World Music Features

The woman’s clothing is being snipped from her body. Systematically, one by one, 200 scissors-wielding strangers—and the woman’s son—silently have a go at the 70-year-old in the black silk skirt and matching long-sleeved top. By the time they are finished having their way with her, the woman will be wearing nothing but her undergarments.

Expressionless, indifferent, she is resigned to this; she knows that she will soon be nearly naked in public. But she is not embarrassed, nor afraid; she doesn’t recoil, doesn’t consider these acts a violation. These people, she is aware, are not cutting with malice in their hearts—they have no desire to hurt her, no intention of making her uncomfortable. The whole idea, after all, is the woman’s.

Sitting on the stage of the Ranelagh Theater in Paris last September, Yoko Ono is restaging one of her most controversial conceptual works, “Cut Piece.”

Like so many other Ono events of the past four decades, there are two reasons why she’s subjecting herself to something that others might consider humiliating: one, because she has always sought to involve her audience in her art and to force a reaction; and two, to try to bring about a better world. “Following the political changes through the year after 9/11, I felt terribly vulnerable—like the most delicate wind could bring me tears,” she wrote in a presentation for the show. “‘Cut Piece’ is my hope for world peace.”

She is no stranger to vulnerability, but she still thinks in the affirmative. A beautiful book devoted to her life and work was simply titled Yes Yoko Ono.

Ono first performed “Cut Piece” back in 1964, when she was a struggling avant-garde artist trying to make a name for herself in her native Japan. Then, she has explained, she “did it with some anger and turbulence in my heart.” This time, she says, “I do it with love for you, for me, and for the world.”

She doesn’t need to explain how slicing up her clothes might possibly help bring about peace. Ono has always operated in this way: By drawing attention to herself, she brings awareness to her cause. The message is in the medium. The message, as always, is peace.

The audience in Paris has been given an instruction: Yoko would like each person who chops away to take the scrap of apparel they have removed from her person and give it to someone they love. After all she’s been through—and she’s endured more than her share of pain—Yoko Ono still believes in the good stuff, in hopes and dreams and “all you need is love.”

It is one of the hottest, muggiest days of the summer when I arrive at the Dakota apartment complex on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. (If you can call it that—the Dakota is to most apartment buildings like caviar is to Egg McMuffin). It’s an imposing structure, even today, more than a century after it was erected. Actress Lauren Bacall has lived there, as did Leonard Bernstein, Judy Garland, Boris Karloff and many other celebs. The Roman Polanski film Rosemary’s Baby was filmed within its ultra-thick walls. But to most people who stop and stare at the landmark at the corner of West 72nd Street and Central Park West, the Dakota is famous for one thing only: It is the place where John Lennon was shot dead, and where his partner in peace and love, Yoko Ono—who witnessed the attack—still lives.

Some historical dates become etched in our collective consciousness: December 7, 1941; November 22, 1963; September 11, 2001. In the minds of baby boomers, December 8, 1980 is another. Nothing would ever be the same for them after Lennon’s murder—any vestiges of innocence that still lingered among the Woodstock Generation were obliterated on that horrific evening.

Some 23 years after the tragedy, it is still difficult, as a fan of John Lennon and the Beatles, as one who came of age during their time, to stand at the driveway where he was felled—the anguish comes flooding back. Yet Ono herself has steadfastly refused to move from the Dakota. This is her home, she has said, and although Lennon’s death by violence shattered her world, Yoko Ono is not a woman who gives up.

With a half-hour to spare before I am to meet her for our interview, I cross the street into Central Park and walk the short distance to Strawberry Fields, the garden named in honor of one of Lennon’s best-loved songs. As they always do, tourists stop at the circular mosaic with its simple plea—IMAGINE—at the center. Visitors often leave flowers or other offerings but today most just take a few pictures, gaze up toward the top floor of the Dakota, perhaps hoping for a glimpse of Yoko, and move along, no doubt searching for air-conditioned comfort on this brutally steamy morning. It’s time for me to do the same.

Upon exiting the elevator at the seventh floor, a gracious personal assistant asks that I remove my shoes—it’s a Japanese custom—before entering the apartment. The home—my first impression is one of a nearly overwhelming whiteness—is, as might be expected, exquisite. I’m ushered into the oversized kitchen and it occurs to me that this room itself is the stuff of Beatle legend: It is to this kitchen that John Lennon, in the five years preceding his death, deliberately and blissfully maintaining a low public profile after years in the glare, often retreated, baking bread, playing with the couple’s young son, Sean. Those were Lennon’s happiest years. I can understand why Yoko chose to stay.

As I await Ono, it’s difficult not to snoop: photos of John, of Yoko, of the two of them together, of Sean; artworks and antiques, books galore—souvenirs of a remarkable life.

Ono has been described as tiny, and she is indeed a small woman. But upon meeting her and shaking her hand I’m struck by the enormity of her presence. Arguably the most famous Asian-American woman in history, she has spent dozens of years in the spotlight, both as popular culture icon and humanitarian. Yet for many of those years she was the object of scorn and outright loathing. The “Dragon Lady,” some called her, accusing her of breaking up the Beatles by coming into Lennon’s life and diverting him from the path he’d been on (as if these four bickering men would have stayed together forever). Beatles fans castigated her music, criticized her appearance, ascribed questionable motives to her pairing with John.

But Ono not only weathered the storms, she drew strength from them. A dragon, she has noted, is a powerful, mythic figure, and so she would use her power and myth to do good deeds. If the barbs have pierced her—and of course they have—the scars aren’t visible. Yoko Ono exudes the strength of one who has been through the wars. And now, with Lennon gone for more years than he spent in the public eye, Ono is finally getting some payback. As she begins her eighth decade of life, she’s begun having hit records.

Hours before he died, John Lennon was complimenting his wife on a song she had recorded for their brand new Double Fantasy album.  “Walking On Thin Ice,” he assured her, would be her first number one. Last spring, his prediction came to pass: an EP of remixes of the song by Pet Shop Boys, Danny Tenaglia, Felix Da Housecat, Orange Factory, François K and Eric Kupper, Peter Rauhofer and Rui Da Silva topped the Billboard Dance Club Play chart.

Recognition for Ono’s own music, extreme and admittedly (and consciously) difficult, has indeed been a long time coming. Upon their release, her early albums such as Fly and Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band were vilified by rock fans and critics alike. Recordings she made in tandem with Lennon, among them Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (the cover of which depicted the couple in total frontal nudity), Wedding Album and Live Peace In Toronto, 1969, had even the most ardent Beatles followers blaming Ono for what they perceived to be the demise of Lennon as a creative force. Yoko’s singing invited countless creative adjectives attempting to drive home the point that her vocalizing was little more than an intolerable primal caterwaul. John and Yoko just shrugged off the negative feedback and continued doing what they did—if they were the last two people on Earth who understood each other, then that would be good enough.

But as far back as the early ’80s, following Lennon’s death, some daring visionaries were suggesting that Yoko was actually just ahead of her time—a progenitor of punk, as it were. The legendary DJ Larry Levan of New York’s Paradise Garage picked up on “Walking On Thin Ice” when it was a new release, and for some years now, Ono’s oeuvre has been steadily gaining respect among cognoscenti of the cutting-edge. Her influence has been acknowledged by artists as diverse as Sonic Youth, the B-52’s, Elvis Costello, Stereolab and the Beastie Boys. Ultimately, though, it was the dance community that finally embraced her wholeheartedly, without reservation.

Seated at the head of her kitchen table, also mosaic, Ono—omnipresent shades in place—is asked why it took everyone so long to catch up to her. “Ask them!” she answers without hesitation, a smile coming to her face. Then, reconsidering the question more thoughtfully, she adds, “I always feel that when you plant a tree, some trees grow slower. I think it’s the right time now.”

Why didn’t the rock and roll crowd take to her music? “Why should they?” she responds, and the point is well taken. As far out on the edge as some rock has dared venture, Ono’s music has always been something else entirely—it’s no coincidence that one of her early champions was Ornette Coleman, the pioneering avant-garde jazz saxist, who invited Ono to perform with him before she even knew who the Beatles were.

            Although she is notorious for her hands-on approach, directing all aspects of her own work and all business involving Lennon’s estate, Ono uncharacteristically allowed the recent DJ remixes of some of her older tracks to be created without her input. The reimagined “Open Your Box,” “Kiss Kiss Kiss” and “Yang Yang,” released in 2001 and ’02 (a “Will I”/“Fly” remix was scheduled for a fall release), perked up dancers when they were first spun, but the huge success of “Walking On Thin Ice” came as a delightful surprise to Ono. “I mean, John just said it would be my first number one. Without thinking, probably, but it came true. It’s so funny,” she says. “People didn’t notice it [when it was first released in 1981], but ‘Walking On Thin Ice’ was disco. But it’s really that they’re coming around now more than me changing.”

One obvious reason for her acceptance as a dance diva would be that the young clubbers moving to Ono’s music carry around little or no Beatle baggage. The Fab Four are ancient history, and Yoko, if they know much about her at all, is not a devil who brainwashed John Lennon but an exotic and intriguing voice powering some exciting new electronic tunes. “Well, the Beatles are still going very strong, in terms of commerciality and their message as well,” she says. “That’s good too in a way. But yeah, that’s true that they are not so involved in the scandal aspect of it,” Ono says about the dancers now embracing her music.

Ono herself has become enamored of the dance music world as a result of her newfound place within it. She’s made a number of surprise appearances at clubs in several cities, singing over the remixed tracks, and she’s enjoyed the experience as much as the audiences have. “It’s an outsider situation and I was always an outsider myself, so I feel very close.”

Yoko Ono was already an outsider when she met John Lennon in 1966, and the two of them quickly and naturally became entwined. Although some detractors would like to believe that she schemed her way into the Beatle’s life in order to further her own position within the art world, Ono had already established a formidable reputation for her startling, provocative, unique events, objects, paintings, writings, films and other conceptual creations. Her work, from the beginning, emanated power, stimulated thought and required a reaction—often an uncomprehending and arch reaction. For a woman so small and soft-spoken, the impact she had on people has always been enormous.

            Born in Tokyo on February 18, 1933, Yoko Ono—the name translates to Ocean Child—was the oldest of three children. Her mother, Isoko, was the granddaughter of a merchant prince who established a major Japanese bank before being assassinated. Her father, Ono Eisuke, was himself a high-ranking banker—he’d been transferred to the San Francisco office just two weeks before Yoko was born.

The family lived a life of wealth and privilege, until 1945, when American bombs rained down on Tokyo, signaling the beginning of the end of World War II. With her father then missing in Hanoi, Yoko, two younger siblings and their mother left the city for the countryside, foraging for food and barely eking by. Following the war, the family (Yoko’s father survived) set out for the U.S., where Yoko attended Sarah Lawrence College. She threw herself into her art, music and writing but found that few understood what she was trying to do. Ono felt increasingly alienated from the mainstream.

Music had been a presence throughout Yoko’s childhood, and both of her parents were talented musicians. “My mother was a very good Asian instrumentalist,” she says. “She could play five or six instruments, including koto, biwa, shamisen and tsuzumi. And my father wanted to be a pianist and actually got to the point of doing concerts and got good reviews. But his father wanted him to inherit the business so he went that way.”

            Ono’s parents had trained her in the Western arts as well as native Japanese culture—where her father had dreams of Yoko becoming a pianist, her mother encouraged the girl’s painting. But the prospects for women becoming professional artists of any kind in Japan were virtually nonexistent at the time. “I was very intimidated,” Ono says, “because there was so much hope for me being a pianist and of course, I couldn’t make it. And also, I  think part of me was resisting painting as well. My mother was such a good painter that I just never thought that I wanted to go in that direction. My mother’s father was a good painter. They were all sort of professional painters. Besides, when somebody tries to force you into something…”

            Instead, Yoko found herself drawn toward the avant-garde wing of the arts, including the music of Anton Von Webern and John Cage. She found her own work moving in that direction, away from the accepted forms. “That was just something I had in me from the beginning,” she says. “I don’t know why. I always wanted to create something new. I didn’t want to repeat something that was created already. So basically I thought, this is what you can do, discovering things that we can do in that field.”

            Living among downtown New York’s art elite, married to a student named Ichiyanagi Toshi, Ono, in the mid-’50s and early ’60s, began staging performance events that often perplexed her audience. At one she threw dried peas at her guests while swishing her hair as musical accompaniment. In “Clock Piece,” a clock was placed on a stage and the audience was asked to wait until the alarm went off. She devised many such “Instruction” pieces: “Light a match and watch till it goes out,” went one. “Watch the sun until it becomes square,” instructed another. Audiences, according to one reviewer at the time, were “alternately stupefied and aroused.”

            The early ’60s, as those years did for so many, became a swirl of activity for Ono. She moved back to Japan for a couple of years, divorced her first husband and married her second, American filmmaker Tony Cox, with whom she had a daughter, Kyoko (Cox would later abscond with the girl, and Ono did not see her again for some 30 years). In 1964, Ono published a book, Grapefruit, continuing the Instructions motif: “Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.”

That same year, she and Cox moved back to New York, where Ono became aligned with a complex art movement called Fluxus, actually more of an anti-art movement in that it encouraged an anarchistic approach in order to make a conceptual statement. In 1965, Ono performed at Carnegie Recital Hall, where one of her creations, “Bag Piece,” involved a number of performers climbing into a large bag, removing their clothes, and cavorting around for some time, leaving the audience wondering what was going on inside. Another, “Sky Piece To Jesus Christ,” saw an orchestra being wrapped in gauze until its members could no longer see one another, unable to play in unison yet strangely unified. In 1966, she made a film, Bottoms, which featured 365 bare butts swaying as they walked.

“What I’m trying to do is make something happen by throwing a pebble into the water and creating ripples...I don’t want to control the ripples,” she told a British magazine in 1968.

            It was on November 9, 1966, at a preview of a solo exhibition at the Indica Gallery in London, that Ono’s life took its most significant turn—as did John Lennon’s, then at the height of his Beatle fame. Invited to attend by a mutual friend, Lennon curiously checked out the artworks by this Asian woman with whom he was unfamiliar. Picking up Ono’s “Box of Smile,” which revealed a mirror when opened, Lennon smiled. Climbing a ladder to view her “Ceiling Painting,” he noticed a magnifying glass, placed it against a white dot on the black canvas above him, and was pleased to see that the dot was the word “Yes” in miniature.

            Approaching a piece titled “Hammer a Nail In,” the rock musician inquired of the artist whether he might do as it said. Ono informed him that it would cost him five shillings. Lennon retorted, “I’ll give you five imaginary shillings and hammer an imaginary nail.”

            They didn’t become lovers immediately, but kept in touch and, by early 1968, much to the chagrin of the other Beatles, John and Yoko had become virtually inseparable.

John and Yoko: Their two names were nearly always mentioned in the same breath until they became as one—Joko; Lennono. Until the time that the Beatles announced their split in 1970—and through most of the decade afterwards (save for Lennon’s “lost weekend” of a couple of alcohol-soaked mid-’70s years, when he and Yoko separated)—John and Yoko recorded together, made films together, got busted for drugs together. But more than anything else, these two war children—Lennon had been born in 1940 during the bombing of Liverpool—campaigned for peace together.

            Just how effective their efforts may have ultimately been in turning the tide against the Vietnam War we might never really know. But make no mistake: they did have an impact. They became masters of the staged media event. For their honeymoon in early 1969, they chose to stay in bed in an Amsterdam hotel—and invited the TV cameras and journalists to watch them and have a chat. The purpose: If everyone stayed in bed growing their hair instead of fighting, violence would cease. How did they think this form of protest could possibly work? Well, they said, it attracted all of the media, didn’t it? So already they were getting the word out. It was the ’60s personified.

At another Bed-In, in Montreal, John and Yoko led a sing-along on a new Lennon song, “Give Peace A Chance,” which remains an anthem to this day.

            That they were considered ridiculous by some didn’t bother them: If laughing at John and Yoko would keep people from waging war, they’d happily play the clowns. And besides, for Ono, derision was hardly a new thing: she’d already long been accustomed to being looked down upon by those who didn’t get—or were offended by—her avant-garde art. Anything these Beatles fans might throw at her she’d probably already deflected before. “Everything in the world was done to me,” she told New York magazine in 2002. As long as John stood by her, that was all that mattered.

Today, some three-and-a-half decades removed from those heady early days with Lennon, Yoko Ono maintains an active schedule: showcasing her own art in gallery exhibits in several countries and American cities, keeping Lennon’s name and work in the forefront, appearing at numerous public functions, lending her celebrity to a variety of causes, taking care of various business enterprises. But more than anything else, Yoko Ono is still all about peace. Just as she and John once paid for huge billboards reading “War Is Over! If You Want It” to be posted in Times Square, last spring Ono bought ad space in several major newspapers to do her part to stop the war in Iraq. “Imagine Peace,” the ads read, signed Yoko Ono Lennon. In October 2002, she gave a speech in Oxford decrying the impending war: “Find peace in your heart and it will spread all over the world. The effect of it is strong and immediate. Keep your quiet center, and stand for peace, instead of fighting for peace. We can do it,” she read.

Ono is asked what message she would deliver to President Bush if she were granted an audience with him.

“I wouldn’t speak to him,” she replies in no uncertain terms. Why not?

“Well, you know, he wants to do what he wants to do. And I don’t think this is the time to have a dialogue but to do what we do. They want to do what they want to do and they have the right attitude of ignoring us rather than to have a conversation or dialogue. That’s strange, in a way. [In the past, presidents] were more concerned about what people said, and I don’t think that this regime is that concerned. I think that peace marches are still very appropriate, so that all of us know that we’re together. Each one of us will have to plant a seed with conviction. But I think that we have to find other ways of really being effective.”

Like what? “E-mail power!” she says. “I think it’s a piece of luck that we have this thing [the Internet]. I think that the powers-that-be want to tamper with it or suppress it but I don’t think they can do that.”

A pessimist might suggest that a greater majority of young people, those who would be most directly affected by war because they’d be the ones fighting it, is more apathetic than their ’60s counterparts. Ono only partially agrees.

“People in general are more apathetic about it, rather than just the people who are actually going to war. They just think that they’re professional soldiers so why don’t they go to war? In the ’60s, [because the draft was still in place] people had to go to war so they were very adamant about going to peace marches. It’s a very different situation.

“But I think they’re going to start noticing it on their own. Two soldiers in Britain came back saying that they don’t want to do this kind of war where they kill civilians and all that, and I think that was a very courageous thing to do. It’s being suppressed in the news—I think it was 12 pages in or something. They were risking the fact that they might be court-martialed. I don’t think they’re going to be because I don’t think that politicians want to make a big thing out of it, making them a cause celebre. They won’t do that. But if enough would start to say, well, we don’t want to go, that’s the best thing.

“The world today has the appearance of being more dangerous [than it was in the ’60s],” she says, “but I think there was always that danger element. And I think a lot of us kept on trying to change it and we were able to change it. It has been effective. And this time, too, I think the survival instinct of the human race is going to win over. Human minds are so resilient so maybe [the next generation] will be cleverer than us. I think we can make it within our time.

“If we didn’t fight we would probably be in George Orwell’s 1984 or something like that sooner. So instead being pessimistic about it we have to do what we can do. That’s the only option we have.”

Originally published in Global Rhythm in January 2004