spent decades being mercilessly torn apart in the press, with NME calling her a “no-talent charlatan” as late as 1999. This trend has continued on social media, with almost every video featuring Ono or her music being accompanied by innumerable comments full of misogynistic and racist insults, conspiracy theories, and worst of all, frequent suggestions that she should have been murdered alongside or instead of her late husband.
The hatred of Ono seems to be two-fold, on one side there’s the backlash against her relationship with John Lennon and the perceived impact it had on the Beatles, and on the other is the derision directed at her own creative output.
Yoko Ono met John Lennon in 1966 while preparing her conceptual art exhibition at the Indica Gallery in London, and they started a correspondence. Their relationship began while John was married to his first wife, Cynthia, who went on to divorce him in 1968 after discovering his affair with Ono. The image of Ono as homewrecker is one that she would struggle to shake, and overlays the way she has been viewed by some in the world of the Beatles; as an interloper.
It’s clear that Ono had a huge influence on Lennon musically, in 1968 Lennon penned the Beatles track ‘Julia’ about his late mother. The song features the line “ocean child calls me” — a reference to the translation of Ono’s first name literally being ‘child of the sea’. The inspiration Ono provided became more and more overt, eventually spilling over into the creation of the Plastic Ono Band and Lennon’s other solo projects. Because of this and her involvement with the Beatles, including sitting in on recordings, she is often blamed for the break up of the band. Though both Lennon and Paul McCartney have denied this, claiming the band were already struggling before Ono arrived on the scene.
Some have gone so far to imply that Ono’s influence on Lennon was insidious, that he was ‘under her spell’ and controlled by her. Rumours which Lennon himself responded to in a 1980 interview, claiming that they were “an insult” and stating, “nobody controls me. I’m uncontrollable. The only one who controls me is me, and that’s just barely possible.”
Much of the negativity surrounding Ono rests on the idea that she has no talent or creativity of her own, instead latching onto Lennon’s. Which is nonsensical, as she was already a successful artist in her own right before she met him. Her work ‘Cut Piece’ is a seminal piece of performance art, and has been repeatedly restaged. Ono would sit passively and invite audience members to approach and cut off a piece of her clothing to keep. It’s a provocative act even now, and one which still inspires much debate.
(Reproduced from: http://es.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2015/may/18/yoko-ono-s-cut-piece-explained/)
As well as art, Ono has produced a great deal of fascinating music. A classically trained pianist, she has a rich back catalogue of albums, including solo work as well as her joint ventures with Lennon. One aspect of her music which is frequently ridiculed is her voice, as she will often scream as well as sing. The song ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow)’ is particularly noted for Ono’s distraught-sounding screaming. The song is about her daughter Kyoko, who was kidnapped by her father aged 8, and who Ono didn’t see again for decades. I think her distress is warranted, and makes for an incredibly moving piece.
Much of her music may be bizarre, or off putting, but I admire a woman who can feel and perform so authentically, and not care whether or not people find it coarse or odd.
She has also performed more traditional ballads, with one of the most famous being ‘Mrs Lennon’, a haunting lament regarding her anxiety about losing her identity in the wake of her marriage — “Mrs. Lennon, oh Mrs. Lennon, making the tea and watching the sea…”
In 2017 Ono was finally given a song-writing credit for ‘Imagine’ by the National Music Publishers Association at an event where they played a clip of Lennon saying it “should be credited as a Lennon-Ono song. A lot of it — the lyric and the concept — 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.” Clearly, she had, and still has, a lot to creatively offer.
Ono has reflected on the negative responses to her life and work on a number of occasions, though perhaps never more clearly than in her 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,
I’m not gonna die for you,
You might as well face the truth,
I’m gonna stick around for quite awhile.”
Now aged 87, she certainly has done that.
