Heavy Friends
Saturday February 18th, 2023 with Heavy Ben
Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono was born on this day in Tokyo, Japan in 1933. Happy 90th birthday! Experimental art, feminism, avant rock, imagination A ferocious optimism animates Yoko Ono’s half-century++ career. Her early performance art (Cut Piece), film (Bottoms), Fluxus contributions (alongside George Maciunas, La Monte Young, John Cage), writings (1964 book of creative prompts 'Grapefruit'), worked from the assumption that art was play, an inborn human faculty. She carried that humanism into the music she made, on her own and with husband John Lennon, throughout the 1970s. Impassioned, erratic vocals tore at long-held conventions of what women behind microphones should sound like. Her liberating irreverence reverberated throughout post-punk and new wave in bands like the B-52s, The Slits and Talking Heads, as well as underground and experimental artists like Meredith Monk, Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill/Le Tigre, and Spiritualized. Ono has remained impressively active in recent decades. That her legacy as a creative force was so deeply subsumed by the myth of the Beatles speaks to a slowly lifting rockist misogyny, not the quality of her work. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/20/yoko-onos-art-of-defiance