re: #46 Unabogie

In defense of Yoko, I will say that I fully admit that her singing is not a pleasant sound. That’s a given. But I do think she had interesting ideas about modern art, and that everyone saying that “Yoko broke up the Beatles,” as if John Lennon wasn’t a fully formed man with agency in his own artistic life, is kind of messed up and misogynistic.

Yoko Ono has had an interesting life. She was born into an elite Japanese family, went to the Peers School (Gakushūin) for high school and started at Gakushūin University. She then went to the USA in 1952 and did quite a bit of stuff in NYC avant-garde circles prior to meeting Lennon in the late 1960s. She has lived over 40 years since he died. During pretty much all that time she has done art, music, various installations and suchlike. It would be interesting to compare and contrast her with the artist Yayoi Kusama, who is four years older, born pretty solidly middle class, who is also an artist (trained in Nihonga painting), who also came to the USA in the mid-1950s but left in 1972 to go to Japan. I would suspect it’s us Olds who know the name Yoko Ono, but Yayoi Kusama is probably more famous among the young for her artwork, particularly her Infinity Room installations and her dot artworks.

Oh yeah, there’s a video of Plastic Ono band performing Instant Karma and Yoko Ono is not singing. Instead, she is sitting in a chair, blindfolded with a menstruation pad,* and crocheting. As someone who has spent a good chunk of my life crocheting, I am rather in awe. Not anyone could do that.

* It wasn’t until many years later that I learned it was a menstruation pad, which were the bane of my early teen years. Yeah, I hated them too.