Yoko Ono

So I just read another article about Yoko Ono, this one promoting yet another album, no doubt unlistenable. This time, her son and some poor sap from Cibo Matto are grist for her mill. The interviewer, no doubt overwhelmed at the chance to interview THE Yoko Ono, gushed on about her place in music history and her influence on a generation of musicians.

To which I say HUH? Even Yoko Ono fans must admit they can't listen to her albums and whenever I hear the phrase "Yoko Ono Concert" I imagine a cacophony re-creatable only by an infinite number of monkeys dragging an infinite number of rakes across an infinite number of chalkboards.

Why does any one pretend to like her? Whose music has been influenced by Yoko Ono?

John Lennon's music as well.

She did a song from the album on The View the other week. I love her song "Walking On Thin Ice".

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"Whose music has been influenced by Yoko Ono?"

Wing

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Joe, I'm pretty sure at your ripe old age you've learned the life lesson that not everything is for everybody. Maybe the art of Yoko Ono is not for you and that's okay.

I bought Yoko's new album the day it was released and listened to it on auto-repeat three times. It's a terrific album, gorgeously produced by Sean. I'm sure without hearing it you "know" what it sounds like, or assume you do. And that's fine too, if you're not open to her kind of creativity, that's fine too.

She's got a dedicated fanbase who really love what she does. Around here I know there's me and Norn. She came out of the Fluxus movement and was a contemporary and colleague of John Cage. Her most obvious popular influences can be seen and heard in the music of the B-52s and Bjork.

Again, perhaps not to your taste but not dismissable. As others have noted she was a big influence on Mitchell and Trask's Hedwig & The Angry Inch. Trask reported bursting into tears when meeting her to work on the Hedwig tribute album.

She was a little girl in Japan when the US bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima. This fact completely informs her work and is what drives her heart-felt and constant messages of peace. She's a true original and is still pushing boundaries in her mid-70s. I love her and always will.

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And the t-shirt line she designed at HM is FIERCE.

I'm wearing one right now actually.

P

I have friends who bought Onobox, the 1992 career retrospective the day it was released as well. We all love her.

When her first American art retrospective "Y E S YOKO ONO" opened a month after September 11, 2001 at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT, Yoko's message of hope, peace, and the interconnectedness of all mankind could not have been more relevant. It was an exhibit that was clever, funny, insightful and profound in equal measure.

So you've seen examples, Joe, that disprove the sweeping generalizations you're making, which have the requisite amount of snark and sarcasm we all know so well. But as the MIT catalogue put it: ONO collaborated with such avant-garde figures as John Cage, George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, Andy Warhol, and Ornette Coleman ... . I hope this demonstrates that while you may not value what Yoko has done in her life, many people do.

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