Yoko Ono
Abrasive primal screams meet sophisticated feminist pop. A fearless collision of conceptual art and raw rock energy for the uncompromising listener.
Abrasive primal screams meet sophisticated feminist pop. A fearless collision of conceptual art and raw rock energy for the uncompromising listener.
Listening to Yoko Ono is a confrontation with the absolute present. Her music oscillates between delicate, whispered confessions and explosive, non-verbal vocalizations that bypass the intellect to hit something primal. It is the sound of a woman refusing to be small, using her voice as both a scalpel and a battering ram against traditional song structures.
What sets her apart is the radical vulnerability baked into the noise. While her 1970s work with the Plastic Ono Band prefigured the jagged edges of punk and the rhythmic cool of new wave, her later forays into dance music proved her instinct for melody was always there, just waiting for the right context. She treats the recording studio like a gallery space, where silence is as important as a scream.
Start with 'Approximately Infinite Universe' for a masterclass in feminist blues-rock, or dive into 'Fly' if you want to experience her most daring avant-garde explorations. It is music that demands an opinion, rewarding those who listen past the controversy to hear the visionary underneath.
Yoko Ono (Japanese: 小野 洋子, romanized: Ono Yōko, usually spelled in katakana as オノ・ヨーコ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese artist, musician, activist, and filmmaker. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York City in 1952 to join her family. She became involved with New York City's downtown artists scene in the early 1960s, which included the Fluxus group, and became widely known outside the contemporary art world in 1969 when she married English musician John Lennon of the Beatles, with whom she would subsequently record as a duo in the Plastic Ono Band. The couple used their honeymoon as a stage for public protests against the Vietnam War with what they called a bed-in. She and Lennon remained married until he was murdered in front of the couple's apartment building, The Dakota, on December 8, 1980. Together, they had one son, Sean, who later also became a musician. Ono began a career in popular music in 1969, forming the Plastic Ono Band with Lennon and producing a number of avant-garde music albums in the 1970s. She achieved commercial and critical success in 1980 with the chart-topping album Double Fantasy, a collaboration with Lennon that was released three weeks before his murder, winning the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. To date, she has had twelve number one singles on the US Dance charts, and in 2016 was named the 11th most successful dance club artist of all time by Billboard magazine. Many musicians have paid tribute to Ono as an artist in her own right and as a muse and icon, including Elvis Costello who recorded his version of "Walking on Thin Ice" with the Attractions for the Every Man Has a Woman tribute album to Yoko Ono, the B-52's, Sonic Youth and Meredith Monk. As Lennon's widow, Ono works to preserve his legacy. She funded the Strawberry Fields memorial in Manhattan's Central Park, the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland, and the John Lennon Museum in Saitama, Japan (which closed in 2010). She has made significant philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace and disaster relief in Japan and the Philippines, and other such causes. In 2002, she inaugurated a biennial $50,000 LennonOno Grant for Peace. In 2012, she received the Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt Human Rights Award and co-founded the group Artists Against Fracking.
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