Yoko ono grapefruit poem clouds8/16/2023 Which artists does Ono admire today? ''Myself,'' she says. The festival will also feature a performance of Ono's best performance art work: Cut Piece, the one in which audience members are invited onto stage to cut pieces from her clothing. What I like about her is that she obviously doesn't need the money. She tells me that although she once let anybody who was ''feeling it'' join in, she's ''pretty much a tyrant'' when it comes to her band.īoy George, who'll also appear at this year's Meltdown and covered Ono's The Death of Samantha on his last album, said recently that he's ''one of those weird people who really love her music, and who argues with people all the time because people write her off. The pair ended up writhing about there in high heels until the musical director - Ono's son Sean Lennon - got the musicians to wrap things up. The flip side of this ego-vacuum is the attention-seeking diva who crawled onto the piano while Lady Gaga was singing at a performance of the Plastic Ono Band in 2010. To be accepted, to be thought nice, is traditionally woman's power. It takes willpower to overpower the will to power. And being a Beatle's wife could have been a magic charm but she wasn't interested. To yell with your silence, when you know you very well could make soothing and welcoming sounds at the drop of a hat. To stand back, to hold back, to keep your mouth shut. In a compelling essay for The New York Times last year, Lisa Carver wrote: ''It takes an enormous lack of ego to not put your imprint on everything you do, to not employ your learning and position. I was aware that I was doing something unique and important. Why should we be ashamed of it or treated differently? Of course, when I started to show it, most people thought it was terrible. So I thought we have to show what women are, we're the birthgivers of the human race. They don't want a woman to sound too strong. And I thought: why is woman always known for pretty voice and pretty songs? Because that's what the world wants. And she was going: Ahh! ahhh! ahhh! ahhh! Well, I got scared and I ran away. She tells me: ''When I was a very, very young girl, my mother said: 'Don't ever go to the servants' room because they're talking about things that you shouldn't know.' Well, that's a fine introduction! So I slipped out and went very near the room and heard these two young girls one was talking about her aunt in hospital giving birth. Most of us have wondered what was going on with her voice, which I can find thrilling or jarring depending on the context and my mood. Her art can be funny, empowering and warm - or naive, cliched and vain. She evades questions, offering polite platitudes and gnomic smiles. She's cryptic, conceptual, confusing and, as we talk, it becomes clear she has no interest in making my understanding of her any easier. ''John Rennon's Excrusive Gloupie'' ran one notorious 1970 Esquire headline over a grotesque caricature of her and John.īut this doesn't mean that finding her singing unbearable, or her art empty and pretentious, necessarily makes you racist or sexist. There was clearly sexism and racism at work in the media portrayals of her. Fans blamed her for breaking up the greatest band in history (it took Paul McCartney until his 2012 interview with David Frost to unequivocally state that she was not responsible). Whether publicly bedding down, banging a drum, or ululating wildly beside her husband, Ono became a lightening rod for attitudes both to women and to avant garde art. A lot of the lyrics and the concept came from Yoko, but in those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted her contribution, but it was right out of Grapefruit.'' Lennon's most famous solo song was inspired by a poem from Ono's Grapefruit book, published before they met: ''Imagine the clouds dripping, dig a hole in your garden to put them in.''Īlthough he took all the songwriting credit, Lennon later said that it ''should be credited as a Lennon/Ono song. ''If she won't be a slave, we say that she don't love us/If she's real, we say she's trying to be a man''. ''We make her paint her face and dance,'' they sang in 1972. As a ''Beatle-wife'', Ono helped her husband to acknowledge his former chauvinism and the pair ended up writing songs like the controversially titled Woman is the Nigger of the World.
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