09/05/2025
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9 Ways Yoko Ono Is A True Iconoclast
In celebration of her upcoming retrospective in Chicago, as well as her new biography and documentary, explore Yoko Ono's career-long renegade attitude.
Jon O'Brien
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GRAMMYs
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May 5, 2025 - 09:11 pm
Although she essentially retired from the spotlight during the pandemic, 2025 is fast becoming the year of Yoko Ono.
The countercultural icon is the subject of both a new biography by longtime friend, writer David Sheff, and One to One: John and Yoko, a big screen documentary based on the titular 1972 benefit concert she staged with her other half. Both works further prove that Ono is far from the Beatles-destroying scarlet woman she’s been portrayed as ever since she met John Lennon. She is a creative visionary in her own right.
Indeed, Ono, whose artwork retrospective, Music of the Mind, hits Chicago’s Griffin Galleries of Contemporary Art in October, has spent most of her career vilified. Not only did she — according to the court of public opinion anyway — facilitate the break-up of the world’s most influential band, she also steered its leader toward an experimental world that most of the mainstream found impenetrable. In fact, the British press were so hostile toward Ono that she and Lennon had no choice but to flee to the other side of the Atlantic.
Thankfully, Ono’s contributions to pop culture have been reevaluated in recent years. The contemporary music scene’s most revered names have been queuing up to sing her praises, while her ability to straddle genres and entire art forms has also become far more appreciated in today’s polymathic climate. And let’s not forget how she was still innovating well into her eighties, releasing reconstructed album Warzone, publishing conceptual art book Acorn, and even scoring a 12th Billboard Dance chart No. 1. To paraphrase one of her defining musical endeavors, here are nine reasons why everyone should give Yoko a chance.
She Pushed Boundaries Long Before The Beatles
It took until 1962 for the Fab Four to score their first hit and they arguably only emerged as true musical innovators once the shrieks and screams of Beatlemania subsided three years later. By this point, Ono had already broken all kinds of boundaries, whether becoming the first female to gain acceptance into Gakushuin University's philosophy program, showcasing her pioneering conceptual art (including blank canvas Painting to Be Stepped On) at various downtown New York events, or performing an experimental set at Carnegie Recital Hall which included the regular sound of a flushed toilet.
Ono also collaborated with and drew influences from some of the most forward-thinking names in the creative world. She joined the periphery of Fluxus, an innovative avant-garde collective heavily inspired by the Dadaist movement. Meanwhile, her Manhattan loft hosted performances from minimalistic genius LaMonte Young and classes from her celebrated music theorist mentor John Cage.
She Co-Founded One of Pop's Most Enduring Collectives
In the same year that their great love story began, John Lennon and Yoko Ono also decided to make sweet, if highly experimental, music together. Initially credited to their own names, the duo's prolific output was eventually released under the umbrella of Plastic Ono Band. And while the former Beatle inevitably attracted the most attention, his wife was often the driving creative force.
In 1970, they simultaneously released two self-titled albums in which they were accompanied by the same set of musicians — although Lennon's charted much higher, Ono's is widely renowned as the most influential. Three years later, she took full charge on Approximately Infinite Universe and Feeling the Space. And while the project was understandably retired following Lennon's tragic death in 1980, Ono revived it for 2009's Between My Head and the Sky, with their only son Sean joining the fold of a collective which had previously welcomed the likes of Eric Clapton, George Harrison, and Keith Moon.
She Was Jointly Responsible For A GRAMMY-Winning Album Of The Year
John Lennon, Yoko Ono Win Album Of The Year.mp4
Lennon won four GRAMMYs during his time with the Beatles, but his only accolade outside the Fab Four came posthumously, when Double Fantasy was crowned Album Of The Year in 1982. Of course, the late singer also had to share the award with his widow, who penned and performed half of its 14 tracks.
Lennon's offerings might have provided the hits — "Watching the Wheels," "Woman," and chart-topper "Just Like (Starting Over)" all made the upper reaches of the Hot 100. But Ono contributions such as the new wave disco of "Kiss Kiss Kiss," big band throwback "Yes, I'm Your Angel," and heartfelt familial tribute "Beautiful Boys" all helped to maintain a dialogue which, tragically considering the events immediately after the release, suggested they were still in the full throes of domestic bliss.
She Recorded A Classic Meditation On Grief
As the saying goes, from great suffering comes great art. Alongside the likes of Sufjan Stevens' Carrie and Lowell, Nick Cave's Skeleton Tree, and Mount Eerie's A Crow Looked at Me, Ono's fifth LP Season of Glass is widely accepted as one of the all-time great albums spawned from a period of unimaginable grief.
Ono clearly refused to shy away from her partner Lennon's shocking murder. Released just seven months later, the record is adorned with the controversial image of his bloodstained glasses, while "No No No" opens with the sound of four gunshots and a piercing scream. But the newly widowed star also manages to capture both her innate sadness and that of the entire world on a string of affecting alternative lullabies, with "Even When You’re Far Away" featuring a heartbreaking narration from then-five-year-old son Sean
She Scored Several Hits Of Her Own
While most of Ono's chart success has been in conjunction with her late husband, the cult favorite still has several solo hits under her belt. "Walking on Thin Ice," for example, reached No. 58 on the Hot 100 and made the Top 40 across the other side of the Atlantic. It also gave the maverick her only solo GRAMMY nod in the category of Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female.
Ono also graced the Billboard 200 with five of her first six albums, peaking as high as No. 49 with 1981's Season of Glass. Meanwhile, Starpeace's lead single "Hell in Paradise" made it to No.12 on the U.S. Dance Club chart in 1985. While that would be Ono's last notable chart action for a good 16 years, she came back with a vengeance in the early 2000s.
She's Been Championed By The Alt-Rock Scene
After a decade in the musical wilderness, Ono returned to the fray with 1995's Rising and an accompanying remix album which featured contributions from Adam Yauch, Ween, and Tricky. It was a comeback which not only introduced her to a whole new generation, but also sparked a well-deserved reevaluation of her pioneering career.
Since then, Ono has collaborated with two-thirds of Sonic Youth on supergroup project Yokokimthurston, guested on tracks by Bleachers and Black Lips, and invited the likes of The Flaming Lips, Cat Power, and Death Cab for Cutie to cover her work on two Yes, I'm A Witch albums. "As an advocate, the tallest hurdle to clear has always been the public's ignorance as to the breadth of Yoko's work," the latter's Ben Gibbard argued at the time. "For years, it has been my position that her songwriting has been criminally overlooked."
She Became An Unlikely Club Favorite
In 2003, Ono highlighted once again how she's a master of reinvention when she fully embraced the dance music scene, dropping her Christian name for a series of floorfilling collabs with the likes of Pet Shop Boys, Danny Tenaglia, and Peter Rauhofer. The new version of "Walking on Thin Ice" even topped Billboard's Dance Club chart.
In fact, Ono would go on to repeat the feat with "Everyman... Everywoman," "Give Peace a Chance," and no fewer than nine other reworkings, many of which were assembled for 2007 compilation Open Your Box. Nine years later, Billboard placed her 11th in a list of their most successful dance acts of all time. "When I hear a dance number, just hearing the first eight bars, it immediately makes my body start moving and dancing..." she later told the magazine about her unlikely pivot. "But now that I am very involved with making dance tracks, I feel I finally came home!"
She's Continued To Advocate For Peace
Ono staged one of the most memorable protests in popculture history when she and Lennon rallied against the Vietnam War with a week-long honeymoon in bed. But she's also continually advocated for peace using the power of music, too. 1985 LP Starpeace, for example, was a conceptual affair written in response to the Reagan administration's missile defense system. While on 2018's studio swansong Warzone, she reimagined several of her past declarations to highlight how the world is still "so messed up."
Ono has also spread her message at high profile events such as the 2006 Winter Olympics, conceived the LennonOno Grant for Peace to help artists living in areas of conflict, and helped to design the Imagine Peace Tower, a light memorial at Iceland's Viðey Island honoring Lennon's signature hit.
She's A Feminist Icon
As someone who's arguably endured and overcome more misogyny than any other figure in rock 'n' roll, Ono has deservedly been hailed as a feminist icon. But she's also earned that label through her own agency, particularly the powerful themes and messages in her creative endeavors.
Cut Piece 1964 — a pioneering work of performance art which asked the audience to cut off pieces of her clothing – is regarded as a landmark moment in the history of the feminist art movement. And in 2001, she released Blueprint for a Sunrise, a concept album which tackles the oppression and suffering of women. "We have to help each other, because there's a lot of women in the world who are suffering because the fact is we're not equal," Ono explained toInterview in 2011. "It's as plain as that."
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