Yoko Ono’s Music

The title of this thread should've been Yoko Ono’s "Music".

“Walking on Thin Ice” is probably recognized as her greatest song. And it is a great song. It was released in 1980 and is just this clash of New Wave, funk, and post-disco.

A great song with a great Pet Shop Boys remix

I love her both as an artist and as a musician.

I like her later stuff but I also like 1973 Approximately Infinite Universe. I actually had this album as a boy! I like Death of Samantha

I remember reading comments on YouTube and someone said “if I had Yoko’s confidence, I would be unstoppable”.

My favorite movie is FOUR (Bottoms) - the one with the close ups of asses walking on a treadmills.

R5 Did they sell her albums at regular record shops?

I’m 34, in the late 90’s and 2000’s I had to buy my alternative albums as a teenager at Newbury Comics like Bikini Kill and Babes In Toyland and Sleater-Kinney, etc, etc.

So I didn’t know if Yoko was sold in commercial record shops.

Yes, dear. America had big cosmopolitan cities, you know, with record shops, and modern art galleries. The album was on the Apple Records. Yoko was not recherché. But then, I grew up in NYC suburbs and hung out in the hippy Catskills.

R9 Maybe it was in record stores, but no one bought it.

Nonsense. Ono albums were in every Jr HS and HS art classroom in my parts. Just in with the mix of others.

Ono is not someone gay and straight deplorables could warm to. She is classic pushy avant garde. Many gay men are quite square and also misogynistic and anti-intellectual, just like straight men. Fluxus is "bullshit", Ono an unhinged screamer, yadadadayada

Yoko also introduced me to Meredith Monk who’s just as weird. Yoko is not the only screamer although Monk is a little bit more crazy bag lady having a mental breakdown on the streets than an actual screamer. Same kind of genre tho.

Now question, is Monk a child of Yoko? Is she like the Christina Aguilera to Yoko’s Britney?

Or were they of the same scene?

[quote]Ono is not someone gay and straight deplorables could warm to. She is classic pushy avant garde. Many gay men are quite square and also misogynistic and anti-intellectual, just like straight men.

Go away with your bullshit, implying anyone not into her music is the equivalent of a deplorable. Crazed fan.

My friend, who’s a porn star from South Boston, refers to Yoko as “weird opera shit”.

I will grant there are non deplorables who don't like YOKO. But I've been around a long time, and on dataloiunge too. It's alway ALWAYS the same old boilerplate anti-yoko screeds. I'm not a crazed fan. She's pushy. But she fits into a slot rather well and I also think she is very dryly funny.

R17 I'm sorry. it wasn't my intention to take the side of a hater of Yoko who has annoyed you before. I wasn't aware of that. It just seemed like you were unwilling to accept that not everyone may be a fan of someone you're a fan of. Maybe I jumped in where I shouldn't have.

"Don't Worry Kyoko, Mummy's Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow', has got to be one of the most evocative song titles ever. When Yoko dies she will be seen to have been a massive influence on modern culture. Her art work will soar in value.

I say this objectively, as I've never really followed her work. I did attend her exhibition in Edinburgh in March 1998. There was a installation of stones coming out of a wall. I wish I could find a picture of it. It has skirted around my mind ever since.

I picked the last one because that's how I felt about this question

Isn’t her screaming and chanting inspired by kabuki?

When "Double Fantasy" was released, right before John's murder, I thought Yoko's first three songs on the album ("Kiss Kiss Kiss", "Give Me Something", and "I'm Moving On") were the best songs on the album...better than any of the John Lennon songs even. After those three, though, the quality dipped considerably.

I hated her 3 songs on "Some Time in New York City". I thought they were absolute garbage.

When I'm in the right mood, I can really get into some of the early, avant-garde stuff of her just screaming...like "Why" or "Don't Worry Kyoko". What can I say, sometimes you just want to scream "Why?" at the top of your lungs and go nuts. It can be a very cathartic listening experience.

I'm a fan of the remixes that brought her to the top of the dance charts. The Orange Factory Pump Mix of "Yang Yang" is pretty stunning.

Well that or her pussy was burning.

R19 I love the Fly version but I also love this version where she actually says the title.

She doesn't have a musical bone in her body. Never did.

There were some fantastic remixes in the 90’/00’s. This Danny Tenaglia mix of Walking On Thin Ice is one of my faves. I love the “Ice, ice, ice” chant at 4:09.

The PSB mix posted above is great also. Tom Stephan remixed Kiss Kiss under his Superchumbo moniker.

That brings me back.

[quote] She doesn't have a musical bone in her body. Never did.

Well when Lennon fucked her she did.

good one!

Yoko would actually be very good if she could sing and had decent material. But, if that is the sound she was looking for, she definitely found it..

[quote] Yoko would actually be very good if she could sing and had decent material.

The pilot would actually be very good if he could fly a plane.

Her best vocal performance is probably “Every Man Has A Woman Who Loves Him”.

Probably after that would be “I Have A Woman Inside My Soul” and “Have You Seen a Horizon Lately”.

I think she tried hard on “Approximately Infinite Universe”.

Joke going around is she's threatened to put her music on Spotify if they don't do something about censoring Joe Rogan.

In a Lennon bio I remember hearing that Yoko hired a bunch of top notch studio musicians and when they showed up to work on her album she had no music! She had some sheets of paper with some notations that were supposed to mean chords like "D" and "C" but they had no idea what she meant. So they showed up to make an album but the recording artist had no music for them to work with. Since they had encountered situations like that before, where they had to "make something out of nothing" they noodled around and came up with the music themselves.

R34 Well a lot of her stuff was improv lol

R16 fascinating

I like 2013's "Take Me To The Land Of Hell" title because I feel it's Yoko's spelled-out invitation to the record buyer to join her in listening to and feeling the hellish affects of her music on their ears, bodies, and psychological wellbeing.

....Oops, autocorrect accident, meant above to write: "...effects of her music on..." Apologies.

[quote] But she fits into a slot rather well and I also think she is very dryly funny.

"Dryly funny?" She seems to have no sense of humor at all. She takes herself deadly seriously. I never saw anything "funny" about her, except her idea that she's this incredibly important artist and her attempts at "singing."

R39 That’s not true at all.

She’s more self aware than you think.

I thought it was funny when she said people didn’t like that naked album cover of her and John because they were naked, people didn’t like it because they were ugly.

Here go hell come!

[quote] She’s more self aware than you think.

And just how would you know that? I don't think you're a personal friend of hers although it's obvious you'd like to be.

By the way, people didn't like the "Two Virgins" album cover because they were naked AND because they were ugly. John tried to justify that idiocy by saying he and Yoko had this incredible love for each other that that the nude photos were just so that people could "share in it" if they so desired. Share in it by looking at naked pictures of him and Yoko that revealed neither of them looked good naked? Poor John, he was off his rocker by then.

She should focus on instrumental music only.

She was lucky she came from a wealthy family, which enabled her to study the performing arts and dabble with influential avant-garde artists. She was lucky to be married to successful men. If not for these connections and the mega-fame of John Lennon (husband #3), she would be an obscure hack.

She is way more talented than any of the Beatles.

R42 "And just how would you know that? "

Well, by the same token, how would you know otherwise? Be logical about that.

I like her total self-confidence, and I like John for finding that attractive in someone who is by all accounts very strange.

If you read the (very long) Playboy interview of Yoko and John, they do seem to have a sly sense of humor about things, which has sort of been forgotten by time.

There was a nice moment in Get Back when Paul’s little stepdaughter stares at Yoko doing her yowling into the mic, and then decides to try it out for herself.

She’s an intriguing, delusional, money-focused, uncompromising, guarded, oversharing artist.

Even though the album came out the year I was born, for me the title track from It's Alright (I See Rainbows) has been a life-saving song that has affirmed and sustained my existence during some incredibly intense, disturbing times in my life: "Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end," as Thema Ritter would say.

I remember being outright suicidal during those times, so under no pretense I always hold that Yoko Ono saved my life. I love her dearly.

R2, I love that song; it's so pleasingly sinister sounding. Would love to find more music with that sound. To my uneducated ears and mind, it sounds like the perfect sound for New York around the years 1979-1981.

Yoko was an influence on the B52's early on, and they even did a cover at one point of "Don't Worry Kyoko..."

Boy George's version of "Death of Samantha"

I prefer May Pang's aural work.

[quote] Well, by the same token, how would you know otherwise? Be logical about that.

Judging from her behavior Yoko Ono is not "self aware" but narcissistic. That's my view, although I don't know her personally. The Yoko fan who finds her "self aware" appears to think that he/she does have some kind of personal knowledge of her. Of course there's no truth to that.

R47 - which brings to mind, "what influence did Thelma Ritter have on Yoko Ono"?

I cannot imagine a single person on earth who would enjoy Yoko Ono's music let alone actually buy any of it!

Happy 89th birthday to the Songbird herself!

She is, basically, the Donald Trump, Jr. of Music.

Nobody would know her fucking no-talent name if she didn't have a more famous relative.

[quote] Nobody would know her fucking no-talent name if she didn't have a more famous relative.

True. No one would have ever heard of her if she hadn't gotten her hooks in John Lennon.

Happy birthday, Yoko!

I don't care what the haters say about her, I absolutely love her.

I ask myself the same question every damn day. I love you Yoko.

Me too. Her experimental film "Rape" is a work of genius!

To those dumb twats who "love her" I say this: you don't even KNOW her. I don't think you would "love" her if you did.

In 1985, my friend and I used to listen to “Kiss Kiss Kiss” and laugh our asses off. There’s a part that sounds like a jungle monkey hooting and then there’s a part at the end that sounds like Yoko orgasming, which was hilarious.

R56 She would have been known in the art world without John. She was a pioneer at conceptual art.

[quote] She was a pioneer at conceptual art.

In her mind, no doubt.