Yoko Ono
Encyclopedia
is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist
, known for her work in avant-garde
art, music and filmmaking
as well as her marriage to John Lennon
. Ono brought feminism
to the forefront in her music which prefigured New Wave music
(whether she was a direct influence is still debated) and is known for her philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace and AIDS
outreach programs.
(also known as the Peers School), one of the most exclusive schools in Japan.
In 1940, the family moved to New York City, where Ono's father was working. In 1941, her father was transferred to Hanoi
and the family returned to Japan. Ono was then enrolled in Keimei Gakuen, an exclusive Christian
primary school run by the Mitsui
family. She remained in Tokyo through the great fire-bombing of March 9, 1945. During the fire-bombing, she was sheltered with other members of her family in a special bunker in the Azabu
district of Tokyo, far from the heavy bombing. After the bombing, Ono went to the Karuizawa
mountain resort with members of her family.
Ono has said that she and her family were forced to beg for food while pulling their belongings in a wheelbarrow; and it was during this period in her life that Ono says she developed her "aggressive" attitude and understanding of "outsider" status when children taunted her and her brother, who were once well-to-do. Other stories have her mother bringing a large number of goods with them to the countryside which they bartered for food. One famous anecdote has her mother bartering a German-made sewing machine for sixty kilograms of rice with which to feed the family. Her father remained in the city and, unbeknownst to them, was believed to have been eventually incarcerated
in a prisoner of war camp in China. In an interview by Democracy Nows Amy Goodman
on October 16, 2007, Ono explained, "He was in French Indochina
which is Vietnam
actually... in Saigon. He was in a concentration camp."
By April 1946, Gakushuin
was reopened and Ono was enrolled. The school, located near the imperial palace
, had not been damaged by the war, and Ono found herself a classmate of Akihito
, the future emperor of Japan. She graduated in 1951 and was accepted into the philosophy program of Gakushuin University
, the first woman to enter the department. However, after two semesters, she left the school.
after the war. She left Japan to rejoin the family and enrolled in nearby Sarah Lawrence College
. While her parents approved of her college choice, they were dismayed at her lifestyle, and, according to Ono, chastised her for befriending people they considered to be "beneath" her. In spite of this, Ono loved meeting artists, poets and others who represented the "bohemian
" freedom she longed for herself. Visiting galleries and art "happening
s" in the city whetted her desire to publicly display her own artistic endeavors. La Monte Young
, her first important contact in the New York art world, helped Ono start her career by using her Chambers Street
loft in Tribeca
as a performance space. At one performance, Ono set a painting on fire; fortunately John Cage
had advised her to treat the paper with flame retardant
.
In 1956, she married composer
Toshi Ichiyanagi
. They divorced in 1962 after living apart for several years. On November 28 that same year, Ono married an American named Anthony Cox. Cox was a jazz musician, film producer and art promoter. He had heard of Ono in New York and tracked her down to a mental institution in Japan, where her family had placed her following a suicide
attempt. Ono had neglected to finalize her divorce from Ichiyanagi, so their marriage was annulled on March 1, 1963 and Cox and Ono married again on June 6. Their daughter, Kyoko Chan Cox, was born two months later on August 8, 1963.
The marriage quickly fell apart but the Coxes stayed together for the sake of their joint career. They performed at Tokyo's Sogetsu
Hall with Ono lying atop a piano played by John Cage
. Soon the Coxes returned to New York with Kyoko. In the early years of this marriage, Ono left most of Kyoko's parenting to Cox while she pursued her art full-time and Tony managed publicity. After she divorced Cox on February 2, 1969, Ono and Cox engaged in a bitter legal battle for custody of Kyoko, which resulted in Ono being awarded full custody. However, in 1971, Cox disappeared with eight-year-old Kyoko, in violation of the custody order. Cox subsequently became a Christian and raised Kyoko in a Christian group known as the Church of the Living Word (or "the Walk"). Cox left the group with Kyoko in 1977. Living an underground existence, Cox changed the girl's name to Rosemary. Cox and Kyoko sent Ono a sympathy message after Lennon's 1980 murder. Afterwards, the bitterness between the parents lessened slightly and Ono publicly announced in People Magazine that she would no longer seek out the now-adult Kyoko, but still wished to make contact with her. In 1994, Kyoko made contact with Ono and established a relationship.
, a loose association of Dada
-inspired avant-garde
artists that developed in the early 1960s. Fluxus founder George Maciunas
, a friend of Ono's during the 1960s, admired her work and promoted it with enthusiasm. One of Ono's well known examples is when she took a fly as her alter ego and was inspired by this for her work. Maciunas invited Ono to join the Fluxus group, but she declined because she wanted to remain an independent artist. John Cage
was one of the most important influences on Ono's performance art. It was her relationship to Ichiyanagi Toshi, who was a pupil of John Cage's legendary class of Experimental Composition at the New School, that would introduce her to the unconventional avant-garde, neo-Dadaism of John Cage and his protégés in New York City.
Almost immediately after John Cage finished teaching at the New School for Social Research in the summer of 1960, Ono was determined to rent a place to present her works along with the work of other New York avant-garde artists. She eventually found a cheap loft in downtown Manhattan
at 112 Chambers Street that she used as a studio and living space. Composer La Monte Young urged Ono to let him organize concerts in the loft, and Ono agreed. Both artists began organizing a series of events in Ono's loft, and both Young and Ono claimed to have been the primary curator of these events, but Ono claims to have been eventually pushed into a subsidiary role by Young. The Chambers Street series hosted some of Ono's earliest conceptual artwork including Painting to Be Stepped On, which was a scrap of canvas on the floor that became a completed artwork upon the accrual of footprints. Participants faced a moral dilemma presented by Ono that a work of art no longer needed to be mounted on a wall, inaccessible, but an irregular piece of canvas as low and dirty as to have to be completed by being stepped on.
Ono was an explorer of conceptual art
and performance art
. An example of her performance art is "Cut Piece" (this instance of performance art is also known as a "happening"), first performed in 1964 at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo. Cut Piece had one destructive verb as its instruction: "Cut." Ono executed the performance in Tokyo by walking on stage and casually kneeling on the floor in a draped garment. Audience members were requested to come on stage and begin cutting until she was naked. Cut Piece was one of Ono’s many opportunities to outwardly communicate her internal suffering through her art. Ono had originally been exposed to Jean-Paul Sartre
's theories of existentialism in college, and in order to appease her own human suffering, Ono enlisted her viewers to complete her works of art in order to complete her identity as well. Besides a commentary on identity, Cut Piece was a commentary on the need for social unity and love. It was also a piece that touched on issues of gender and sexism as well as the greater, universal affliction of human suffering and loneliness. Ono performed this piece again in London
and other venues, garnering drastically different attention depending on the audience. In Japan, the audience was shy and cautious. In London, the audience participators became zealous to get a piece of her clothing and became violent to the point where she had to be protected by security.
An example of her conceptual art includes her book of instructions called Grapefruit
. This book, first produced in 1964, includes surreal, Zen
-like instructions that are to be completed in the mind of the reader, for example: "Hide and seek
Piece: Hide until everybody goes home. Hide until everybody forgets about you. Hide until everybody dies." The book, an example of Heuristic
art, was published several times, most widely distributed by Simon and Schuster in 1971, and reprinted by them again in 2000. Many of the scenarios in the book would be enacted as performance pieces throughout Ono's career and have formed the basis for her art exhibitions, including one highly publicized show at the Everson Museum in Syracuse
, New York, that was nearly closed by a fan riot.
In addition to conceptual art, Ono has also created participatory art, including her 1996 project entitled "Wish Tree" in Japan.
Ono was also an experimental filmmaker
who made sixteen films between 1964 and 1972, and gained particular renown for a 1966 Fluxus film called simply No. 4, but often referred to as "Bottoms." The film consists of a series of close-ups of human buttocks as the subject walks on a treadmill. The screen is divided into four almost equal sections by the elements of the gluteal cleft
and the horizontal gluteal crease
. The soundtrack consists of interviews with those who are being filmed as well as those considering joining the project. In 1996, the watch manufacturing company Swatch
produced a limited edition watch that commemorates this film. (Ono also acted in an obscure exploitation film in 1965, Satan's Bed.)
John Lennon once described her as "the world's most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does." Her circle of friends in the New York art world has included Kate Millett
, Nam June Paik
, Dan Richter
, Jonas Mekas
, Merce Cunningham
, Judith Malina
, Erica Abeel, Fred DeAsis
, Peggy Guggenheim
, Betty Rollin
, Shusaku Arakawa
, Adrian Morris
, Stefan Wolpe
, Keith Haring
, and Andy Warhol
, as well as Maciunas
and Young.
In 2001, YES YOKO ONO, a forty-year retrospective
of Ono's work, received the prestigious International Association of Art Critics
USA Award for Best Museum Show Originating in New York City, considered one of the highest accolades in the museum profession. In 2002 Ono was awarded the Skowhegan Medal for work in assorted media. In 2005 she received a lifetime achievement award
from the Japan Society of New York.
Ono received an honorary
Doctorate of Laws from Liverpool University in 2001. In 2002, she was presented with the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from Bard College
.
In 2008, she showed a large retrospective exhibition, Between The Sky And My Head, at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld
, Bielefeld, Germany
, and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
in Gateshead, UK.
In 2009, she showed a selection of new and old work as part of her show "Anton's Memory" in Venice, Italy. She also received a Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement from the Venice Biennale
in 2009.
Wish Tree, her installation in the Sculpture Garden – Museum of Modern Art
, New York (since July 2010), has become very popular with contributions from all over the world.
in London, where Ono was preparing her conceptual art exhibit, and they were introduced by gallery owner John Dunbar. Lennon was intrigued by Ono's "Hammer A Nail": patrons hammered a nail into a wooden board, creating the art piece. Although the exhibition had not yet begun, Lennon wanted to hammer a nail into the clean board, but Ono stopped him. Dunbar asked her, "Don't you know who this is? He's a millionaire! He might buy it." Ono had supposedly not heard of The Beatles, but relented on condition that Lennon pay her five shillings, to which Lennon replied, "I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in." The second version, told by McCartney, is that in late 1965, Ono was in London compiling original musical scores for a book John Cage
was working on, Notations
, but McCartney declined to give her any of his own manuscripts for the book, suggesting that Lennon might oblige. When asked, Lennon gave Ono the original handwritten lyrics to "The Word
".
Ono began telephoning and calling at Lennon's home, and when his wife asked for an explanation, he explained that Ono was only trying to obtain money for her "avant-garde bullshit". In May 1968, while his wife was on holiday in Greece, Lennon invited Ono to visit. They spent the night recording what would become the Two Virgins album, after which, he said, they "made love at dawn." When Lennon's wife returned home she found Ono wearing her bathrobe and drinking tea with Lennon who simply said, "Oh, hi." Ono became pregnant in 1968 and miscarried a male child they named John Ono Lennon II on 21 November 1968, a few weeks after Lennon's divorce from Cynthia was granted.
During Lennon's last two years in The Beatles, he and Ono began public protests against the Vietnam War. They were married in Gibraltar on 20 March 1969, and spent their honeymoon in Amsterdam campaigning with a week-long Bed-In for peace
. They planned another Bed-In in the United States, but were denied entry, so held one instead at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel
in Montreal, where they recorded "Give Peace a Chance". They often combined advocacy with performance art, as in their "Bagism
", first introduced during a Vienna press conference. Lennon detailed this period in The Beatles' song "The Ballad of John and Yoko". Lennon changed his name by deed poll
on 22 April 1969, adding "Ono" as a middle name. Although he used the name John Ono Lennon thereafter, official documents referred to him as John Winston Ono Lennon, since he was not permitted to revoke a name given at birth. After Ono was injured in a car accident, Lennon arranged for a king-sized bed to be brought to the recording studio as he worked on The Beatles' last album, Abbey Road.
Ono and Lennon collaborated on many albums, beginning in 1968 when Lennon was still a Beatle, with Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins
, an album of experimental and difficult electronic music
. That same year, the couple contributed an experimental piece to The White Album called "Revolution 9
." Ono also contributed backing vocals (on "Birthday"), and one line of lead vocals (on "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill
") to The White Album. Many of the couple's later albums were released under the name the Plastic Ono Band. The couple also appeared together at concerts. When Lennon was invited to play with Frank Zappa
at the Fillmore on June 5, 1971, Ono joined in as well.
In 1969, the Plastic Ono Band's first album, Live Peace in Toronto 1969
, was recorded during the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival
festival. In addition to Lennon and Ono, this first incarnation of the group consisted of guitarist Eric Clapton
, bass player Klaus Voormann, and drummer Alan White
. The first half of their performance consisted of rock standards, and during the second half, Ono took the microphone and along with the band performed an avant garde set, ending with music that consisted mainly of feedback
, while Ono screamed and sang.
Ono released her first solo album, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band
in 1970, as a companion piece to Lennon's better-known John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
. The two albums have almost identical covers: Ono's featured a photo of her leaning on Lennon, and Lennon's had a photo of him leaning on Ono. Her album included raw and quite harsh vocals that were possibly influenced by Japanese opera
, but bear much in common with sounds in nature (especially those made by animals) and free jazz techniques used by wind and brass players. The performers included Ornette Coleman
and other renowned free jazz
performers. The personnel was supplemented by John Lennon, Ringo Starr
and minor performers. Some songs consisted of wordless vocalizations, in a style that would influence Meredith Monk
, and other musical artists who have used screams and vocal noise in lieu of words. The album peaked at #183 on the US charts.
In 1971, Ono released Fly
– a double album. On this release Ono explored slightly more conventional psychedelic rock
with tracks like "Midsummer New York" and "Mind Train," in addition to a number of Fluxus experiments. She also received minor airplay with the ballad
"Mrs. Lennon". Perhaps the most famous track from the album is "Don't Worry, Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow)," an ode to Ono's kidnapped daughter.
In 1971, while studying with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
in Majorca, Ono's second husband, Anthony Cox, accused Ono of abducting their daughter, Kyoko from his hotel. A large number of accusations were then made by both parents toward each other and the matter of custody. Cox eventually moved to Houston, Texas and converted to Evangelical Christianity with his new wife, who was originally from Houston. At the end of 1971, a custody hearing in Houston went against Cox. In violation of the order, he took Kyoko and disappeared. Ono then launched a search for her daughter with the aid of the police and private investigator
s. Ono wrote a song about her daughter, "Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow)," which appears on Lennon and Ono's album Live Peace In Toronto 1969
and her album Fly. Both versions feature Eric Clapton
on guitar. Kyoko is also referenced on the first line of "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)
" when Yoko whispers "Happy Christmas Kyoko" followed by Lennon whispering "Happy Christmas Julian."
Both the press and the public were critical of her. She was blamed for the breakup of The Beatles
and repeatedly criticized for her influence over Lennon and his music. Her experimental art was not popularly understood.
After the Beatles disbanded, Lennon and Ono cohabited in London and then in New York. Their relationship was strained by the threat of deportation Lennon faced (due to drug charges filed in Britain), and Ono's separation from her daughter. The couple separated in 1973 and the two began living separate lives, Ono pursuing her career in New York and Lennon living in Los Angeles with personal assistant
May Pang
in a period commonly referred to as his "lost weekend."
In 1975, the couple reconciled. Their son, Sean, was born on Lennon's 35th birthday, October 9, 1975. After Sean's birth, the couple lived in relative seclusion at the Dakota
in New York. Sean has since followed in his parents' footsteps with a musical career, doing solo work and also forming a band The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger
.
John Lennon retired from music to become a househusband caring for their child, until shortly before his murder in December 1980, which Ono witnessed at close range. Ono has stated that the couple were thinking about going out to dinner (after spending several hours in a recording studio), but were returning to their apartment instead, because John wanted to see Sean before he was put to bed. Following the murder, she went into complete seclusion for an extended period.
Following Lennon's murder, Cox and Kyoko sent a message of sympathy to Ono but did not reveal their location. Ono later printed an open letter to Kyoko saying how she missed her but that she would cease her attempts to find her. Kyoko would later appear on the 1987 title track of American English
by the British pop band Wax
.
Ono funded the construction and maintenance of the Strawberry Fields memorial
in New York City's Central Park
, across from where they lived and Lennon died. It was officially dedicated on October 9, 1985, what would have been his 45th birthday. In 1990, Ono collaborated with music consultant Jeff Pollack to honor what would've been Lennon's 50th birthday with a worldwide broadcast of "Imagine"
. Over one thousand stations in over fifty countries participated in the simultaneous broadcast. Ono felt the timing was perfect considering the escalating conflicts in the Middle East as well as Eastern Europe and Germany. In 2000, she founded the John Lennon Museum
in Saitama, Saitama
, Japan. On October 9, 2007, Ono dedicated a new memorial called the Imagine Peace Tower
, located on the island of Viðey, 1 km outside the Skarfabakki harbour in Reykjavík
in Iceland
. Each year, between October 9 and December 8, it projects a vertical beam of light high into the sky. In 2009, Ono created an exhibit called John Lennon: THE NEW YORK CITY YEARS for the NYC Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Annex. The exhibit uses music, photographs and personal items to depict Lennon's life in New York. A portion of the cost of each ticket to the exhibition is donated to Spirit Foundation, a charitable foundation set up by Lennon and Ono.
and jazz legend Ornette Coleman
. In 1961, years before meeting Lennon, she had her first major public performance in a concert at the 258-seat Carnegie Recital Hall
(not the larger "Main Hall"). This concert featured radical experimental music and performances. She had a second engagement at the Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965, in which she debuted "Cut Piece."
In early 1980, Lennon heard Lene Lovich
and The B-52's'
"Rock Lobster" in a nightclub, and it reminded him of Ono's musical sound. He took this as an indication that her sound had reached the mainstream. Indeed, many musicians, particularly those of the new wave movement, have paid tribute to Ono (both as an artist in her own right, and as a muse
and iconic figure
). For example, Elvis Costello
recorded a version of Ono's song "Walking on Thin Ice
," the B-52's who drew from her early recordings covered "Don't Worry, Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow)" (shortening the title to "Don't Worry") and Sonic Youth
included a performance of Ono's early conceptual "Voice Piece for Soprano" in their experimental
album SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century
. One of Barenaked Ladies
's best-known songs is "Be My Yoko Ono
", and Dar Williams
recorded a song called "I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono." The punk rock singer Patti Smith
invited Ono to participate in "Meltdown," a two-week music festival that Smith organized in London; Ono performed at Queen Elizabeth Hall.
On December 8, 1980, Lennon and Ono were in the studio working on Ono's song Walking on Thin Ice. When they returned to The Dakota
, their home in New York City, Lennon was shot dead by Mark David Chapman
, a deranged fan who had been stalking Lennon for two months. "Walking on Thin Ice (For John)" was released as a single less than a month later, and became Ono's first chart success, peaking at No. 58 and gaining major underground airplay. In 1981, she released the album Season of Glass
with the striking cover photo of Lennon's bloody spectacles next to a half-filled glass of water, with a window overlooking Central Park
in the background. This photograph sold at an auction in London in April 2002 for about $13,000. In the liner notes
to Season of Glass, Ono explained that the album is not dedicated to Lennon because "he would have been offended—he was one of us." The album received highly favorable reviews and reflected the public's mood after Lennon's assassination.
Four months after her husband's murder, Ono began a relationship with antiques dealer and interior designer Sam Havadtoy
, which lasted until 2001. She had also been linked to art dealer and Greta Garbo
confidante Sam Green, who is mentioned in Lennon's will
. In 1982, she released It's Alright (I See Rainbows)
. The cover featured Ono in her famous wrap-around sunglasses, looking towards the sun, while on the back the ghost of Lennon looks over her and their son. The album scored minor chart success and airplay with the singles "My Man" and "Never Say Goodbye".
In 1984, a tribute album titled Every Man Has a Woman
was released, featuring a selection of Ono songs performed by artists such as Elvis Costello
, Roberta Flack
, Eddie Money
, Rosanne Cash
and Harry Nilsson
. It was one of Lennon's projects that he never got to finish. Later that year, Ono and Lennon's final album, Milk and Honey, was released as an unfinished demo.
Ono's final album of the 1980s was Starpeace
, a concept album
that she intended as an antidote to Ronald Reagan
's "Star Wars
" missile defense system
. On the cover, a warm, smiling Ono holds the Earth in the palm of her hand. Starpeace became Ono's most successful non-Lennon effort: the single "Hell in Paradise
" was a hit, reaching No. 16 on the US dance charts and #26 on the Billboard Hot 100 as well as major airplay on MTV
.
In 1986, Ono set out on a goodwill world tour for Starpeace, mostly visiting Eastern Europe
an countries.
Ono went on hiatus until signing with Rykodisc
in 1992 to release the comprehensive six-disc box set Onobox
. It included remastered highlights from all of Ono's solo albums, as well as unreleased material from the 1974 "lost weekend" sessions. There was also a one-disc "greatest hits" release of highlights from Onobox, simply titled Walking on Thin Ice
. That year, she agreed to sit down for an extensive interview with music journalist Mark Kemp
for a cover story in the alternative music magazine Option
. The story took a revisionist look at Ono's music for a new generation of fans more accepting of her role as a pioneer in the merger of pop and the avant-garde.
In 1994, Ono produced her own musical entitled New York Rock
, featuring Broadway
renditions of her songs. In 1995, she released Rising
, a collaboration with her son Sean
and his band, Ima. Rising spawned a world tour that traveled through Europe, Japan and the United States. The following year, she collaborated with various alternative rock
musicians for an EP entitled Rising Mixes. Guest remixers of Rising material included Cibo Matto
, Ween
, Tricky
, and Thurston Moore
.
In 1997, Rykodisc reissued all her solo albums on CD, from Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band through Starpeace. Ono and her engineer Rob Stevens personally remastered
the audio, and various bonus tracks were added including outtakes, demos and live cuts.
2001 saw the release of Ono's feminist concept album Blueprint for a Sunrise
. In 2002, Yoko joined The B-52's
in New York for their 25th anniversary concerts. She came out for the encore and performed Rock Lobster
with the band. Starting in 2002, some DJs remix
ed other Ono songs for dance clubs. For the remix project, she dropped her first name and became known as simply "ONO," as a response to the "Oh, no!" jokes that dogged her throughout her career. Ono had great success with new versions of "Walking on Thin Ice", remixed by top DJs and dance artists including Pet Shop Boys
, Orange Factory
, Peter Rauhofer
, and Danny Tenaglia
. In April 2003, Ono's Walking on Thin Ice (Remixes) was rated No. 1 on Billboard Magazine's "Dance/Club Play Chart", gaining Ono her first number one hit. On the 12" mix of the original 1981 version of "Walking on Thin Ice", Lennon can be heard remarking "I think we've just got your first No.1, Yoko." She returned to No. 1 on the same charts in November 2004 with "Everyman...Everywoman...," a reworking of her song "Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him", in January 2008, with "No No No," and in August 2008, with "Give Peace a Chance." In June 2009, at the age of 76, Ono scored her fifth No. 1 hit on the "Dance/Club Play Chart" with "I'm Not Getting Enough."
Ono released the album Yes, I'm a Witch
in 2007, a collection of remixes and covers from her back catalog by various artists including The Flaming Lips
, Cat Power
, Antony
, DJ Spooky
, Porcupine Tree
and Peaches
, released in February 2007, along with a special edition of Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band
. Yes I'm a Witch has been critically well-received. A similar compilation of Ono dance remixes entitled Open Your Box
was also released in April of that year.
In 2009, Ono recorded Between My Head and the Sky
, her first album to be released as "Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band" since 1973's Feeling the Space. The all-new Plastic Ono Band lineup includes Sean Lennon, Cornelius
and Yuka Honda
amongst others. On February 16, 2010, Sean organized a concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music
called "We Are Plastic Ono Band," at which Yoko performed her music with Sean, Clapton, Klaus Voorman and Jim Keltner, for the first time since the 1970s. Guests including Bette Midler, Paul Simon and his son Harper, and principal members of Sonic Youth interpreted her songs in their own styles.
During her career, Ono has collaborated with a diverse group of artists and musicians including John Lennon
, Eric Clapton
, Klaus Voormann
, Cornelius
(Keigo Oyamada, Naoki Shimizu and Yoko Araki), Frank Zappa
, Sean Lennon
, Yuka Honda
, Jim Keltner
, Earl Slick
, Peaches
, John Cage
, David Tudor
, George Maciunas
, Ornette Coleman
, Charlotte Moorman
, George Brecht
, Jackson Mac Low
, Jonas Mekas
, Fred DeAsis, Yvonne Rainer
, La Monte Young
, Richard Maxfield
, Zbigniew Rybczyński
, Yo La Tengo
, and Andy Warhol
(in 1987 Ono was one of the speakers at Warhol's funeral). As a dance music artist, Ono has worked with re-mixers/producers such as Basement Jaxx
, Pet Shop Boys
, Cat Power
, Bill Kates, Tricky
, Thurston Moore
, Keiji Haino
, Nick Vernier Band
, Cibo Matto
, Billy Martin
, DJ Spooky
, Apples In Stereo, Damien Price, The Flaming Lips
, DJ Chernobyl, Bimbo Jones
, DJ Dan
, Craig Armstrong, Jorge Artajo
, Shuji Nabara, and Konrad Behr, among others.
in 2004, Yoko flooded the city with banners, bags, stickers, postcards, flyers, posters and badges, with two images: one of a woman's naked breast, the other of the same woman's vulva. The piece, titled "My Mummy Was Beautiful", was dedicated to Lennon's mother, Julia, who had died when Lennon was a teenager. According to Ono, the work was meant to be innocent, not shocking. She was attempting to replicate the experience of a baby looking up at his or her mother's body: the mother's pudendum
and breasts are a child's introduction to humanity
. It was created in the spirit of, and seems inspired by Gustave Courbet
's L'Origine du monde
.
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Ono performed at the opening ceremony
for the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Turin
, Italy, wearing white, like many of the others who performed during the ceremony, to symbolize the snow that makes the Winter Olympics possible. She read a free verse poem calling for peace in the world. The poem was an intro to a performance of the song "Imagine", Lennon's anthem to world peace.
On December 13, 2006, Ono's bodyguard was arrested after he was taped trying to extort Ono for two million dollars, threatening to release private conversations and photographs.
On June 26, 2007, Ono appeared on Larry King Live along with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Olivia Harrison. Ono headlined the Pitchfork Music Festival
in Chicago on July 14, 2007, performing a full set that mixed music and performance art. She sang "Mulberry", a song about her time in the countryside after the Japanese collapse in World War II
for only the third time in her life, with Thurston Moore
. Ono had previously performed the song once with John Lennon and once with Sean Lennon
and told the audience of thousands that she will never perform it again.
On October 9, 2007 Ono officially lit the Imagine Peace Tower
on Viðey Island in Iceland
, dedicated to peace and to Lennon.
Ono returned to Liverpool for the 2008 Liverpool Biennial, where she unveiled "Sky Ladders" in the ruins of Church of St Luke, Liverpool
(which was largely destroyed during World War II and now stands roofless as a memorial to those killed in the Liverpool Blitz
).
In May 2009, Yoko designed a T-shirt for the second 'Fashion against AIDS' campaign/collection of HIV/AIDS awareness NGO Designers against AIDS and H&M, with the statement 'Imagine Peace' depicted in 21 different languages.
On March 31, 2009, Yoko Ono went to the inauguration of the exhibition: "Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John & Yoko" to mark the 40th anniversary of Lennon-Ono bed-in at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Canada from May 26 to June 2, 1969.
Ono appeared on-stage at Microsoft's June 1, 2009 E3 press conference with Olivia Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr to promote The Beatles: Rock Band
video game.
Ono appears on the new Basement Jaxx
album Scars
, featuring on the single "Day of the Sunflowers (We March On)".
and special guests including Paul Simon
and Bette Midler
. (See "Musical career" above.) On April 1, 2010, she was named the first "Global Autism Ambassador" by the Autism Speaks
organization. Ono appeared with Ringo Starr
on July 7, 2010 at New York's Radio City Music Hall
in celebration of Starr's 70th birthday, performing "With a Little Help from My Friends
" and "Give Peace a Chance
". On October 2, 2010, Ono and the Plastic Ono Band performed at The Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles, California with special guest Lady GaGa
.
On her 78th Birthday, 18 February 2011, Yoko Ono took out a full page advert in the UK free newspaper Metro for 'Imagine Peace 2011'. It took the form of an open letter, inviting people to think of, and wish for, peace. Ono and son Sean held a benefit concert to aid in the relief efforts for earthquake and tsunami-ravaged Japan on March 27 in New York City. In July 2011, Ono was awarded the 8th Hiroshima Art Prize for her contributions in art and for peace.
" in their honeymoon suite at the Amsterdam
Hilton Hotel in March 1969. The press fought to get in, presuming that the two would be having sex for their cameras, but they instead found a pair of newlyweds wearing pajamas and eager to talk about and promote world peace
. Another Bed-In
in May 1969 at the Queen Elizabeth Fairmont in Montreal, Canada, resulted in the recording of their first single, "Give Peace A Chance", a Top 20 hit for the newly-christened Plastic Ono Band. Other demonstrations with John included Bagism
. Introduced in Vienna, Bagism encouraged a disregard for physical appearance in judging others.
In the 1970s, Ono and Lennon became close to many radical leaders, including Bobby Seale
, Abbie Hoffman
, Jerry Rubin
, Michael X
, John Sinclair
(for whom they organized a benefit after he was imprisoned), Angela Davis
, Kate Millett
, and David Peel. They appeared on The Mike Douglas Show
and took over hosting duties for a week, during which Ono spoke at length about the evils of racism
and sexism
. Ono remained outspoken in her support of feminism, and openly bitter about the racism she had experienced from rock fans, especially in the United Kingdom. For example, an Esquire
article of the period was titled "John Rennon's Excrusive Gloupie" and featured an unflattering David Levine
cartoon.
In 2002, Ono inaugurated her own peace award, The LennonOno Grant for Peace, by giving $50,000 (£31,900) prize money to artists living "in regions of conflict." Israel
i and Palestinian
artists were the first recipients. The award is given out every two years, in conjunction with the lighting of the Imagine Peace Tower.
On Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2003, on the eve of the Iraqi invasion by the Americans and the British, Ono heard about a romantic couple holding a love-in protest in their tiny bedroom in Addingham, West Yorkshire. She sent the couple, Andrew and Christine Gale, some flowers and wished them the best.
In 2004, Ono remade her song "Everyman... Everywoman..." to support same-sex marriage
, releasing remixes that included "Every Man Has a Man Who Loves Him" and "Every Woman Has a Woman Who Loves Her."
In late 1965, Ono was in London compiling original musical scores for a book John Cage
was working on. She met McCartney who declined to give her any of his own manuscripts for the book. John Lennon later gave Ono the original handwritten lyrics to "The Word
", which were subsequently reproduced in Cage's book Notations
published in 1969.
Writing credit on Beatles songs was another issue. While the group was together, every song written by Lennon or McCartney was credited as Lennon–McCartney regardless of whether the song was a collaboration or written solely by one of the two (except for those appearing on their first album, Please Please Me, which credited the songs to McCartney–Lennon). In 1976, McCartney released a live album called Wings Over America
which credited the five Beatles tracks he included as P. McCartney–J. Lennon compositions. Neither Lennon nor Ono objected. After Lennon's death, McCartney once again attempted to change the order to "McCartney–Lennon" for songs such as "Yesterday
" that were solely or predominantly written by him, but Ono would not allow it, saying she felt this broke an agreement that the two had made while Lennon was still alive. However, McCartney argued that such an agreement never existed. The two other Beatles agreed that the credits should remain as they always had been and McCartney withdrew his request. On the 1998 John Lennon anthology, Lennon Legend, the composer credit of "Give Peace a Chance
" was changed to "John Lennon" from its original composing credit of Lennon–McCartney. Although the song was written by Lennon during his tenure with the Beatles it was both written and recorded without the help of the band and released as Lennon's first independent single under the "Plastic Ono Band" moniker. Lennon subsequently expressed regret that he had not given co-writing credit to Ono instead, who actually helped him write the song. In 2002, McCartney released another live album, Back in the U.S. Live 2002, and the 19 Beatles' songs included are described as "composed by Paul McCartney and John Lennon".
In 1995, after the Beatles released Lennon's "Free as a Bird
" and "Real Love" with demos provided by Ono, McCartney and his family collaborated with her and Sean Lennon to create the song "Hiroshima Sky is Always Blue", which commemorates the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of that Japanese city. Of Ono, McCartney stated: "I thought she was a cold woman. I think that's wrong ... she's just the opposite ... I think she's just more determined than most people to be herself."
In 1997, Ono compared Lennon to Mozart
while McCartney, she said, more closely resembled his less-talented rival Salieri
. This remark infuriated Linda McCartney
, who was battling breast cancer
at the time. When she died less than a year later, McCartney pointedly did not invite Ono to a New York memorial service for her.
Accepting an award at the 2005 Q Awards, Ono mentioned that Lennon had once felt insecure about his songwriting, and asked her why other musicians "always cover Paul's songs, and never mine". Ono had responded, "You're a good songwriter; it's not June with spoon that you write. You're a good singer, and most musicians are probably a little bit nervous about covering your songs". McCartney responded by saying, "I don’t take any notice of her. She’s John’s wife so I have to respect her for that, but I don’t think she’s the brightest of buttons. She’s said some particularly daft things in her time. Her life is dedicated to putting me down but I attempt very strongly not to put her down." Ono later issued a statement claiming she did not mean any offense, as her comment was an attempt to console her husband, not attack McCartney; she went on to insist that she respected McCartney and that it was the press who had taken her comments out of context. " At the June 2006 Las Vegas premiere of Cirque du Soleil
's Beatles performance "Love
", pictures were taken of her and Paul hugging. They appeared again together in July 2007 for the show's first anniversary.
remains strained. In her 2006 biography, John, (London: Hodder; U.S.: Crown Publishing) Cynthia Lennon portrays Ono as a selfish, spiteful woman. In the book, she describes learning about Ono's control over John (who referred to Ono as "mother") in the period in the mid-1970s when Ono chose May Pang
to be John's companion. Cynthia hypothesizes that John had a "mother complex," allowing himself to be dominated by strong women and draws a parallel between his relationship with Ono and that with his domineering aunt Mimi Smith
in childhood.
Peace activist
This list of peace activists includes people who proactively advocate diplomatic, non-military resolution of political disputes, usually through nonviolent means.A peace activist is an activist of the peace movement.*Jane Addams*Martti Ahtisaari...
, known for her work in avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
art, music and filmmaking
Filmmaking
Filmmaking is the process of making a film, from an initial story, idea, or commission, through scriptwriting, casting, shooting, directing, editing, and screening the finished product before an audience that may result in a theatrical release or television program...
as well as her marriage to John Lennon
John Lennon
John Winston Lennon, MBE was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music...
. Ono brought feminism
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
to the forefront in her music which prefigured New Wave music
New Wave music
New Wave is a subgenre of :rock music that emerged in the mid to late 1970s alongside punk rock. The term at first generally was synonymous with punk rock before being considered a genre in its own right that incorporated aspects of electronic and experimental music, mod subculture, disco and 1960s...
(whether she was a direct influence is still debated) and is known for her philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace and AIDS
AIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
outreach programs.
Early life
Yoko Ono was born in 1933 to mother Isoko Ono, the great-granddaughter of Zenjiro Yasuda of the Yasuda banking family, and to father Yeisuke Ono, a banker and one-time classical pianist who was a descendant of an Emperor of Japan. The name "Yoko" means "ocean child". Two weeks before she was born, her father was transferred to San Francisco by his employer, the Yokohama Specie Bank. The rest of the family followed soon after and Yoko met her father when she was two. Her younger brother Keisuke was born in December 1936. In 1937, her father was transferred back to Japan and Ono was enrolled at Tokyo's GakushuinGakushuin
The or Peers School is an educational institution founded in Tokyo in 1877, during the Meiji period, for the education of the children of the Japanese aristocracy, though it eventually also opened its doors to the offspring of extremely wealthy commoners...
(also known as the Peers School), one of the most exclusive schools in Japan.
In 1940, the family moved to New York City, where Ono's father was working. In 1941, her father was transferred to Hanoi
Hanoi
Hanoi , is the capital of Vietnam and the country's second largest city. Its population in 2009 was estimated at 2.6 million for urban districts, 6.5 million for the metropolitan jurisdiction. From 1010 until 1802, it was the most important political centre of Vietnam...
and the family returned to Japan. Ono was then enrolled in Keimei Gakuen, an exclusive Christian
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
primary school run by the Mitsui
Mitsui
is one of the largest corporate conglomerates in Japan and one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world.-History:Founded by Mitsui Takatoshi , who was the fourth son of a shopkeeper in Matsusaka, in what is now today's Mie prefecture...
family. She remained in Tokyo through the great fire-bombing of March 9, 1945. During the fire-bombing, she was sheltered with other members of her family in a special bunker in the Azabu
Azabu
is an area within Minato in Tokyo, Japan, built on a marshy area of foothills south of central Tokyo. Its coverage roughly corresponds to that of the former Azabu Ward, presently consisting of nine official districts: Azabu-Jūban, Azabudai, Azabu-Nagasakachō, Azabu-Mamianachō, Nishi-Azabu,...
district of Tokyo, far from the heavy bombing. After the bombing, Ono went to the Karuizawa
Karuizawa, Nagano
is a town located in Kitasaku District, Nagano, Japan.As of January 1, 2008, the town has an estimated population of 17,833 and has a total area of ....
mountain resort with members of her family.
Ono has said that she and her family were forced to beg for food while pulling their belongings in a wheelbarrow; and it was during this period in her life that Ono says she developed her "aggressive" attitude and understanding of "outsider" status when children taunted her and her brother, who were once well-to-do. Other stories have her mother bringing a large number of goods with them to the countryside which they bartered for food. One famous anecdote has her mother bartering a German-made sewing machine for sixty kilograms of rice with which to feed the family. Her father remained in the city and, unbeknownst to them, was believed to have been eventually incarcerated
Prison
A prison is a place in which people are physically confined and, usually, deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime...
in a prisoner of war camp in China. In an interview by Democracy Nows Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman is an American progressive broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter and author. Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, an independent global news program broadcast daily on radio, television and the internet.-Early life:Goodman was born in Bay Shore, New York...
on October 16, 2007, Ono explained, "He was in French Indochina
French Indochina
French Indochina was part of the French colonial empire in southeast Asia. A federation of the three Vietnamese regions, Tonkin , Annam , and Cochinchina , as well as Cambodia, was formed in 1887....
which is Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...
actually... in Saigon. He was in a concentration camp."
By April 1946, Gakushuin
Gakushuin
The or Peers School is an educational institution founded in Tokyo in 1877, during the Meiji period, for the education of the children of the Japanese aristocracy, though it eventually also opened its doors to the offspring of extremely wealthy commoners...
was reopened and Ono was enrolled. The school, located near the imperial palace
Kokyo
is the main residence of the Emperor of Japan. It is a large park-like area located in the Chiyoda area of Tokyo close to Tokyo Station and contains several buildings including the main palace , the emperor left Kyoto Imperial Palace for Tokyo...
, had not been damaged by the war, and Ono found herself a classmate of Akihito
Akihito
is the current , the 125th emperor of his line according to Japan's traditional order of succession. He acceded to the throne in 1989.-Name:In Japan, the emperor is never referred to by his given name, but rather is referred to as "His Imperial Majesty the Emperor" which may be shortened to . In...
, the future emperor of Japan. She graduated in 1951 and was accepted into the philosophy program of Gakushuin University
Gakushuin University
is an elite higher educational institution in Mejiro, Toshima Ward, Tokyo. It was re-established after World War II as an affiliate of the Gakushūin School Corporation, the privatized successor to the original Gakushūin University or "Peers School" set up during the Meiji era to educate the...
, the first woman to enter the department. However, after two semesters, she left the school.
Education and marriages
Ono's family moved to Scarsdale, New YorkScarsdale, New York
Scarsdale is a coterminous town and village in Westchester County, New York, United States, in the northern suburbs of New York City. The Town of Scarsdale is coextensive with the Village of Scarsdale, but the community has opted to operate solely with a village government, one of several villages...
after the war. She left Japan to rejoin the family and enrolled in nearby Sarah Lawrence College
Sarah Lawrence College
Sarah Lawrence College is a private liberal arts college in the United States, and a leader in progressive education since its founding in 1926. Located just 30 minutes north of Midtown Manhattan in southern Westchester County, New York, in the city of Yonkers, this coeducational college offers...
. While her parents approved of her college choice, they were dismayed at her lifestyle, and, according to Ono, chastised her for befriending people they considered to be "beneath" her. In spite of this, Ono loved meeting artists, poets and others who represented the "bohemian
Bohemianism
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...
" freedom she longed for herself. Visiting galleries and art "happening
Happening
A happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings take place anywhere , are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience...
s" in the city whetted her desire to publicly display her own artistic endeavors. La Monte Young
La Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
, her first important contact in the New York art world, helped Ono start her career by using her Chambers Street
Chambers Street (Manhattan)
Chambers Street is a bi-directional street in the New York City borough of Manhattan. It runs from River Terrace, Battery Park City, in the west, past PS 234 and Stuyvesant High School to 1 Centre Street, the Manhattan Municipal Building, to the east. In the early 20th century the street...
loft in Tribeca
TriBeCa
Tribeca is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York in the United States. Its name is an acronym based on the words "Triangle below Canal Street", and is properly bounded by Canal Street, West Street, Broadway, and Vesey Street...
as a performance space. At one performance, Ono set a painting on fire; fortunately John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
had advised her to treat the paper with flame retardant
Flame retardant
Flame retardants are chemicals used in thermoplastics, thermosets, textiles and coatings that inhibit or resist the spread of fire. These can be separated into several different classes of chemicals:...
.
In 1956, she married composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
Toshi Ichiyanagi
Toshi Ichiyanagi
is a Japanese composer of avant-garde music. He studied with Tomojiro Ikenouchi and John Cage.One of his most notable works is the 1960 composition, Kaiki, which combined Japanese instruments, shō and koto, and western instruments, harmonica and saxophone. Another work Distance requires the...
. They divorced in 1962 after living apart for several years. On November 28 that same year, Ono married an American named Anthony Cox. Cox was a jazz musician, film producer and art promoter. He had heard of Ono in New York and tracked her down to a mental institution in Japan, where her family had placed her following a suicide
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
attempt. Ono had neglected to finalize her divorce from Ichiyanagi, so their marriage was annulled on March 1, 1963 and Cox and Ono married again on June 6. Their daughter, Kyoko Chan Cox, was born two months later on August 8, 1963.
The marriage quickly fell apart but the Coxes stayed together for the sake of their joint career. They performed at Tokyo's Sogetsu
Sogetsu
Sogetsu is a school of Ikebana, or Japanese floral art.It was founded 1927 by Sofu Teshigahara....
Hall with Ono lying atop a piano played by John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
. Soon the Coxes returned to New York with Kyoko. In the early years of this marriage, Ono left most of Kyoko's parenting to Cox while she pursued her art full-time and Tony managed publicity. After she divorced Cox on February 2, 1969, Ono and Cox engaged in a bitter legal battle for custody of Kyoko, which resulted in Ono being awarded full custody. However, in 1971, Cox disappeared with eight-year-old Kyoko, in violation of the custody order. Cox subsequently became a Christian and raised Kyoko in a Christian group known as the Church of the Living Word (or "the Walk"). Cox left the group with Kyoko in 1977. Living an underground existence, Cox changed the girl's name to Rosemary. Cox and Kyoko sent Ono a sympathy message after Lennon's 1980 murder. Afterwards, the bitterness between the parents lessened slightly and Ono publicly announced in People Magazine that she would no longer seek out the now-adult Kyoko, but still wished to make contact with her. In 1994, Kyoko made contact with Ono and established a relationship.
Artwork
Ono was a sometime member of FluxusFluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
, a loose association of Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
-inspired avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
artists that developed in the early 1960s. Fluxus founder George Maciunas
George Maciunas
George Maciunas was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He was a founding member of Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers...
, a friend of Ono's during the 1960s, admired her work and promoted it with enthusiasm. One of Ono's well known examples is when she took a fly as her alter ego and was inspired by this for her work. Maciunas invited Ono to join the Fluxus group, but she declined because she wanted to remain an independent artist. John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
was one of the most important influences on Ono's performance art. It was her relationship to Ichiyanagi Toshi, who was a pupil of John Cage's legendary class of Experimental Composition at the New School, that would introduce her to the unconventional avant-garde, neo-Dadaism of John Cage and his protégés in New York City.
Almost immediately after John Cage finished teaching at the New School for Social Research in the summer of 1960, Ono was determined to rent a place to present her works along with the work of other New York avant-garde artists. She eventually found a cheap loft in downtown Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
at 112 Chambers Street that she used as a studio and living space. Composer La Monte Young urged Ono to let him organize concerts in the loft, and Ono agreed. Both artists began organizing a series of events in Ono's loft, and both Young and Ono claimed to have been the primary curator of these events, but Ono claims to have been eventually pushed into a subsidiary role by Young. The Chambers Street series hosted some of Ono's earliest conceptual artwork including Painting to Be Stepped On, which was a scrap of canvas on the floor that became a completed artwork upon the accrual of footprints. Participants faced a moral dilemma presented by Ono that a work of art no longer needed to be mounted on a wall, inaccessible, but an irregular piece of canvas as low and dirty as to have to be completed by being stepped on.
Ono was an explorer of conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
and performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
. An example of her performance art is "Cut Piece" (this instance of performance art is also known as a "happening"), first performed in 1964 at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo. Cut Piece had one destructive verb as its instruction: "Cut." Ono executed the performance in Tokyo by walking on stage and casually kneeling on the floor in a draped garment. Audience members were requested to come on stage and begin cutting until she was naked. Cut Piece was one of Ono’s many opportunities to outwardly communicate her internal suffering through her art. Ono had originally been exposed to Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
's theories of existentialism in college, and in order to appease her own human suffering, Ono enlisted her viewers to complete her works of art in order to complete her identity as well. Besides a commentary on identity, Cut Piece was a commentary on the need for social unity and love. It was also a piece that touched on issues of gender and sexism as well as the greater, universal affliction of human suffering and loneliness. Ono performed this piece again in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
and other venues, garnering drastically different attention depending on the audience. In Japan, the audience was shy and cautious. In London, the audience participators became zealous to get a piece of her clothing and became violent to the point where she had to be protected by security.
An example of her conceptual art includes her book of instructions called Grapefruit
Grapefruit (book)
Grapefruit is an artist's book written by Yoko Ono, originally published in 1964. It has become famous as an early example of conceptual art, containing a series of "event scores" that replace the physical work of art – the traditional stock-in-trade of artists – with instructions that an...
. This book, first produced in 1964, includes surreal, Zen
Zen
Zen is a school of Mahāyāna Buddhism founded by the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma. The word Zen is from the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word Chán , which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit word dhyāna, which can be approximately translated as "meditation" or "meditative state."Zen...
-like instructions that are to be completed in the mind of the reader, for example: "Hide and seek
Hide and seek
Hide-and-seek or hide-and-go-seek is a variant of the game tag, in which a number of players conceal themselves in the environment, to be found by one or more seekers.-Variants:Numerous variants of the game can be found around the world...
Piece: Hide until everybody goes home. Hide until everybody forgets about you. Hide until everybody dies." The book, an example of Heuristic
Heuristic
Heuristic refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. Heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution, where an exhaustive search is impractical...
art, was published several times, most widely distributed by Simon and Schuster in 1971, and reprinted by them again in 2000. Many of the scenarios in the book would be enacted as performance pieces throughout Ono's career and have formed the basis for her art exhibitions, including one highly publicized show at the Everson Museum in Syracuse
Syracuse, New York
Syracuse is a city in and the county seat of Onondaga County, New York, United States, the largest U.S. city with the name "Syracuse", and the fifth most populous city in the state. At the 2010 census, the city population was 145,170, and its metropolitan area had a population of 742,603...
, New York, that was nearly closed by a fan riot.
In addition to conceptual art, Ono has also created participatory art, including her 1996 project entitled "Wish Tree" in Japan.
- "Wish Piece by Yoko Ono (1996)
- Make a wish
- Write it down on a piece of paper
- Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree
- Ask your friends to do the same
- Keep wishing
- Until the branches are covered with wishes".
Ono was also an experimental filmmaker
Filmmaking
Filmmaking is the process of making a film, from an initial story, idea, or commission, through scriptwriting, casting, shooting, directing, editing, and screening the finished product before an audience that may result in a theatrical release or television program...
who made sixteen films between 1964 and 1972, and gained particular renown for a 1966 Fluxus film called simply No. 4, but often referred to as "Bottoms." The film consists of a series of close-ups of human buttocks as the subject walks on a treadmill. The screen is divided into four almost equal sections by the elements of the gluteal cleft
Gluteal cleft
The intergluteal cleft, also known as the natal cleft, the vertical gluteal crease, and the gluteal cleft, is the groove between the buttocks that runs from just below the sacrum to the perineum, so named because it forms the visible border between the external rounded protrusions of the gluteus...
and the horizontal gluteal crease
Horizontal gluteal crease
The gluteal sulcus is an area of the body of humans and great apes, described by a horizontal crease formed by the inferior aspect of the buttocks and the posterior upper thigh...
. The soundtrack consists of interviews with those who are being filmed as well as those considering joining the project. In 1996, the watch manufacturing company Swatch
Swatch
Swatch is a brand name for a line of wrist watches from the Swatch Group, a Swiss conglomerate with vertical control of the production of Swiss watches and related products...
produced a limited edition watch that commemorates this film. (Ono also acted in an obscure exploitation film in 1965, Satan's Bed.)
John Lennon once described her as "the world's most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does." Her circle of friends in the New York art world has included Kate Millett
Kate Millett
Kate Millett is an American lesbian feminist writer and activist. A seminal influence on second-wave feminism, Millet is best known for her 1970 book Sexual Politics.-Career:...
, Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist....
, Dan Richter
Daniel Richter (actor)
Daniel Richter is an American mime and actor. He is remembered as playing the leader of a tribe of ape-men in 2001: A Space Odyssey....
, Jonas Mekas
Jonas Mekas
Jonas Mekas is a Lithuanian-born American filmmaker, writer, and curator who has often been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema." His work has been exhibited in museums and festivals across Europe and America.-Biography:...
, Merce Cunningham
Merce Cunningham
Mercier "Merce" Philip Cunningham was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of the American avant-garde for more than 50 years. Throughout much of his life, Cunningham was considered one of the greatest creative forces in American dance...
, Judith Malina
Judith Malina
Judith Malina is an American theater and film actress, writer, and director, who was one of the founders of The Living Theatre.-Early life:...
, Erica Abeel, Fred DeAsis
Parol
Parols are ornamental star-like Christmas lanterns from the Philippines. They are traditionally made out of bamboo and paper and come in various sizes, shapes and designs; however, their star-shape façade and basic design remain dominant....
, Peggy Guggenheim
Peggy Guggenheim
Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim was an American art collector. Born to a wealthy New York City family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down with the Titanic in 1912 and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who would establish the Solomon R...
, Betty Rollin
Betty Rollin
Betty Rollin , has been an NBC News correspondent and author.Rollin's reports have won both the DuPont and Emmy awards. She now contributes reports for PBS's Religion and Ethics News Weekly....
, Shusaku Arakawa
Shusaku Arakawa
was a Japanese artist and architect. He had a personal and artistic partnership with writer and artist Madeline Gins that spanned more than four decades.-Life:...
, Adrian Morris
Adrian Morris
Adrian Grant Morris was an English painter. Following a successful retrospective exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in London in May/June, 2008, works were included in their mixed Autumn exhibition, 2009...
, Stefan Wolpe
Stefan Wolpe
Stefan Wolpe was a German-born composer.-Life:Wolpe was born in Berlin. He attended the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory from the age of fourteen, and the Berlin Hochschule für Musik in 1920-1921. He studied composition under Franz Schreker and was also a pupil of Ferruccio Busoni...
, Keith Haring
Keith Haring
Keith Haring was an artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s.-Early life:...
, and Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
, as well as Maciunas
George Maciunas
George Maciunas was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He was a founding member of Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers...
and Young.
In 2001, YES YOKO ONO, a forty-year retrospective
Retrospective
Retrospective generally means to take a look back at events that already have taken place. For example, the term is used in medicine, describing a look back at a patient's medical history or lifestyle.-Music:...
of Ono's work, received the prestigious International Association of Art Critics
International Association of Art Critics
The International Association of Art Critics was founded in 1950 to revitalize critical discourse, which suffered under Fascism during World War II. AICA was initially affiliated with UNESCO as a non-governmental organization...
USA Award for Best Museum Show Originating in New York City, considered one of the highest accolades in the museum profession. In 2002 Ono was awarded the Skowhegan Medal for work in assorted media. In 2005 she received a lifetime achievement award
Award
An award is something given to a person or a group of people to recognize excellence in a certain field; a certificate of excellence. Awards are often signifiedby trophies, titles, certificates, commemorative plaques, medals, badges, pins, or ribbons...
from the Japan Society of New York.
Ono received an honorary
Honorary degree
An honorary degree or a degree honoris causa is an academic degree for which a university has waived the usual requirements, such as matriculation, residence, study, and the passing of examinations...
Doctorate of Laws from Liverpool University in 2001. In 2002, she was presented with the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from Bard College
Bard College
Bard College, founded in 1860 as "St. Stephen's College", is a small four-year liberal arts college located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.-Location:...
.
In 2008, she showed a large retrospective exhibition, Between The Sky And My Head, at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld
Kunsthalle Bielefeld
The Kunsthalle Bielefeld is a modern art museum in Bielefeld, Germany. It was designed by Philip Johnson in 1968, and paid for by the businessman and art patron Rudolf August Oetker.-Collection and exhibitions:...
, Bielefeld, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art is an international centre for contemporary art located on the south bank of the River Tyne alongside the Gateshead Millennium Bridge in Gateshead, North East England, United Kingdom...
in Gateshead, UK.
In 2009, she showed a selection of new and old work as part of her show "Anton's Memory" in Venice, Italy. She also received a Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement from the Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
in 2009.
Wish Tree, her installation in the Sculpture Garden – Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, New York (since July 2010), has become very popular with contributions from all over the world.
Life with John Lennon
Two versions exist of how Lennon met Ono. According to the first, on 9 November 1966 Lennon went to the Indica GalleryIndica Gallery
Indica Gallery was a counterculture art gallery in Mason's Yard , St. James's, London, England during the late 1960s, in the basement of the Indica Bookshop co-owned by John Dunbar, Peter Asher and Barry Miles...
in London, where Ono was preparing her conceptual art exhibit, and they were introduced by gallery owner John Dunbar. Lennon was intrigued by Ono's "Hammer A Nail": patrons hammered a nail into a wooden board, creating the art piece. Although the exhibition had not yet begun, Lennon wanted to hammer a nail into the clean board, but Ono stopped him. Dunbar asked her, "Don't you know who this is? He's a millionaire! He might buy it." Ono had supposedly not heard of The Beatles, but relented on condition that Lennon pay her five shillings, to which Lennon replied, "I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in." The second version, told by McCartney, is that in late 1965, Ono was in London compiling original musical scores for a book John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
was working on, Notations
Notations
Notations is a book that was edited by John Cage with Alison Knowles. The book is made up of a large collection of graphical scores which are presented in alphabetical order, with each score getting equal space....
, but McCartney declined to give her any of his own manuscripts for the book, suggesting that Lennon might oblige. When asked, Lennon gave Ono the original handwritten lyrics to "The Word
The Word (song)
"The Word" is a song by The Beatles first released on their 1965 album Rubber Soul. It has been cited as the first instance in which The Beatles began writing about love in more abstract terms, versus concrete girl/boy terms, a la "She Loves You", with preaching lyrics such as "The word is love"...
".
Ono began telephoning and calling at Lennon's home, and when his wife asked for an explanation, he explained that Ono was only trying to obtain money for her "avant-garde bullshit". In May 1968, while his wife was on holiday in Greece, Lennon invited Ono to visit. They spent the night recording what would become the Two Virgins album, after which, he said, they "made love at dawn." When Lennon's wife returned home she found Ono wearing her bathrobe and drinking tea with Lennon who simply said, "Oh, hi." Ono became pregnant in 1968 and miscarried a male child they named John Ono Lennon II on 21 November 1968, a few weeks after Lennon's divorce from Cynthia was granted.
During Lennon's last two years in The Beatles, he and Ono began public protests against the Vietnam War. They were married in Gibraltar on 20 March 1969, and spent their honeymoon in Amsterdam campaigning with a week-long Bed-In for peace
Bed-In
During the Vietnam War, in 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono held two week-long Bed-Ins for Peace in Amsterdam and Montreal, which were their non-violent ways of protesting wars and promoting peace...
. They planned another Bed-In in the United States, but were denied entry, so held one instead at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel
Queen Elizabeth Hotel
The Queen Elizabeth Hotel is a grand hotel in Montreal, Quebec. Completed in 1958, it was built by the Canadian National Railway, but was later sold to Canadian Pacific Hotels, now Fairmont Hotels and Resorts...
in Montreal, where they recorded "Give Peace a Chance". They often combined advocacy with performance art, as in their "Bagism
Bagism
Bagism is a term which was created by John Lennon and Yoko Ono as part of their extensive peace campaign in the late 1960s. The intent of bagism was to satirize prejudice and stereotyping. Bagism involved literally wearing a bag over one's entire body...
", first introduced during a Vienna press conference. Lennon detailed this period in The Beatles' song "The Ballad of John and Yoko". Lennon changed his name by deed poll
Deed poll
A deed poll is a legal document binding only to a single person or several persons acting jointly to express an active intention...
on 22 April 1969, adding "Ono" as a middle name. Although he used the name John Ono Lennon thereafter, official documents referred to him as John Winston Ono Lennon, since he was not permitted to revoke a name given at birth. After Ono was injured in a car accident, Lennon arranged for a king-sized bed to be brought to the recording studio as he worked on The Beatles' last album, Abbey Road.
Ono and Lennon collaborated on many albums, beginning in 1968 when Lennon was still a Beatle, with Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins
Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins
Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins is an album released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1968. The result of an all-night session of musical experimentation in Lennon's home studio at Kenwood, John and Yoko's debut album is known not only for its avant garde content, but also for its cover...
, an album of experimental and difficult electronic music
Electronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
. That same year, the couple contributed an experimental piece to The White Album called "Revolution 9
Revolution 9
"Revolution 9" is a recorded composition that appeared on The Beatles' 1968 self-titled LP release . The sound collage, credited to Lennon–McCartney, was created primarily by John Lennon with assistance from George Harrison and Yoko Ono. Lennon said he was trying to paint a picture of a revolution...
." Ono also contributed backing vocals (on "Birthday"), and one line of lead vocals (on "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill
The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill
"The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" is a song by The Beatles from the 1968 double album The Beatles ....
") to The White Album. Many of the couple's later albums were released under the name the Plastic Ono Band. The couple also appeared together at concerts. When Lennon was invited to play with Frank Zappa
Frank Zappa
Frank Vincent Zappa was an American composer, singer-songwriter, electric guitarist, record producer and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote rock, jazz, orchestral and musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed...
at the Fillmore on June 5, 1971, Ono joined in as well.
Live Peace in Toronto 1969
-Side two:-Personnel:* John Lennon — lead vocals, rhythm guitar* Yoko Ono — vocals* Eric Clapton — lead guitar, backing vocals* Klaus Voormann — bass* Alan White — drums* Kim Fowley — spoken introduction-External links:*...
, was recorded during the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival
Toronto Rock and Roll Revival
The Toronto Rock and Roll Revival was a one day, twelve hour music festival held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on September 13, 1969. It featured a number of popular musical acts from the 1950s and 1960s...
festival. In addition to Lennon and Ono, this first incarnation of the group consisted of guitarist Eric Clapton
Eric Clapton
Eric Patrick Clapton, CBE, is an English guitarist and singer-songwriter. Clapton is the only three-time inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: once as a solo artist, and separately as a member of The Yardbirds and Cream. Clapton has been referred to as one of the most important and...
, bass player Klaus Voormann, and drummer Alan White
Alan White (Yes drummer)
Alan White is an English rock drummer known for his work with the progressive rock band Yes. White was also a member of the Plastic Ono Band, playing live in 1969 at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival, which was recorded and released three months later as Live Peace in Toronto 1969...
. The first half of their performance consisted of rock standards, and during the second half, Ono took the microphone and along with the band performed an avant garde set, ending with music that consisted mainly of feedback
Audio feedback
Audio feedback is a special kind of positive feedback which occurs when a sound loop exists between an audio input and an audio output...
, while Ono screamed and sang.
Ono released her first solo album, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band
Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band
Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band is the avant-garde debut album by Yoko Ono, which came after recording three experimental releases with John Lennon and a live album as a member of The Plastic Ono Band...
in 1970, as a companion piece to Lennon's better-known John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band was received with high critical praise upon release. Critic Greil Marcus remarked, "John's singing in the last verse of 'God' may be the finest in all of rock." In early 1971, the album reached number eight on the UK and went to number six in the US, spending eighteen...
. The two albums have almost identical covers: Ono's featured a photo of her leaning on Lennon, and Lennon's had a photo of him leaning on Ono. Her album included raw and quite harsh vocals that were possibly influenced by Japanese opera
Noh
, or - derived from the Sino-Japanese word for "skill" or "talent" - is a major form of classical Japanese musical drama that has been performed since the 14th century. Many characters are masked, with men playing male and female roles. Traditionally, a Noh "performance day" lasts all day and...
, but bear much in common with sounds in nature (especially those made by animals) and free jazz techniques used by wind and brass players. The performers included Ornette Coleman
Ornette Coleman
Ornette Coleman is an American saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter and composer. He was one of the major innovators of the free jazz movement of the 1960s....
and other renowned free jazz
Free jazz
Free jazz is an approach to jazz music that was first developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Though the music produced by free jazz pioneers varied widely, the common feature was a dissatisfaction with the limitations of bebop, hard bop, and modal jazz, which had developed in the 1940s and 1950s...
performers. The personnel was supplemented by John Lennon, Ringo Starr
Ringo Starr
Richard Starkey, MBE better known by his stage name Ringo Starr, is an English musician and actor who gained worldwide fame as the drummer for The Beatles. When the band formed in 1960, Starr was a member of another Liverpool band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. He became The Beatles' drummer in...
and minor performers. Some songs consisted of wordless vocalizations, in a style that would influence Meredith Monk
Meredith Monk
Meredith Jane Monk is an American composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer. Since the 1960s, Monk has created multi-disciplinary works which combine music, theatre, and dance, recording extensively for ECM Records.-Life and work:Meredith Monk is primarily known for her...
, and other musical artists who have used screams and vocal noise in lieu of words. The album peaked at #183 on the US charts.
In 1971, Ono released Fly
Fly (Yoko Ono album)
Fly is the second album by Yoko Ono. It was produced by John Lennon and Ono, and released in 1971. It was a complete avant-garde/Fluxus package in a gatefold sleeve that came with a full-size poster and a postcard to order Ono's book Grapefruit. Notable songs include the singles "Midsummer New...
– a double album. On this release Ono explored slightly more conventional psychedelic rock
Psychedelic rock
Psychedelic rock is a style of rock music that is inspired or influenced by psychedelic culture and attempts to replicate and enhance the mind-altering experiences of psychedelic drugs. It emerged during the mid 1960s among folk rock and blues rock bands in United States and the United Kingdom...
with tracks like "Midsummer New York" and "Mind Train," in addition to a number of Fluxus experiments. She also received minor airplay with the ballad
Ballad
A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...
"Mrs. Lennon". Perhaps the most famous track from the album is "Don't Worry, Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow)," an ode to Ono's kidnapped daughter.
In 1971, while studying with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi , born Mahesh Prasad Varma , developed the Transcendental Meditation technique and was the leader and guru of the TM movement, characterised as a new religious movement and also as non-religious...
in Majorca, Ono's second husband, Anthony Cox, accused Ono of abducting their daughter, Kyoko from his hotel. A large number of accusations were then made by both parents toward each other and the matter of custody. Cox eventually moved to Houston, Texas and converted to Evangelical Christianity with his new wife, who was originally from Houston. At the end of 1971, a custody hearing in Houston went against Cox. In violation of the order, he took Kyoko and disappeared. Ono then launched a search for her daughter with the aid of the police and private investigator
Private investigator
A private investigator , private detective or inquiry agent, is a person who can be hired by individuals or groups to undertake investigatory law services. Private detectives/investigators often work for attorneys in civil cases. Many work for insurance companies to investigate suspicious claims...
s. Ono wrote a song about her daughter, "Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow)," which appears on Lennon and Ono's album Live Peace In Toronto 1969
Live Peace in Toronto 1969
-Side two:-Personnel:* John Lennon — lead vocals, rhythm guitar* Yoko Ono — vocals* Eric Clapton — lead guitar, backing vocals* Klaus Voormann — bass* Alan White — drums* Kim Fowley — spoken introduction-External links:*...
and her album Fly. Both versions feature Eric Clapton
Eric Clapton
Eric Patrick Clapton, CBE, is an English guitarist and singer-songwriter. Clapton is the only three-time inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: once as a solo artist, and separately as a member of The Yardbirds and Cream. Clapton has been referred to as one of the most important and...
on guitar. Kyoko is also referenced on the first line of "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)
Happy Xmas (War Is Over)
"Happy Xmas " is a song written by John Lennon and Yoko Ono and released in 1971 as a single by John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band with the Harlem Community Choir....
" when Yoko whispers "Happy Christmas Kyoko" followed by Lennon whispering "Happy Christmas Julian."
Both the press and the public were critical of her. She was blamed for the breakup of The Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
and repeatedly criticized for her influence over Lennon and his music. Her experimental art was not popularly understood.
After the Beatles disbanded, Lennon and Ono cohabited in London and then in New York. Their relationship was strained by the threat of deportation Lennon faced (due to drug charges filed in Britain), and Ono's separation from her daughter. The couple separated in 1973 and the two began living separate lives, Ono pursuing her career in New York and Lennon living in Los Angeles with personal assistant
Personal assistant
A personal assistant or personal aide is someone who assists in daily business or personal tasks. It is common in design to have a PDA, or personal design assistant....
May Pang
May Pang
May Fung Yee Pang is best known as the former girlfriend of John Lennon. She had previously worked as a personal assistant and production coordinator for Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono....
in a period commonly referred to as his "lost weekend."
In 1975, the couple reconciled. Their son, Sean, was born on Lennon's 35th birthday, October 9, 1975. After Sean's birth, the couple lived in relative seclusion at the Dakota
The Dakota
The Dakota, constructed from October 25, 1880 to October 27, 1884, is a co-op apartment building located on the northwest corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City...
in New York. Sean has since followed in his parents' footsteps with a musical career, doing solo work and also forming a band The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger
The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger
The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger is a band formed in 2008 by Sean Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl.-History:The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger was formed in 2008 by musician Sean Lennon and his girlfriend, musician/model Charlotte Kemp Muhl. The name of the band is from a short story once written by...
.
John Lennon retired from music to become a househusband caring for their child, until shortly before his murder in December 1980, which Ono witnessed at close range. Ono has stated that the couple were thinking about going out to dinner (after spending several hours in a recording studio), but were returning to their apartment instead, because John wanted to see Sean before he was put to bed. Following the murder, she went into complete seclusion for an extended period.
Following Lennon's murder, Cox and Kyoko sent a message of sympathy to Ono but did not reveal their location. Ono later printed an open letter to Kyoko saying how she missed her but that she would cease her attempts to find her. Kyoko would later appear on the 1987 title track of American English
American English (album)
American English is a 1987 album by Wax, and includes their hit single "Bridge to Your Heart". The album cover, designed by Storm Thorgerson, shows objects that all refer to wax.-Track listing:...
by the British pop band Wax
Wax (pop band)
Wax was a 1980s pop rock group consisting of Andrew Gold and 10cc guitarist/bassist Graham Gouldman. In the US, they were listed as Wax UK. The band is best known for the hit singles "Right Between the Eyes" and "Bridge to Your Heart".-History:...
.
Memorials
Strawberry Fields Memorial
Strawberry Fields is a landscaped section in New York City's Central Park that is dedicated to the memory of the musician John Lennon. It is named after the Beatles song "Strawberry Fields Forever".-Creation and location:...
in New York City's Central Park
Central Park
Central Park is a public park in the center of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The park initially opened in 1857, on of city-owned land. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they entitled the Greensward Plan...
, across from where they lived and Lennon died. It was officially dedicated on October 9, 1985, what would have been his 45th birthday. In 1990, Ono collaborated with music consultant Jeff Pollack to honor what would've been Lennon's 50th birthday with a worldwide broadcast of "Imagine"
Imagine (song)
"Imagine" is a song written and performed by the English musician John Lennon. It is the opening track on his album Imagine, released in 1971...
. Over one thousand stations in over fifty countries participated in the simultaneous broadcast. Ono felt the timing was perfect considering the escalating conflicts in the Middle East as well as Eastern Europe and Germany. In 2000, she founded the John Lennon Museum
John Lennon Museum
was a museum located inside the Saitama Super Arena in Chūō-ku, Saitama, Saitama Prefecture, Japan. It was established to preserve knowledge of John Lennon's life and musical career. It displayed Lennon's widow Yoko Ono's collection of his memorabilia as well as other displays...
in Saitama, Saitama
Saitama, Saitama
' is the capital and the most populous city of Saitama Prefecture in Japan, situated in the south-east of the prefecture. Its area incorporates the former cities of Urawa, Ōmiya, Yono and Iwatsuki. It is a city designated by government ordinance...
, Japan. On October 9, 2007, Ono dedicated a new memorial called the Imagine Peace Tower
Imagine Peace Tower
The Imagine Peace Tower is a memorial to John Lennon from his widow, Yoko Ono, located on Viðey Island in Kollafjörður Bay near Reykjavík, Iceland. It consists of a tall "tower of light", projected from a white stone monument that has the words "Imagine Peace" carved into it in 24 languages...
, located on the island of Viðey, 1 km outside the Skarfabakki harbour in Reykjavík
Reykjavík
Reykjavík is the capital and largest city in Iceland.Its latitude at 64°08' N makes it the world's northernmost capital of a sovereign state. It is located in southwestern Iceland, on the southern shore of Faxaflói Bay...
in Iceland
Iceland
Iceland , described as the Republic of Iceland, is a Nordic and European island country in the North Atlantic Ocean, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Iceland also refers to the main island of the country, which contains almost all the population and almost all the land area. The country has a population...
. Each year, between October 9 and December 8, it projects a vertical beam of light high into the sky. In 2009, Ono created an exhibit called John Lennon: THE NEW YORK CITY YEARS for the NYC Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum is a museum located on the shore of Lake Erie in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, United States. It is dedicated to archiving the history of some of the best-known and most influential artists, producers, engineers and others who have, in some major way,...
Annex. The exhibit uses music, photographs and personal items to depict Lennon's life in New York. A portion of the cost of each ticket to the exhibition is donated to Spirit Foundation, a charitable foundation set up by Lennon and Ono.
Musical career
Ono collaborated with experimental luminaries such as John CageJohn Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
and jazz legend Ornette Coleman
Ornette Coleman
Ornette Coleman is an American saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter and composer. He was one of the major innovators of the free jazz movement of the 1960s....
. In 1961, years before meeting Lennon, she had her first major public performance in a concert at the 258-seat Carnegie Recital Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
(not the larger "Main Hall"). This concert featured radical experimental music and performances. She had a second engagement at the Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965, in which she debuted "Cut Piece."
In early 1980, Lennon heard Lene Lovich
Lene Lovich
Lene Lovich is an American singer based in England, who first gained attention as part of the New Wave music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her most popular hit single was "Lucky Number", first released in 1979.-Early years:...
and The B-52's'
The B-52's
The B-52's are an American rock band, formed in Athens, Georgia in 1976. The original line-up consisted of Fred Schneider , Kate Pierson , Cindy Wilson , Ricky Wilson , and Keith Strickland . Following Ricky Wilson's death in 1985 Strickland switched to guitar...
"Rock Lobster" in a nightclub, and it reminded him of Ono's musical sound. He took this as an indication that her sound had reached the mainstream. Indeed, many musicians, particularly those of the new wave movement, have paid tribute to Ono (both as an artist in her own right, and as a muse
Muse
The Muses in Greek mythology, poetry, and literature, are the goddesses who inspire the creation of literature and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge, related orally for centuries in the ancient culture, that was contained in poetic lyrics and myths...
and iconic figure
Icon
An icon is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, from Eastern Christianity and in certain Eastern Catholic churches...
). For example, Elvis Costello
Elvis Costello
Elvis Costello , born Declan Patrick MacManus, is an English singer-songwriter. He came to prominence as an early participant in London's pub rock scene in the mid-1970s and later became associated with the punk/New Wave genre. Steeped in word play, the vocabulary of Costello's lyrics is broader...
recorded a version of Ono's song "Walking on Thin Ice
Walking on Thin Ice
"Walking on Thin Ice" is a New Wave/dance song by Yoko Ono, released in 1981. She and John Lennon concluded the recording of the song on December 8, 1980. It was upon their return from the recording studio to The Dakota that Lennon was murdered by Mark David Chapman...
," the B-52's who drew from her early recordings covered "Don't Worry, Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow)" (shortening the title to "Don't Worry") and Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth is an American alternative rock band from New York City, formed in 1981. The current lineup consists of Thurston Moore , Kim Gordon , Lee Ranaldo , Steve Shelley , and Mark Ibold .In their early career, Sonic Youth was associated with the No Wave art and music scene in New York City...
included a performance of Ono's early conceptual "Voice Piece for Soprano" in their experimental
Experimental music
Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...
album SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century
SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century
SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century is a double album of covers of avant-garde recordings by Sonic Youth and collaborators.SYR4 features works by avant-garde classical composers such as John Cage, Yoko Ono, Steve Reich, and Christian Wolff played by Sonic Youth along with several collaborators from the...
. One of Barenaked Ladies
Barenaked Ladies
Barenaked Ladies is a Canadian alternative rock band. The band is currently composed of Jim Creeggan, Kevin Hearn, Ed Robertson, and Tyler Stewart. Barenaked Ladies formed in 1988 in Scarborough, Ontario, then a suburban municipality outside the City of Toronto...
's best-known songs is "Be My Yoko Ono
Be My Yoko Ono
"Be My Yoko Ono" is a song by the Canadian musical group Barenaked Ladies.The song was written by Steven Page and Ed Robertson and first appeared on their 1989 demo tape, Buck Naked...
", and Dar Williams
Dar Williams
Dar Williams is an American singer-songwriter specializing in pop folk.She is a frequent performer at folk festivals and has toured with such artists as Mary Chapin Carpenter, Patty Griffin, Ani DiFranco, The Nields, Shawn Colvin, Girlyman, Joan Baez, and Catie Curtis.-Biography:Williams was born...
recorded a song called "I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono." The punk rock singer Patti Smith
Patti Smith
Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses....
invited Ono to participate in "Meltdown," a two-week music festival that Smith organized in London; Ono performed at Queen Elizabeth Hall.
On December 8, 1980, Lennon and Ono were in the studio working on Ono's song Walking on Thin Ice. When they returned to The Dakota
The Dakota
The Dakota, constructed from October 25, 1880 to October 27, 1884, is a co-op apartment building located on the northwest corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City...
, their home in New York City, Lennon was shot dead by Mark David Chapman
Mark David Chapman
Mark David Chapman is an American prison inmate who murdered former Beatles member John Lennon on December 8, 1980. He committed the crime as Lennon and Yoko Ono were outside of The Dakota apartment building in New York City. Chapman aimed five shots at Lennon, hitting him four times in his back...
, a deranged fan who had been stalking Lennon for two months. "Walking on Thin Ice (For John)" was released as a single less than a month later, and became Ono's first chart success, peaking at No. 58 and gaining major underground airplay. In 1981, she released the album Season of Glass
Season of Glass
Season of Glass is a 1981 album by Yoko Ono, her first solo recording after the murder of her husband John Lennon. The album was released less than six months after Lennon's death and deals with it directly in songs such as "Goodbye Sadness" and "I Don't Know Why".The front cover features Lennon's...
with the striking cover photo of Lennon's bloody spectacles next to a half-filled glass of water, with a window overlooking Central Park
Central Park
Central Park is a public park in the center of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The park initially opened in 1857, on of city-owned land. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they entitled the Greensward Plan...
in the background. This photograph sold at an auction in London in April 2002 for about $13,000. In the liner notes
Liner notes
Liner notes are the writings found in booklets which come inserted into the compact disc jewel case or the equivalent packaging for vinyl records and cassettes.-Origin:...
to Season of Glass, Ono explained that the album is not dedicated to Lennon because "he would have been offended—he was one of us." The album received highly favorable reviews and reflected the public's mood after Lennon's assassination.
Four months after her husband's murder, Ono began a relationship with antiques dealer and interior designer Sam Havadtoy
Sam Havadtoy
Sam Havadtoy is a British born Hungarian-American interior designer, contemporary painter and owner of Gallery 56. He is well known for being part of the artist circle of New York including – among others - Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono and Jasper Johns.- Early life :Havadtoy was born in...
, which lasted until 2001. She had also been linked to art dealer and Greta Garbo
Greta Garbo
Greta Garbo , born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, was a Swedish film actress. Garbo was an international star and icon during Hollywood's silent and classic periods. Many of Garbo's films were sensational hits, and all but three were profitable...
confidante Sam Green, who is mentioned in Lennon's will
Will (law)
A will or testament is a legal declaration by which a person, the testator, names one or more persons to manage his/her estate and provides for the transfer of his/her property at death...
. In 1982, she released It's Alright (I See Rainbows)
It's Alright (I See Rainbows)
It's Alright is the sixth solo album by Yoko Ono, and her second release after the death of husband John Lennon. As a variation of a theme concerning its predecessor, the back cover features a transparent image of Lennon in a then-contemporary photo of Yoko and Sean, depicted in Central Park...
. The cover featured Ono in her famous wrap-around sunglasses, looking towards the sun, while on the back the ghost of Lennon looks over her and their son. The album scored minor chart success and airplay with the singles "My Man" and "Never Say Goodbye".
In 1984, a tribute album titled Every Man Has a Woman
Every Man Has a Woman
Every Man Has a Woman is a tribute album to Yoko Ono for her 50th birthday. It contains covers of her songs from the albums Approximately Infinite Universe , Double Fantasy , Season of Glass , and It's Alright . The album was purportedly one of John Lennon's projects, but he died before he could...
was released, featuring a selection of Ono songs performed by artists such as Elvis Costello
Elvis Costello
Elvis Costello , born Declan Patrick MacManus, is an English singer-songwriter. He came to prominence as an early participant in London's pub rock scene in the mid-1970s and later became associated with the punk/New Wave genre. Steeped in word play, the vocabulary of Costello's lyrics is broader...
, Roberta Flack
Roberta Flack
Roberta Flack is an American singer, songwriter, and musician who is notable for jazz, soul, R&B, and folk music...
, Eddie Money
Eddie Money
Eddie Money is an American rock guitarist, saxophonist and singer-songwriter who found success in the 1970s and 1980s with a string of Top 40 hits and platinum albums...
, Rosanne Cash
Rosanne Cash
Rosanne Cash is an American singer-songwriter and author. She is the eldest daughter of the late country music singer Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin....
and Harry Nilsson
Harry Nilsson
Harry Edward Nilsson III was an American singer-songwriter who achieved the peak of his commercial success in the early 1970s. On all but his earliest recordings he is credited as Nilsson...
. It was one of Lennon's projects that he never got to finish. Later that year, Ono and Lennon's final album, Milk and Honey, was released as an unfinished demo.
Ono's final album of the 1980s was Starpeace
Starpeace
Starpeace is Yoko Ono's 1985 concept album, designed to spread a message of peace around the world as an opposition to Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" missile defense system...
, a concept album
Concept album
In music, a concept album is an album that is "unified by a theme, which can be instrumental, compositional, narrative, or lyrical." Commonly, concept albums tend to incorporate preconceived musical or lyrical ideas rather than being improvised or composed in the studio, with all songs contributing...
that she intended as an antidote to Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
's "Star Wars
Strategic Defense Initiative
The Strategic Defense Initiative was proposed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983 to use ground and space-based systems to protect the United States from attack by strategic nuclear ballistic missiles. The initiative focused on strategic defense rather than the prior strategic...
" missile defense system
National Missile Defense
National missile defense is a generic term for a type of missile defense intended to shield an entire country against incoming missiles, such as intercontinental ballistic missile or other ballistic missiles. Interception might be by anti-ballistic missiles or directed-energy weapons such as lasers...
. On the cover, a warm, smiling Ono holds the Earth in the palm of her hand. Starpeace became Ono's most successful non-Lennon effort: the single "Hell in Paradise
Hell in Paradise
"Hell in Paradise" is a song by Yoko Ono from the 1985 album "Starpeace". The lyrics are about mankind's perceived idea of hell, despite living in the paradise that Ono considers to be planet Earth. After "Walking On Thin Ice", it was her biggest hit of the 1980s, charting at #16 on the US dance...
" was a hit, reaching No. 16 on the US dance charts and #26 on the Billboard Hot 100 as well as major airplay on MTV
MTV
MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....
.
In 1986, Ono set out on a goodwill world tour for Starpeace, mostly visiting Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
an countries.
Ono went on hiatus until signing with Rykodisc
Rykodisc
Rykodisc Records is an American record label. It is owned by Warner Music Group, operates as a unit of WMG's Independent Label Group and is distributed through Alternative Distribution Alliance.-Company history:...
in 1992 to release the comprehensive six-disc box set Onobox
Onobox
Onobox is a 1992 comprehensive 6-disc collection of Yoko Ono's work from 1968 to 1985. The discs are grouped by era and theme. Disc six is the previously unreleased 1974 album A Story, which was later reissued separately along with the rest of Ono's back catalogue. There was also an accompanying...
. It included remastered highlights from all of Ono's solo albums, as well as unreleased material from the 1974 "lost weekend" sessions. There was also a one-disc "greatest hits" release of highlights from Onobox, simply titled Walking on Thin Ice
Walking on Thin Ice (album)
Walking on Thin Ice is a greatest-hits compilation of Yoko Ono's work from 1971 to 1985. It was released by Rykodisc in 1992, along with the more comprehensive 6-disc Onobox set...
. That year, she agreed to sit down for an extensive interview with music journalist Mark Kemp
Mark Kemp
Mark Kemp is an American music journalist and author. A graduate of East Carolina University, he has served as music editor of Rolling Stone and vice president of music editorial for MTV Networks...
for a cover story in the alternative music magazine Option
Option (music magazine)
Option was a music magazine based in Los Angeles, California.-History:Originally called OPtion, it, along with Sound Choice, were the dual successors to the earlier music magazine OP, published by John Foster and the Lost Music Network and known for its diverse scope and the role it played in...
. The story took a revisionist look at Ono's music for a new generation of fans more accepting of her role as a pioneer in the merger of pop and the avant-garde.
In 1994, Ono produced her own musical entitled New York Rock
New York Rock
New York Rock is an off-Broadway musical by Yoko Ono. It is a thinly veiled account of her life with John Lennon. The musical contains many songs from Ono's albums throughout the years, as well as several new tracks, some of which were reworked for inclusion on Rising.-Track listing:# "It Happened"...
, featuring Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...
renditions of her songs. In 1995, she released Rising
Rising (Yoko Ono album)
Rising is a 1995 album by avant-garde artist Yoko Ono. Released on November 7, on Capitol Records, the album features the backing band IMA , which included Ono's son Sean Lennon, Timo Ellis, and Sam Koppelman. The album has sold 11,000 copies in the United States to date...
, a collaboration with her son Sean
Sean Lennon
is an American singer, songwriter, musician, guitarist and actor. He is the only child of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. His godfather is Sir Elton John.-Early life and education:...
and his band, Ima. Rising spawned a world tour that traveled through Europe, Japan and the United States. The following year, she collaborated with various alternative rock
Alternative rock
Alternative rock is a genre of rock music and a term used to describe a diverse musical movement that emerged from the independent music underground of the 1980s and became widely popular by the 1990s...
musicians for an EP entitled Rising Mixes. Guest remixers of Rising material included Cibo Matto
Cibo Matto
Cibo Matto are a New York City-based band formed by two Japanese women, Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, in 1994...
, Ween
Ween
Ween is an American alternative rock group. They formed in 1984 in New Hope, Pennsylvania when central members Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo met in an eighth grade typing class. Ween has a large cult underground fanbase despite being generally unknown in American pop music...
, Tricky
Tricky
Tricky is an English musician and actor. As a producer and a musician, he is noted for a dark, rich and layered sound and a whispering sprechgesang lyrical style. Culturally, Tricky encourages an intertwining of societies, particularly in his musical fusion of rock and hip hop, high art and pop...
, and Thurston Moore
Thurston Moore
Thurston Joseph Moore is an American musician best known as a singer, songwriter and guitarist of Sonic Youth. He has also participated in many solo and group collaborations outside of Sonic Youth, as well as running the Ecstatic Peace! record label...
.
In 1997, Rykodisc reissued all her solo albums on CD, from Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band through Starpeace. Ono and her engineer Rob Stevens personally remastered
Audio mastering
Mastering, a form of audio post-production, is the process of preparing and transferring recorded audio from a source containing the final mix to a data storage device ; the source from which all copies will be produced...
the audio, and various bonus tracks were added including outtakes, demos and live cuts.
2001 saw the release of Ono's feminist concept album Blueprint for a Sunrise
Blueprint for a Sunrise
* "Wouldnit "swing"" is a remix of "Wouldnit" from Rising* "Soul Got Out Of The Box" was originally a 1972 outtake from Approximately Infinite Universe...
. In 2002, Yoko joined The B-52's
The B-52's
The B-52's are an American rock band, formed in Athens, Georgia in 1976. The original line-up consisted of Fred Schneider , Kate Pierson , Cindy Wilson , Ricky Wilson , and Keith Strickland . Following Ricky Wilson's death in 1985 Strickland switched to guitar...
in New York for their 25th anniversary concerts. She came out for the encore and performed Rock Lobster
Rock lobster
Jasus edwardsii, the southern rock lobster, red rock lobster, or spiny rock lobster, is a species of spiny lobster found throughout coastal waters of southern Australia and New Zealand including the Chatham Islands. This species is commonly called crayfish or crays in New Zealand and in Māori...
with the band. Starting in 2002, some DJs remix
Remix
A remix is an alternative version of a recorded song, made from an original version. This term is also used for any alterations of media other than song ....
ed other Ono songs for dance clubs. For the remix project, she dropped her first name and became known as simply "ONO," as a response to the "Oh, no!" jokes that dogged her throughout her career. Ono had great success with new versions of "Walking on Thin Ice", remixed by top DJs and dance artists including Pet Shop Boys
Pet Shop Boys
Pet Shop Boys are an English electronic dance music duo, consisting of Neil Tennant, who provides main vocals, keyboards and occasional guitar, and Chris Lowe on keyboards....
, Orange Factory
Open Your Box
Open Your Box is a song by Yoko Ono, released on 12 March 1971 as the B-side of John Lennon's single Power to the People. It was remixed and re-released by Orange Factory in 2001....
, Peter Rauhofer
Peter Rauhofer
Peter Rauhofer is a DJ, remixer and producer who formerly went under the moniker Club 69 as well as Size Queen. A native of Vienna, Austria, he is famous for his remixes of a number of Madonna's songs including "Nothing Really Matters", "American Life", "Nothing Fails, "Nobody Knows Me", "Get...
, and Danny Tenaglia
Danny Tenaglia
Danny Tenaglia is a New York-based DJ and Grammy nominated record producer.-Early life:At the age of ten, Tenaglia first started to collect records. In 1979 he began going to nightclub Paradise Garage, where DJ Larry Levan's genre-less blend of music appealed to him...
. In April 2003, Ono's Walking on Thin Ice (Remixes) was rated No. 1 on Billboard Magazine's "Dance/Club Play Chart", gaining Ono her first number one hit. On the 12" mix of the original 1981 version of "Walking on Thin Ice", Lennon can be heard remarking "I think we've just got your first No.1, Yoko." She returned to No. 1 on the same charts in November 2004 with "Everyman...Everywoman...," a reworking of her song "Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him", in January 2008, with "No No No," and in August 2008, with "Give Peace a Chance." In June 2009, at the age of 76, Ono scored her fifth No. 1 hit on the "Dance/Club Play Chart" with "I'm Not Getting Enough."
Ono released the album Yes, I'm a Witch
Yes, I'm a Witch
-Track listing:All songs were written by Yoko Ono.#Hank Shocklee – "Witch Shocktronica Intro"#Peaches – "Kiss Kiss Kiss"#Shitake Monkey – "O'Oh"#Blow Up – "Everyman Everywoman"#Le Tigre – "Sisters O Sisters"#Porcupine Tree – "Death of Samantha"...
in 2007, a collection of remixes and covers from her back catalog by various artists including The Flaming Lips
The Flaming Lips
The Flaming Lips are an American alternative rock band, formed in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1983.Melodically, their sound contains lush, multi-layered, psychedelic rock arrangements, but lyrically their compositions show elements of space rock, including unusual song and album titles—such as "What...
, Cat Power
Cat Power
Charlyn Marie Marshall , also known as Chan Marshall or by her stage name Cat Power, is an American singer/songwriter and occasional actress and model. Cat Power was originally the name of Marshall's first band, but has come to refer to her musical projects with various backing bands...
, Antony
Antony Hegarty
Antony Hegarty is an English singer-songwriter, best known as the lead singer of the band Antony and the Johnsons.-Early life:...
, DJ Spooky
DJ Spooky
Paul D. Miller , known by his stage name DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, is a Washington DC-born electronic and experimental hip hop musician whose work is often called by critics or his fans as "illbient" or "trip hop". He is a turntablist, a producer, a philosopher, and an author...
, Porcupine Tree
Porcupine Tree
Porcupine Tree is a progressive rock band formed by Steven Wilson in 1987 in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, England. Their music is difficult to categorise, being associated with both psychedelic rock and progressive rock, yet having been influenced by trance, krautrock and ambient due to Steven...
and Peaches
Peaches (musician)
Merrill Beth Nisker , better known by her stage name Peaches, is a Canadian electronic musician and performance artist who lives in Berlin, Germany. Her songs are noted for disregarding traditional gender norms and their use of sexually explicit lyrics...
, released in February 2007, along with a special edition of Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band
Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band
Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band is the avant-garde debut album by Yoko Ono, which came after recording three experimental releases with John Lennon and a live album as a member of The Plastic Ono Band...
. Yes I'm a Witch has been critically well-received. A similar compilation of Ono dance remixes entitled Open Your Box
Open Your Box (album)
Open Your Box is a remix album by Yoko Ono which was released on April 24, 2007. It is a compilation of her successful series of remix singles released since 2001 with the addition of several new mixes. Collaborators include Basement Jaxx, Felix Da Housecat and the Pet Shop Boys...
was also released in April of that year.
In 2009, Ono recorded Between My Head and the Sky
Between My Head and the Sky
Between My Head and the Sky is an album by Yoko Ono released on Chimera Music in September 2009. This is her first studio album to be released as "Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band" since 1973's Feeling the Space...
, her first album to be released as "Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band" since 1973's Feeling the Space. The all-new Plastic Ono Band lineup includes Sean Lennon, Cornelius
Cornelius (musician)
Cornelius is a Japanese recording artist and producer.-Career:Oyamada's first claim to fame was as a member of the pop duo Flipper's Guitar, one of the key groups of the Tokyo Shibuya-kei scene...
and Yuka Honda
Yuka Honda
Yuka Honda is a Japanese musician who resides in New York City. She is a multi-instrumentalist musician, composer, record producer, and co-founder of the band Cibo Matto...
amongst others. On February 16, 2010, Sean organized a concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Brooklyn Academy of Music is a major performing arts venue in Brooklyn, a borough of New York City, United States, known as a center for progressive and avant garde performance....
called "We Are Plastic Ono Band," at which Yoko performed her music with Sean, Clapton, Klaus Voorman and Jim Keltner, for the first time since the 1970s. Guests including Bette Midler, Paul Simon and his son Harper, and principal members of Sonic Youth interpreted her songs in their own styles.
During her career, Ono has collaborated with a diverse group of artists and musicians including John Lennon
John Lennon
John Winston Lennon, MBE was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music...
, Eric Clapton
Eric Clapton
Eric Patrick Clapton, CBE, is an English guitarist and singer-songwriter. Clapton is the only three-time inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: once as a solo artist, and separately as a member of The Yardbirds and Cream. Clapton has been referred to as one of the most important and...
, Klaus Voormann
Klaus Voormann
Klaus Voormann is a German Grammy Award-winning artist, noted musician, and record producer. He designed artwork for many bands including The Beatles, The Bee Gees, Wet Wet Wet and Turbonegro. His most notable work as a producer was his work with the band Trio, including their worldwide hit "Da Da...
, Cornelius
Cornelius (musician)
Cornelius is a Japanese recording artist and producer.-Career:Oyamada's first claim to fame was as a member of the pop duo Flipper's Guitar, one of the key groups of the Tokyo Shibuya-kei scene...
(Keigo Oyamada, Naoki Shimizu and Yoko Araki), Frank Zappa
Frank Zappa
Frank Vincent Zappa was an American composer, singer-songwriter, electric guitarist, record producer and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote rock, jazz, orchestral and musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed...
, Sean Lennon
Sean Lennon
is an American singer, songwriter, musician, guitarist and actor. He is the only child of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. His godfather is Sir Elton John.-Early life and education:...
, Yuka Honda
Yuka Honda
Yuka Honda is a Japanese musician who resides in New York City. She is a multi-instrumentalist musician, composer, record producer, and co-founder of the band Cibo Matto...
, Jim Keltner
Jim Keltner
James Lee "Jim" Keltner is an American drummer known primarily for his session work. He has contributed to the work of many well-known artists...
, Earl Slick
Earl Slick
Earl Slick is a guitarist best known for his collaborations with David Bowie, Jim Diamond and Robert Smith, although he has also worked with other artists , John Waite, and even released some solo recordings.In the early 1970s, Earl Slick gained his...
, Peaches
Peaches (musician)
Merrill Beth Nisker , better known by her stage name Peaches, is a Canadian electronic musician and performance artist who lives in Berlin, Germany. Her songs are noted for disregarding traditional gender norms and their use of sexually explicit lyrics...
, John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
, David Tudor
David Tudor
David Eugene Tudor was an American pianist and composer of experimental music.- Biography :Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied piano with Irma Wolpe and composition with Stefan Wolpe and became known as one of the leading performers of avant garde piano music. He gave the...
, George Maciunas
George Maciunas
George Maciunas was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He was a founding member of Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers...
, Ornette Coleman
Ornette Coleman
Ornette Coleman is an American saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter and composer. He was one of the major innovators of the free jazz movement of the 1960s....
, Charlotte Moorman
Charlotte Moorman
Madeline Charlotte Moorman Garside was an American cellist and performance artist.She was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She studied cello from age ten and won a scholarship to Centenary College where she took her B.A. in music in 1955. She received her M.A...
, George Brecht
George Brecht
George Brecht , born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil...
, Jackson Mac Low
Jackson Mac Low
Jackson Mac Low was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practioneer of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work of John Cage, Earle...
, Jonas Mekas
Jonas Mekas
Jonas Mekas is a Lithuanian-born American filmmaker, writer, and curator who has often been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema." His work has been exhibited in museums and festivals across Europe and America.-Biography:...
, Fred DeAsis, Yvonne Rainer
Yvonne Rainer
Yvonne Rainer is an American dancer, choreographer and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is frequently challenging and experimental. Her work is classified as minimalist art.- Early life :...
, La Monte Young
La Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
, Richard Maxfield
Richard Maxfield
Richard Maxfield was a composer of instrumental, electro-acoustic, and electronic music.Born in Seattle, he most likely taught the first University-level course in electronic music in America at the New School for Social Research...
, Zbigniew Rybczyński
Zbigniew Rybczynski
Zbigniew Rybczyński is a Polish filmmaker who has won numerous prestigious industry awards both in the United States and internationally. He was also a teacher of cinematography, and digital cinematography. Currently he is a researcher of blue and greenscreen compositing technology at Ultimatte...
, Yo La Tengo
Yo La Tengo
Yo La Tengo, sometimes abbreviated as YLT, is an American alternative rock band formed in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1984. Since 1992, the lineup has consisted of Ira Kaplan , Georgia Hubley , and James McNew .Despite achieving limited mainstream success, Yo La Tengo has been called "the quintessential...
, and Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
(in 1987 Ono was one of the speakers at Warhol's funeral). As a dance music artist, Ono has worked with re-mixers/producers such as Basement Jaxx
Basement Jaxx
Basement Jaxx are a British electronic dance music duo from London, England consisting of Felix Buxton born 1971 and Simon Ratcliffe born 1 December 1969. They first rose to popularity in the late 1990s...
, Pet Shop Boys
Pet Shop Boys
Pet Shop Boys are an English electronic dance music duo, consisting of Neil Tennant, who provides main vocals, keyboards and occasional guitar, and Chris Lowe on keyboards....
, Cat Power
Cat Power
Charlyn Marie Marshall , also known as Chan Marshall or by her stage name Cat Power, is an American singer/songwriter and occasional actress and model. Cat Power was originally the name of Marshall's first band, but has come to refer to her musical projects with various backing bands...
, Bill Kates, Tricky
Tricky
Tricky is an English musician and actor. As a producer and a musician, he is noted for a dark, rich and layered sound and a whispering sprechgesang lyrical style. Culturally, Tricky encourages an intertwining of societies, particularly in his musical fusion of rock and hip hop, high art and pop...
, Thurston Moore
Thurston Moore
Thurston Joseph Moore is an American musician best known as a singer, songwriter and guitarist of Sonic Youth. He has also participated in many solo and group collaborations outside of Sonic Youth, as well as running the Ecstatic Peace! record label...
, Keiji Haino
Keiji Haino
Keiji Haino born May 3, 1952 in Chiba, Japan, and currently residing in Tokyo, is a Japanese musician whose work has included rock, free improvisation, noise, singer-songwriter, solo percussion, psychedelic, minimalism and drone styles...
, Nick Vernier Band
Nick Vernier Band
Nick Vernier Band is an alias for productions by Dutch musician and record producer Eric Van Den Brink. Although a ‘one man band’ in essence, featured collaborators include Probyn Gregory, Gerry Beckley , Stephen John Kalinich, Paul Jones, Iain Matthews, Matt Malley, Emitt Rhodes, Duncan Maitland,...
, Cibo Matto
Cibo Matto
Cibo Matto are a New York City-based band formed by two Japanese women, Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, in 1994...
, Billy Martin
Billy Martin
Alfred Manuel "Billy" Martin, Jr. was an American Major League Baseball second baseman and manager. He is best known as the manager of the New York Yankees, a position he held five different times...
, DJ Spooky
DJ Spooky
Paul D. Miller , known by his stage name DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, is a Washington DC-born electronic and experimental hip hop musician whose work is often called by critics or his fans as "illbient" or "trip hop". He is a turntablist, a producer, a philosopher, and an author...
, Apples In Stereo, Damien Price, The Flaming Lips
The Flaming Lips
The Flaming Lips are an American alternative rock band, formed in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1983.Melodically, their sound contains lush, multi-layered, psychedelic rock arrangements, but lyrically their compositions show elements of space rock, including unusual song and album titles—such as "What...
, DJ Chernobyl, Bimbo Jones
Bimbo Jones
Bimbo Jones is a UK dance music group comprising producers Lee Dagger and Marc JB and vocalist Katherine Ellis. Known for their remix work and white label releases, they produced a remix of Meck's 2006 UK number-one single "Thunder in My Heart Again"...
, DJ Dan
DJ Dan
DJ Dan is an American electronic house music DJ and producer. Dan previously released works through the Moonshine label....
, Craig Armstrong, Jorge Artajo
Jorge Artajo
Jorge Artajo Muruzabal was born in Sádaba, , Spain. visual artist, poet, draftsman, writer, performer and social activist. He currently lives in Madrid working as editor in chief at Canal + Spain TV channel.-Biography:...
, Shuji Nabara, and Konrad Behr, among others.
2000s
At the Liverpool BiennialLiverpool Biennial
Liverpool Biennial is a British international festival of contemporary art held in Liverpool. The festival comprises the International Exhibition, the John Moores Painting Prize, the Bloomberg New Contemporaries Exhibition and the Independents Biennial....
in 2004, Yoko flooded the city with banners, bags, stickers, postcards, flyers, posters and badges, with two images: one of a woman's naked breast, the other of the same woman's vulva. The piece, titled "My Mummy Was Beautiful", was dedicated to Lennon's mother, Julia, who had died when Lennon was a teenager. According to Ono, the work was meant to be innocent, not shocking. She was attempting to replicate the experience of a baby looking up at his or her mother's body: the mother's pudendum
Vulva
The vulva consists of the external genital organs of the female mammal. This article deals with the vulva of the human being, although the structures are similar for other mammals....
and breasts are a child's introduction to humanity
Human nature
Human nature refers to the distinguishing characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and acting, that humans tend to have naturally....
. It was created in the spirit of, and seems inspired by Gustave Courbet
Gustave Courbet
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. The Realist movement bridged the Romantic movement , with the Barbizon School and the Impressionists...
's L'Origine du monde
L'Origine du monde
L’Origine du monde is an oil-on-canvas painted by French artist Gustave Courbet in 1866. It is a close-up view of the genitals and abdomen of a naked woman, lying on a bed with legs spread...
.
2006 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony
The Opening Ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics was held on February 10, 2006 beginning at 20:00 CET at the Stadio Olimpico in Turin, Italy....
for the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Turin
Turin
Turin is a city and major business and cultural centre in northern Italy, capital of the Piedmont region, located mainly on the left bank of the Po River and surrounded by the Alpine arch. The population of the city proper is 909,193 while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat...
, Italy, wearing white, like many of the others who performed during the ceremony, to symbolize the snow that makes the Winter Olympics possible. She read a free verse poem calling for peace in the world. The poem was an intro to a performance of the song "Imagine", Lennon's anthem to world peace.
On December 13, 2006, Ono's bodyguard was arrested after he was taped trying to extort Ono for two million dollars, threatening to release private conversations and photographs.
On June 26, 2007, Ono appeared on Larry King Live along with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Olivia Harrison. Ono headlined the Pitchfork Music Festival
Pitchfork Music Festival
The Pitchfork Music Festival is an annual summer music festival organized by Pitchfork Media and held in Union Park in Chicago, IL. The festival, which is normally held over three days in July, focuses primarily on artists and bands from alternative rock, rap & hip-hop, electronica, and dance...
in Chicago on July 14, 2007, performing a full set that mixed music and performance art. She sang "Mulberry", a song about her time in the countryside after the Japanese collapse in World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
for only the third time in her life, with Thurston Moore
Thurston Moore
Thurston Joseph Moore is an American musician best known as a singer, songwriter and guitarist of Sonic Youth. He has also participated in many solo and group collaborations outside of Sonic Youth, as well as running the Ecstatic Peace! record label...
. Ono had previously performed the song once with John Lennon and once with Sean Lennon
Sean Lennon
is an American singer, songwriter, musician, guitarist and actor. He is the only child of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. His godfather is Sir Elton John.-Early life and education:...
and told the audience of thousands that she will never perform it again.
On October 9, 2007 Ono officially lit the Imagine Peace Tower
Imagine Peace Tower
The Imagine Peace Tower is a memorial to John Lennon from his widow, Yoko Ono, located on Viðey Island in Kollafjörður Bay near Reykjavík, Iceland. It consists of a tall "tower of light", projected from a white stone monument that has the words "Imagine Peace" carved into it in 24 languages...
on Viðey Island in Iceland
Iceland
Iceland , described as the Republic of Iceland, is a Nordic and European island country in the North Atlantic Ocean, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Iceland also refers to the main island of the country, which contains almost all the population and almost all the land area. The country has a population...
, dedicated to peace and to Lennon.
Ono returned to Liverpool for the 2008 Liverpool Biennial, where she unveiled "Sky Ladders" in the ruins of Church of St Luke, Liverpool
Church of St Luke, Liverpool
St Luke's Church in Liverpool, England, is located on the corner of Berry Street and Leece Street opposite the top of Bold Street. It was designed by John Foster, and construction of the building began on 9 April 1811, with consecration taking place on 12 January 1831.On Monday, 5 May 1941, St...
(which was largely destroyed during World War II and now stands roofless as a memorial to those killed in the Liverpool Blitz
Liverpool Blitz
The Liverpool Blitz was the heavy and sustained bombing of the British city of Liverpool and its surrounding area, at the time mostly within the counties of Lancashire and Cheshire but commonly known as Merseyside, during the Second World War by the German Luftwaffe.Liverpool, Bootle, and the...
).
In May 2009, Yoko designed a T-shirt for the second 'Fashion against AIDS' campaign/collection of HIV/AIDS awareness NGO Designers against AIDS and H&M, with the statement 'Imagine Peace' depicted in 21 different languages.
On March 31, 2009, Yoko Ono went to the inauguration of the exhibition: "Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John & Yoko" to mark the 40th anniversary of Lennon-Ono bed-in at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Canada from May 26 to June 2, 1969.
Ono appeared on-stage at Microsoft's June 1, 2009 E3 press conference with Olivia Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr to promote The Beatles: Rock Band
The Beatles: Rock Band
The Beatles: Rock Band is a 2009 music video game developed by Harmonix Music Systems, published by MTV Games, and distributed by Electronic Arts. It is the third major console release in the Rock Band music video game series, in which players can simulate the playing of rock music by using...
video game.
Ono appears on the new Basement Jaxx
Basement Jaxx
Basement Jaxx are a British electronic dance music duo from London, England consisting of Felix Buxton born 1971 and Simon Ratcliffe born 1 December 1969. They first rose to popularity in the late 1990s...
album Scars
Scars (Basement Jaxx album)
Scars is the fifth studio album by British electronic dance music duo Basement Jaxx, released on 21 September 2009. It was preceded by the first single "Raindrops", released on 21 June, while the second single, "Feelings Gone", was also released in the United Kingdom on 21 September...
, featuring on the single "Day of the Sunflowers (We March On)".
2010s
On February 16, 2010, Yoko Ono revived an early Plastic Ono Band line-up with Eric ClaptonEric Clapton
Eric Patrick Clapton, CBE, is an English guitarist and singer-songwriter. Clapton is the only three-time inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: once as a solo artist, and separately as a member of The Yardbirds and Cream. Clapton has been referred to as one of the most important and...
and special guests including Paul Simon
Paul Simon
Paul Frederic Simon is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist.Simon is best known for his success, beginning in 1965, as part of the duo Simon & Garfunkel, with musical partner Art Garfunkel. Simon wrote most of the pair's songs, including three that reached number one on the US singles...
and Bette Midler
Bette Midler
Bette Midler is an American singer, actress, and comedian, also known by her informal stage name, The Divine Miss M. She became famous as a cabaret and concert headliner, and went on to star in successful and acclaimed films such as The Rose, Ruthless People, Beaches, and For The Boys...
. (See "Musical career" above.) On April 1, 2010, she was named the first "Global Autism Ambassador" by the Autism Speaks
Autism Speaks
Autism Speaks is the world's largest autism advocacy organization that sponsors autism research and conducts awareness and outreach activities aimed at families, governments, and the public. It was founded in February 2005 by Bob Wright, vice chairman of General Electric, and by his wife Suzanne, a...
organization. Ono appeared with Ringo Starr
Ringo Starr
Richard Starkey, MBE better known by his stage name Ringo Starr, is an English musician and actor who gained worldwide fame as the drummer for The Beatles. When the band formed in 1960, Starr was a member of another Liverpool band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. He became The Beatles' drummer in...
on July 7, 2010 at New York's Radio City Music Hall
Radio City Music Hall
Radio City Music Hall is an entertainment venue located in New York City's Rockefeller Center. Its nickname is the Showplace of the Nation, and it was for a time the leading tourist destination in the city...
in celebration of Starr's 70th birthday, performing "With a Little Help from My Friends
With a Little Help from My Friends
-Joe Cocker version:Joe Cocker's version was a radical re-arrangement of the original, in a slower, 6/8 meter, using different chords in the middle eight, and a lengthy instrumental introduction...
" and "Give Peace a Chance
Give Peace a Chance
"Give Peace a Chance" is a song written by John Lennon, originally under the moniker Lennon–McCartney, released as a single in 1969 by the Plastic Ono Band on Apple Records, catalogue Apple 13 in the United Kingdom, Apple 1809 in the United States. It is the first solo single issued by Lennon, and...
". On October 2, 2010, Ono and the Plastic Ono Band performed at The Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles, California with special guest Lady GaGa
Lady GaGa
Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta , better known by her stage name Lady Gaga, is an American singer and songwriter. Born and raised in New York City, she primarily studied at the Convent of the Sacred Heart and briefly attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts before withdrawing to...
.
On her 78th Birthday, 18 February 2011, Yoko Ono took out a full page advert in the UK free newspaper Metro for 'Imagine Peace 2011'. It took the form of an open letter, inviting people to think of, and wish for, peace. Ono and son Sean held a benefit concert to aid in the relief efforts for earthquake and tsunami-ravaged Japan on March 27 in New York City. In July 2011, Ono was awarded the 8th Hiroshima Art Prize for her contributions in art and for peace.
Political activism
Since the 1960s, Ono has been an activist for peace and human rights. After their wedding, Lennon and Ono held a "Bed-In for PeaceBed-In
During the Vietnam War, in 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono held two week-long Bed-Ins for Peace in Amsterdam and Montreal, which were their non-violent ways of protesting wars and promoting peace...
" in their honeymoon suite at the Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
Hilton Hotel in March 1969. The press fought to get in, presuming that the two would be having sex for their cameras, but they instead found a pair of newlyweds wearing pajamas and eager to talk about and promote world peace
World peace
World Peace is an ideal of freedom, peace, and happiness among and within all nations and/or people. World peace is an idea of planetary non-violence by which nations willingly cooperate, either voluntarily or by virtue of a system of governance that prevents warfare. The term is sometimes used to...
. Another Bed-In
Bed-In
During the Vietnam War, in 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono held two week-long Bed-Ins for Peace in Amsterdam and Montreal, which were their non-violent ways of protesting wars and promoting peace...
in May 1969 at the Queen Elizabeth Fairmont in Montreal, Canada, resulted in the recording of their first single, "Give Peace A Chance", a Top 20 hit for the newly-christened Plastic Ono Band. Other demonstrations with John included Bagism
Bagism
Bagism is a term which was created by John Lennon and Yoko Ono as part of their extensive peace campaign in the late 1960s. The intent of bagism was to satirize prejudice and stereotyping. Bagism involved literally wearing a bag over one's entire body...
. Introduced in Vienna, Bagism encouraged a disregard for physical appearance in judging others.
In the 1970s, Ono and Lennon became close to many radical leaders, including Bobby Seale
Bobby Seale
Robert George "Bobby" Seale , is an activist. He is known for co-founding the Black Panther Party with Huey Newton.-Early life:...
, Abbie Hoffman
Abbie Hoffman
Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was a political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ....
, Jerry Rubin
Jerry Rubin
Jerry Rubin was an American social activist during the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1980s, he became a successful businessman.-Early life:...
, Michael X
Michael X
Michael X , born Michael de Freitas in Trinidad and Tobago to a Portuguese father and a Bajan-born mother, was a self-styled black revolutionary and civil rights activist in 1960s London. He was also known as Michael Abdul Malik and Abdul Malik...
, John Sinclair
John Sinclair (poet)
John Sinclair is a Detroit poet, one-time manager of the band MC5, and leader of the White Panther Party — a militantly anti-racist countercultural group of white socialists seeking to assist the Black Panthers in the Civil Rights movement — from November 1968 to July 1969...
(for whom they organized a benefit after he was imprisoned), Angela Davis
Angela Davis
Angela Davis is an American political activist, scholar, and author. Davis was most politically active during the late 1960s through the 1970s and was associated with the Communist Party USA, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party...
, Kate Millett
Kate Millett
Kate Millett is an American lesbian feminist writer and activist. A seminal influence on second-wave feminism, Millet is best known for her 1970 book Sexual Politics.-Career:...
, and David Peel. They appeared on The Mike Douglas Show
The Mike Douglas Show
The Mike Douglas Show is an American daytime television talk show hosted by Mike Douglas that aired in syndication from 1961 to 1982, distributed by Westinghouse Broadcasting and for much of its run, originated from studios of two of the company's TV stations.The program featured light banter with...
and took over hosting duties for a week, during which Ono spoke at length about the evils of racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
and sexism
Sexism
Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the application of the belief or attitude that there are characteristics implicit to one's gender that indirectly affect one's abilities in unrelated areas...
. Ono remained outspoken in her support of feminism, and openly bitter about the racism she had experienced from rock fans, especially in the United Kingdom. For example, an Esquire
Esquire (magazine)
Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...
article of the period was titled "John Rennon's Excrusive Gloupie" and featured an unflattering David Levine
David Levine
David Levine was an American artist and illustrator best known for his caricatures in The New York Review of Books. Jules Feiffer has called him "the greatest caricaturist of the last half of the 20th Century".-Early life and education:Levine was born in Brooklyn, where his father Harry ran a...
cartoon.
In 2002, Ono inaugurated her own peace award, The LennonOno Grant for Peace, by giving $50,000 (£31,900) prize money to artists living "in regions of conflict." Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
i and Palestinian
Palestinian people
The Palestinian people, also referred to as Palestinians or Palestinian Arabs , are an Arabic-speaking people with origins in Palestine. Despite various wars and exoduses, roughly one third of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in the area encompassing the West Bank, the Gaza...
artists were the first recipients. The award is given out every two years, in conjunction with the lighting of the Imagine Peace Tower.
On Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2003, on the eve of the Iraqi invasion by the Americans and the British, Ono heard about a romantic couple holding a love-in protest in their tiny bedroom in Addingham, West Yorkshire. She sent the couple, Andrew and Christine Gale, some flowers and wished them the best.
In 2004, Ono remade her song "Everyman... Everywoman..." to support same-sex marriage
Same-sex marriage
Same-sex marriage is marriage between two persons of the same biological sex or social gender. Supporters of legal recognition for same-sex marriage typically refer to such recognition as marriage equality....
, releasing remixes that included "Every Man Has a Man Who Loves Him" and "Every Woman Has a Woman Who Loves Her."
Relationship with Paul McCartney
In 2005, Ono said, "People like to picture Paul and me in a boxing ring, feuding all the time, otherwise it's not exciting or interesting for them. People need light-hearted topics like me and Paul fighting to escape all the horror of the world, but it's not true anymore." However, they have publicly disagreed on several issues.In late 1965, Ono was in London compiling original musical scores for a book John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
was working on. She met McCartney who declined to give her any of his own manuscripts for the book. John Lennon later gave Ono the original handwritten lyrics to "The Word
The Word (song)
"The Word" is a song by The Beatles first released on their 1965 album Rubber Soul. It has been cited as the first instance in which The Beatles began writing about love in more abstract terms, versus concrete girl/boy terms, a la "She Loves You", with preaching lyrics such as "The word is love"...
", which were subsequently reproduced in Cage's book Notations
Notations
Notations is a book that was edited by John Cage with Alison Knowles. The book is made up of a large collection of graphical scores which are presented in alphabetical order, with each score getting equal space....
published in 1969.
Writing credit on Beatles songs was another issue. While the group was together, every song written by Lennon or McCartney was credited as Lennon–McCartney regardless of whether the song was a collaboration or written solely by one of the two (except for those appearing on their first album, Please Please Me, which credited the songs to McCartney–Lennon). In 1976, McCartney released a live album called Wings Over America
Wings over America
Wings over America is the sixth album by Wings and their only live album. In its initial release, it was a triple album and included a poster of the band.-Recording history:...
which credited the five Beatles tracks he included as P. McCartney–J. Lennon compositions. Neither Lennon nor Ono objected. After Lennon's death, McCartney once again attempted to change the order to "McCartney–Lennon" for songs such as "Yesterday
Yesterday (song)
"Yesterday" is a song originally recorded by The Beatles for their 1965 album Help!. The song first hit the United Kingdom top 10 three months after the release of Help!. The song remains popular today with more than 1,600 cover versions, one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded...
" that were solely or predominantly written by him, but Ono would not allow it, saying she felt this broke an agreement that the two had made while Lennon was still alive. However, McCartney argued that such an agreement never existed. The two other Beatles agreed that the credits should remain as they always had been and McCartney withdrew his request. On the 1998 John Lennon anthology, Lennon Legend, the composer credit of "Give Peace a Chance
Give Peace a Chance
"Give Peace a Chance" is a song written by John Lennon, originally under the moniker Lennon–McCartney, released as a single in 1969 by the Plastic Ono Band on Apple Records, catalogue Apple 13 in the United Kingdom, Apple 1809 in the United States. It is the first solo single issued by Lennon, and...
" was changed to "John Lennon" from its original composing credit of Lennon–McCartney. Although the song was written by Lennon during his tenure with the Beatles it was both written and recorded without the help of the band and released as Lennon's first independent single under the "Plastic Ono Band" moniker. Lennon subsequently expressed regret that he had not given co-writing credit to Ono instead, who actually helped him write the song. In 2002, McCartney released another live album, Back in the U.S. Live 2002, and the 19 Beatles' songs included are described as "composed by Paul McCartney and John Lennon".
In 1995, after the Beatles released Lennon's "Free as a Bird
Free as a Bird
"Free as a Bird" is a song originally composed and recorded in 1977 as a home demo by John Lennon. In 1995 a studio version of the recording incorporating contributions from Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr was released as a single by The Beatles.The single was released as part of...
" and "Real Love" with demos provided by Ono, McCartney and his family collaborated with her and Sean Lennon to create the song "Hiroshima Sky is Always Blue", which commemorates the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of that Japanese city. Of Ono, McCartney stated: "I thought she was a cold woman. I think that's wrong ... she's just the opposite ... I think she's just more determined than most people to be herself."
In 1997, Ono compared Lennon to Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...
while McCartney, she said, more closely resembled his less-talented rival Salieri
Antonio Salieri
Antonio Salieri was a Venetian classical composer, conductor and teacher born in Legnago, south of Verona, in the Republic of Venice, but who spent his adult life and career as a faithful subject of the Habsburg monarchy....
. This remark infuriated Linda McCartney
Linda McCartney
Linda Louise McCartney, Lady McCartney was an American photographer, musician and animal rights activist. Her father and mother were Lee Eastman and Louise Sara Lindner Eastman....
, who was battling breast cancer
Breast cancer
Breast cancer is cancer originating from breast tissue, most commonly from the inner lining of milk ducts or the lobules that supply the ducts with milk. Cancers originating from ducts are known as ductal carcinomas; those originating from lobules are known as lobular carcinomas...
at the time. When she died less than a year later, McCartney pointedly did not invite Ono to a New York memorial service for her.
Accepting an award at the 2005 Q Awards, Ono mentioned that Lennon had once felt insecure about his songwriting, and asked her why other musicians "always cover Paul's songs, and never mine". Ono had responded, "You're a good songwriter; it's not June with spoon that you write. You're a good singer, and most musicians are probably a little bit nervous about covering your songs". McCartney responded by saying, "I don’t take any notice of her. She’s John’s wife so I have to respect her for that, but I don’t think she’s the brightest of buttons. She’s said some particularly daft things in her time. Her life is dedicated to putting me down but I attempt very strongly not to put her down." Ono later issued a statement claiming she did not mean any offense, as her comment was an attempt to console her husband, not attack McCartney; she went on to insist that she respected McCartney and that it was the press who had taken her comments out of context. " At the June 2006 Las Vegas premiere of Cirque du Soleil
Cirque du Soleil
Cirque du Soleil , is a Canadian entertainment company, self-described as a "dramatic mix of circus arts and street entertainment." Based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and located in the inner-city area of Saint-Michel, it was founded in Baie-Saint-Paul in 1984 by two former street performers, Guy...
's Beatles performance "Love
LOVE (Cirque du Soleil)
Love is a 2006 theatrical production by Cirque du Soleil which combines the re-produced and re-imagined music of The Beatles with an interpretive, circus-based artistic and athletic stage performance. The show plays at a specially built theatre at The Mirage in Las Vegas.A joint venture between...
", pictures were taken of her and Paul hugging. They appeared again together in July 2007 for the show's first anniversary.
Relationship with Cynthia Lennon
Ono's relationship with John Lennon's first wife, Cynthia LennonCynthia Lennon
Cynthia Lillian Lennon is the former wife of musician John Lennon, and mother of Julian Lennon. She grew up in the middle-class section of Hoylake, on the Wirral Peninsula in North West England. At the age of twelve, she was accepted into the Junior Art School, and was later enrolled in the...
remains strained. In her 2006 biography, John, (London: Hodder; U.S.: Crown Publishing) Cynthia Lennon portrays Ono as a selfish, spiteful woman. In the book, she describes learning about Ono's control over John (who referred to Ono as "mother") in the period in the mid-1970s when Ono chose May Pang
May Pang
May Fung Yee Pang is best known as the former girlfriend of John Lennon. She had previously worked as a personal assistant and production coordinator for Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono....
to be John's companion. Cynthia hypothesizes that John had a "mother complex," allowing himself to be dominated by strong women and draws a parallel between his relationship with Ono and that with his domineering aunt Mimi Smith
Mimi Smith
Mary Elizabeth "Mimi" Smith was the maternal aunt and parental guardian of the English musician John Lennon. Mimi was born in Liverpool, England and was the oldest of five daughters. She became a resident trainee nurse at the Woolton Convalescent Hospital, and later worked as a private secretary...
in childhood.
Albums
[*] = with John Lennon, number indicates U.S. chart peak positions- Unfinished Music No.1: Two VirginsUnfinished Music No.1: Two VirginsUnfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins is an album released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1968. The result of an all-night session of musical experimentation in Lennon's home studio at Kenwood, John and Yoko's debut album is known not only for its avant garde content, but also for its cover...
[*] (1968) #124 - Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the LionsUnfinished Music No.2: Life with the LionsUnfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions is an album of noise music released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1969, and the successor to 1968's highly controversial Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins...
[*] (1969) #174 - Wedding AlbumWedding Album-CD bonus tracks:#"Who Has Seen the Wind?" - 2:05 #*A gentle and melodic folk song featuring lyrics based on the 19th century poem of the same title, written by English poet Christina Rossetti...
[*] (1969) #178 - Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono BandYoko Ono/Plastic Ono BandYoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band is the avant-garde debut album by Yoko Ono, which came after recording three experimental releases with John Lennon and a live album as a member of The Plastic Ono Band...
(1970) #182 - FlyFly (Yoko Ono album)Fly is the second album by Yoko Ono. It was produced by John Lennon and Ono, and released in 1971. It was a complete avant-garde/Fluxus package in a gatefold sleeve that came with a full-size poster and a postcard to order Ono's book Grapefruit. Notable songs include the singles "Midsummer New...
(1971) #199 - Some Time in New York CitySome Time in New York CitySome Time in New York City was released in 1972 and is John Lennon's third post-Beatles album, fifth with Yoko Ono, and third with producer Phil Spector...
[*] (1972) #48 - Approximately Infinite UniverseApproximately Infinite UniverseApproximately Infinite Universe is a double album by Yoko Ono, released in early 1973. It represents a departure from the experimental avant garde rock of her first two albums towards a more conventional pop/rock sound, while also dabbling in feminist rock. It peaked at #193 in the United States...
(1972) #193 - Feeling the SpaceFeeling the SpaceFeeling the Space is Yoko Ono's fourth album, her last one on Apple Records and her last release of the 1970s. . The entire album adopts a feminist theme, focusing on the plights of women in the 1970s...
(1973) - A StoryA Story (album)A Story is an album by Yoko Ono, recorded in 1974, during the "lost weekend" sessions in which John Lennon produced Walls And Bridges. The album went unreleased until the 1992 box set Onobox, which featured material from A Story on disc six. It only saw proper release as an individual album in...
(1974) (Unreleased until 1997) - Double FantasyDouble FantasyDouble Fantasy is an album released by John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, in 1980. Though initially poorly received, the album is notable for its association with Lennon's murder three weeks after its release, whereupon it become a worldwide commercial success, and went on to win the 1981 Album...
[*] (1980) #1 - Season of GlassSeason of GlassSeason of Glass is a 1981 album by Yoko Ono, her first solo recording after the murder of her husband John Lennon. The album was released less than six months after Lennon's death and deals with it directly in songs such as "Goodbye Sadness" and "I Don't Know Why".The front cover features Lennon's...
(1981) #49 - It's Alright (I See Rainbows)It's Alright (I See Rainbows)It's Alright is the sixth solo album by Yoko Ono, and her second release after the death of husband John Lennon. As a variation of a theme concerning its predecessor, the back cover features a transparent image of Lennon in a then-contemporary photo of Yoko and Sean, depicted in Central Park...
(1982) #98 - Milk and Honey [*] (1984) #11
- StarpeaceStarpeaceStarpeace is Yoko Ono's 1985 concept album, designed to spread a message of peace around the world as an opposition to Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" missile defense system...
(1985) - RisingRising (Yoko Ono album)Rising is a 1995 album by avant-garde artist Yoko Ono. Released on November 7, on Capitol Records, the album features the backing band IMA , which included Ono's son Sean Lennon, Timo Ellis, and Sam Koppelman. The album has sold 11,000 copies in the United States to date...
(1995) - Blueprint for a SunriseBlueprint for a Sunrise* "Wouldnit "swing"" is a remix of "Wouldnit" from Rising* "Soul Got Out Of The Box" was originally a 1972 outtake from Approximately Infinite Universe...
(2001) - Yes, I'm a WitchYes, I'm a Witch-Track listing:All songs were written by Yoko Ono.#Hank Shocklee – "Witch Shocktronica Intro"#Peaches – "Kiss Kiss Kiss"#Shitake Monkey – "O'Oh"#Blow Up – "Everyman Everywoman"#Le Tigre – "Sisters O Sisters"#Porcupine Tree – "Death of Samantha"...
(2007) - Open Your BoxOpen Your Box (album)Open Your Box is a remix album by Yoko Ono which was released on April 24, 2007. It is a compilation of her successful series of remix singles released since 2001 with the addition of several new mixes. Collaborators include Basement Jaxx, Felix Da Housecat and the Pet Shop Boys...
(2007) - Between My Head and the SkyBetween My Head and the SkyBetween My Head and the Sky is an album by Yoko Ono released on Chimera Music in September 2009. This is her first studio album to be released as "Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band" since 1973's Feeling the Space...
(2009)
Compilations, live albums and EPs
- Live Peace in Toronto 1969Live Peace in Toronto 1969-Side two:-Personnel:* John Lennon — lead vocals, rhythm guitar* Yoko Ono — vocals* Eric Clapton — lead guitar, backing vocals* Klaus Voormann — bass* Alan White — drums* Kim Fowley — spoken introduction-External links:*...
[*] (1969) #10 - OnoboxOnoboxOnobox is a 1992 comprehensive 6-disc collection of Yoko Ono's work from 1968 to 1985. The discs are grouped by era and theme. Disc six is the previously unreleased 1974 album A Story, which was later reissued separately along with the rest of Ono's back catalogue. There was also an accompanying...
(1992) - Walking on Thin IceWalking on Thin Ice (album)Walking on Thin Ice is a greatest-hits compilation of Yoko Ono's work from 1971 to 1985. It was released by Rykodisc in 1992, along with the more comprehensive 6-disc Onobox set...
(1992) - New York RockNew York RockNew York Rock is an off-Broadway musical by Yoko Ono. It is a thinly veiled account of her life with John Lennon. The musical contains many songs from Ono's albums throughout the years, as well as several new tracks, some of which were reworked for inclusion on Rising.-Track listing:# "It Happened"...
(1994) (Original cast recording: Yoko Ono does not perform on this album. It is the cast of a Broadway show performing her songs.) - Rising Mixes (1996)
- Don't Stop Me! EP (2009)
Singles
| Year | Song | UK UK Singles Chart The UK Singles Chart is compiled by The Official Charts Company on behalf of the British record-industry. The full chart contains the top selling 200 singles in the United Kingdom based upon combined record sales and download numbers, though some media outlets only list the Top 40 or the Top 75 ... |
U.S. Dance | Album |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1971 | "Mrs. Lennon Mrs. Lennon "Mrs. Lennon" was Yoko Ono's single from her Fly album . The song was also featured in the film Imagine .A cover version has been recorded by the band Donny Who Loved Bowling.... "/"Midsummer New York" |
- | - | Fly |
| "Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow)" | - | - | ||
| 1972 | "Now or Never"/"Move on Fast Move on Fast "Move on Fast" is a song by Yoko Ono, originally released in 1972 on the album Approximately Infinite Universe, and on the B-side to the single "Now or Never"... " |
- | - | Approximately Infinite Universe |
| "Mind Train"/"Listen, the Snow Is Falling" | - | - | — | |
| 1973 | "Death of Samantha"/"Yang Yang Yang Yang (song) "Yang Yang" is a song by Yoko Ono, originally released in 1972 on the album Approximately Infinite Universe, and on the B-side to "Death of Samantha". The song was later included on Ono's compilation albums Walking on Thin Ice and Onobox... " |
- | - | Approximately Infinite Universe |
| "Josejoi Banzai (Part 2)" (Japan-only) | - | - | — | |
| "Woman Power"/"Men, Men, Men" | - | - | Feeling the Space | |
| "Run, Run, Run"/"Men, Men, Men" | - | - | ||
| 1974 | "Yume O Motou (Let's Have A Dream)"/"It Happened" (Japan-only release) | - | - | — |
| 1981 | "Walking on Thin Ice Walking on Thin Ice "Walking on Thin Ice" is a New Wave/dance song by Yoko Ono, released in 1981. She and John Lennon concluded the recording of the song on December 8, 1980. It was upon their return from the recording studio to The Dakota that Lennon was murdered by Mark David Chapman... "/"It Happened" |
35 | 13 | Season of Glass Season of Glass Season of Glass is a 1981 album by Yoko Ono, her first solo recording after the murder of her husband John Lennon. The album was released less than six months after Lennon's death and deals with it directly in songs such as "Goodbye Sadness" and "I Don't Know Why".The front cover features Lennon's... (1997 re-release), Double Fantasy Double Fantasy Double Fantasy is an album released by John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, in 1980. Though initially poorly received, the album is notable for its association with Lennon's murder three weeks after its release, whereupon it become a worldwide commercial success, and went on to win the 1981 Album... (2000 re-release) |
| "No, No, No No, No, No (Yoko Ono song) "No, No, No" is a song by Yoko Ono from her controversial 1981 album Season of Glass. The song's opening contains the sound of four gunshots and Ono screaming. The B-side was "Will You Touch Me"... "/"Will You Touch Me" |
- | - | Season of Glass | |
| 1982 | "My Man"/"Let The Tears Dry" | - | - | It's Alright (I See Rainbows) |
| "Never Say Goodbye"/"Loneliness" | - | - | ||
| 1985 | "Hell in Paradise Hell in Paradise "Hell in Paradise" is a song by Yoko Ono from the 1985 album "Starpeace". The lyrics are about mankind's perceived idea of hell, despite living in the paradise that Ono considers to be planet Earth. After "Walking On Thin Ice", it was her biggest hit of the 1980s, charting at #16 on the US dance... "/"Hell in Paradise" (instrumental) |
- | 12 | Starpeace |
| "Cape Clear"/"Walking on Thin Ice" (promo) | - | - | ||
| 2001 | "Open Your Box Open Your Box Open Your Box is a song by Yoko Ono, released on 12 March 1971 as the B-side of John Lennon's single Power to the People. It was remixed and re-released by Orange Factory in 2001.... " (remixes) |
144 | 25 | remixes compiled on Open Your Box (2007) |
| 2002 | "Kiss Kiss Kiss" (remixes) | - | 20 | |
| "Yang Yang Yang Yang (song) "Yang Yang" is a song by Yoko Ono, originally released in 1972 on the album Approximately Infinite Universe, and on the B-side to "Death of Samantha". The song was later included on Ono's compilation albums Walking on Thin Ice and Onobox... " (remixes) |
- | 17 | ||
| 2003 | "Walking on Thin Ice Walking on Thin Ice "Walking on Thin Ice" is a New Wave/dance song by Yoko Ono, released in 1981. She and John Lennon concluded the recording of the song on December 8, 1980. It was upon their return from the recording studio to The Dakota that Lennon was murdered by Mark David Chapman... " (remixes) |
35 | 1 | |
| "Will I" (remixes)/"Fly" (remixes) | - | 19 | ||
| 2004 | "Hell in Paradise Hell in Paradise "Hell in Paradise" is a song by Yoko Ono from the 1985 album "Starpeace". The lyrics are about mankind's perceived idea of hell, despite living in the paradise that Ono considers to be planet Earth. After "Walking On Thin Ice", it was her biggest hit of the 1980s, charting at #16 on the US dance... " (remixes) |
- | 4 | |
| "Everyman… Everywoman…" (remixes) | - | 1 | ||
| 2007 | "You’re the One You're the One (Yoko Ono song) "You're the One" is a song by Yoko Ono, originally released in 1984 on Ono's and John Lennon's duet album Milk and Honey. The song was also on the compilation albums Onobox and Walking on Thin Ice.-Composition:... " (remixes) |
- | 2 | |
| "No, No, No No, No, No (Yoko Ono song) "No, No, No" is a song by Yoko Ono from her controversial 1981 album Season of Glass. The song's opening contains the sound of four gunshots and Ono screaming. The B-side was "Will You Touch Me"... " (remixes) |
- | 1 | ||
| 2008 | "Give Peace a Chance Give Peace a Chance "Give Peace a Chance" is a song written by John Lennon, originally under the moniker Lennon–McCartney, released as a single in 1969 by the Plastic Ono Band on Apple Records, catalogue Apple 13 in the United Kingdom, Apple 1809 in the United States. It is the first solo single issued by Lennon, and... " (remixes) |
- | 1 | |
| 2009 | "I'm Not Getting Enough I'm Not Getting Enough "I'm Not Getting Enough" is a song by Yoko Ono, originally released in 2001 on the album Blueprint for a Sunrise. In 2009, the song was remixed and released as digital green releases by Mind Train and Twisted Records on iTunes and the Twisted Records online store.-Critical reception:Bertrand... " (remixes) |
- | 1 | |
| 2010 | "Give Me Something Give Me Something "Give Me Something" is a song by Yoko Ono, originally released in 1980 on John Lennon and Ono's duet album Double Fantasy. The song appeared in Ono's off-Broadway musical New York Rock and her compilation albums Walking on Thin Ice and Onobox... " (remixes) |
- | 1 | |
| "Wouldnit (I'm a Star) Wouldnit (I'm a Star) "Wouldnit " is a song by Yoko Ono, originally released in 1995 on the album Rising. A remix of the song appeared on Ono's 2001 album Blueprint for a Sunrise.-Background:... " |
- | 1 | — | |
| 2011 | "Move on Fast Move on Fast "Move on Fast" is a song by Yoko Ono, originally released in 1972 on the album Approximately Infinite Universe, and on the B-side to the single "Now or Never"... " |
- | 1 | — |
| "Talking to the Universe" | - | 1 | — |
B-Side appearances on John Lennon singles
- "Remember Love" (on "Give Peace a ChanceGive Peace a Chance"Give Peace a Chance" is a song written by John Lennon, originally under the moniker Lennon–McCartney, released as a single in 1969 by the Plastic Ono Band on Apple Records, catalogue Apple 13 in the United Kingdom, Apple 1809 in the United States. It is the first solo single issued by Lennon, and...
") (1969) - "Don't Worry, Kyoko" (on "Cold TurkeyCold TurkeyCold Turkey is a song written by John Lennon, released as a single in 1969 by the Plastic Ono Band on Apple Records, catalogue Apples 1001 in the United Kingdom, Apple 1813 in the United States. It is the second solo single issued by Lennon, and it peaked at #30 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #14 on...
") (1969) - "Who Has Seen the Wind?" (on "Instant Karma!Instant Karma!"Instant Karma!" is a song written by John Lennon, released as a single in 1970 on Apple Records, catalogue Apple 1003 in the United Kingdom, Apple 1818 in the United States. It is the third solo single issued by Lennon, and it peaked at #3 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and Cash Box Top 100 singles...
") (1970) - "Why" (on "MotherMother (John Lennon song)Mother is a song by British musician John Lennon, first released on his 1970 album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. An edited version of the song was issued as a single in the United States on Apple Records, catalogue 1827, about three weeks after the album. The single runs about fifteen seconds...
") (1971) - "Open Your BoxOpen Your BoxOpen Your Box is a song by Yoko Ono, released on 12 March 1971 as the B-side of John Lennon's single Power to the People. It was remixed and re-released by Orange Factory in 2001....
" (on "Power to the PeoplePower to the People (song)"Power to the People" is a song written by John Lennon, released as a single in 1971 by John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band on Apple Records, catalogue Apple R5892 in the United Kingdom and Apple 1830 in the United States. It peaked at #11 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #7 on the British singles chart...
") (1971) - "Listen, the Snow is Falling" on (on "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)Happy Xmas (War Is Over)"Happy Xmas " is a song written by John Lennon and Yoko Ono and released in 1971 as a single by John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band with the Harlem Community Choir....
") (1971) - "Sisters O Sisters" on (on "Woman Is the Nigger of the WorldWoman Is the Nigger of the World"Woman Is the Nigger of the World" is a song written by John Lennon & Yoko Ono and recorded by John Lennon. It was released as a single on Apple Records in the United States and in New Zealand and Japan, but was withdrawn from release in Britain. It peaked at #57 on the Billboard Hot 100, making...
") (1972) - "Kiss Kiss Kiss" (on "(Just Like) Starting Over(Just Like) Starting Over" Starting Over" is a song written and performed by John Lennon for his album, Double Fantasy. The B-side was Yoko Ono's "Kiss Kiss Kiss". It was released as a single on 24 October 1980 and reached number one in both the USA and UK two weeks after he was murdered. It is his biggest solo American...
") (1980) - "Beautiful Boys" (on "Woman") (1981)
- "Yes, I'm Your Angel" (on "Watching the WheelsWatching the Wheels"Watching the Wheels" is a single by John Lennon released posthumously in 1981 after his murder. It was the third and final single released from Lennon and Yoko Ono's Double Fantasy album, and reached #10 in the U.S and #30 in the UK....
") (1981) - "O'Sanity" (on "Nobody Told MeNobody Told Me"Nobody Told Me" is a song by the British musician John Lennon. Recorded shortly before his death in 1980, the song was later completed by Lennon's widow Yoko Ono in 1983 and released as the first single from Lennon and Ono's album Milk and Honey in 1984. The song was later released in the UK in...
") (1984) - "Your Hands (あなたの手）" (on "Borrowed TimeBorrowed Time (John Lennon song)"Borrowed Time" is the title of a song from John Lennon and Yoko Ono's last album, Milk and Honey. While the single failed to chart in the United States, it charted at #32 in the UK Singles Chart....
") (1984) - "Sleepless Night" (on "I'm Stepping OutI'm Stepping Out"I'm Stepping Out" is the final single from the final John Lennon and Yoko Ono album Milk and Honey. In it, Lennon celebrates his enthusiasm for the night life of New York City, and makes tongue in cheek reference to his "househusband" period. It reached #88 in the UK Singles chart and #55 in the...
") (1984) - "It's Alright" (on "Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves HimEvery Man has a Woman who Loves Him"Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him" is a Yoko Ono song from her Double Fantasy album with John Lennon. The version released as a single, and on the compilation album Every Man Has a Woman, is credited to Lennon, and has stripped away Ono's lead vocal, while bringing Lennon's backing vocal up in...
") (1985)
Films
- Satans Bed (as an actress)
- Eye blink (1966, 5 mins)
- Bottoms (1966, 5½ mins)
- Match (1966, 5 mins)
- Cut Piece (1965, 9 mins)
- Wrapping Piece (1967, approx. 20 mins., music by Delia DerbyshireDelia DerbyshireDelia Ann Derbyshire was an English musician and composer of electronic music and musique concrète. She is best known for her electronic realisation of Ron Grainer's theme music to the British science fiction television series Doctor Who and for her work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.-Early...
) - Film No. 4 (Bottoms) (1966/1967, 80 mins)
- Bottoms, advertisement/commercial (1966/1967, approx. 2 mins)
- Two Virgins (1968, approx. 20 mins), a portrait film: superimpositions of John’s and Yoko’s faces.
- Film No. Five (Smile) (1968, 51 mins)
- Rape (1969, 77 mins), filmed by Nick Rowland. A young woman is relentlessly pursued by a camera crew.
- Bed-In, (1969, 74 mins)
- Let It Be, (1970, 81 mins)
- Apotheosis (1970, 18½ mins)
- Freedom (1970, 1 min), a slow-motion film showing a woman throwing her bra away.
- Fly (1970 (25 mins), a fly crawls slowly across a woman's naked body. Made with Jonas Mekas and premiered at the Cannes film festival in May, 1971.
- Making of Fly (1970, approx. 30 mins)
- Erection (1971, 20 mins), a film of a hotel’s construction over many months based on still photographs by Iain McMillan.
- Imagine (1971, 70 mins)
- Sisters O Sisters (1971, 4 mins)
- Luck of the Irish (1971, approx. 4 mins)
- Flipside (TV show) (1972, approx. 25 mins)
- Blueprint for the Sunrise (2000, 28 mins)
- Onochord (2004, non ending loop).
Further reading
- Clayson, Alan et al. Woman: The Incredible Life of Yoko Ono
- Goldman, AlbertAlbert GoldmanAlbert Harry Goldman was an American professor and author.Born in Dormont, Pennsylvania, Albert Goldman wrote about the culture and personalities of the American music industry both in books and as a contributor to magazines...
. The Lives of John LennonThe Lives of John LennonThe Lives of John Lennon is a 1988 biography of musician John Lennon by Americanauthor Albert Goldman. The book is a product of several years of research and hundreds of interviews with many of Lennon's friends, acquaintances, servants and musicians... - Green, John. Dakota Days
- Hendricks, Geoffrey. Fluxus Codex
- Hendricks, Geoffrey. Yoko Ono: Arias and Objects
- Hopkins, Jerry. Yoko Ono
- Millett, Kate. Flying
- Pang, MayMay PangMay Fung Yee Pang is best known as the former girlfriend of John Lennon. She had previously worked as a personal assistant and production coordinator for Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono....
. Loving John - Norman, PhilipPhilip Norman (author)Philip Norman is an English novelist, biographer, journalist and playwright.Norman grew up in Ryde, Isle of Wight. He attended Ryde School, and his father, Clive Norman, ran the Seagull Ballroom on Ryde Pier. He described his childhood in his book Babycham Night...
, John Lennon : the life, 1st ed., New York : Ecco, 2008. ISBN 978-0-06-075401-3. - Norman, Philip, Days in the life : John Lennon remembered, London : Century, 1990. ISBN 0-7126-3922-5
- Haskell, Barbara. Yoko Ono: Arias and Objects. Exhibition Catalogue. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1991.
- Rumaker, Michael. The Butterfly
- Seaman, Frederic. The Last Days of John Lennon
- Sheff, David. John Lennon and Yoko Ono: The Playboy Interviews
- Walker, John. Yoko Ono in Art and celebrity, London: Pluto Press, (2003).
- Wiener, JonJon WienerJon Wiener is an American professor of history at the University of California Irvine, a contributing editor to The Nation magazine, and a Los Angeles radio host. He was the plaintiff in a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation for its files on John Lennon.-...
. Come Together: John Lennon in His Time - Wenner, JannJann WennerJann Simon Wenner is the co-founder and publisher of the music and politics biweekly Rolling Stone, as well as the owner of Men's Journal and Us Weekly magazines.-Childhood:...
, ed. The Ballad of John and Yoko - Yoon, Jean. The Yoko Ono Project