Art is a conversation between you and someone you’ve probably never met
April 27, 2016 7:43 PM   Subscribe

Years With Yoko. For a long time Ono was basically despised, the inevitable lot of someone married to a person whose fame actually may have eclipsed Christ’s. Fools hate foreigners, and fools hate women, but a lot of people who ought to know better hate the avant-garde, and a lot of people who ought to know better hate the politically engaged, and a lot of people who ought to know better hate polymaths, and Ono is all those things. (SLTheMillions)

Yoko Ono previously: 1, 2, 3
posted by triggerfinger (67 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
I used to hold all the old cliche notions about Yoko Ono - until I went to a retrospective of her work at Moma in NYC a few years ago was was mesmorized by Cut Piece - where Yoko had audience members come and cut pieces of clothing off of her. It was deeply moving - vulnerable and brave - asking questions about the relationship of the artist with the audience - and how women are viewed and taken apart. I was stunned by the depth of her work - and my ignorance of her talent.
posted by helmutdog at 7:56 PM on April 27, 2016 [21 favorites]


Love Yoko. A (very smart) friend introduced me to Rising and then I worked backward a bit, although I'm no connoisseur and appreciate the recommendations for further reading/listening in this article. I love this little piece - the author is on the right side of whatever arguments this is part of. I'm going to check out his novel now.
posted by latkes at 7:57 PM on April 27, 2016


Thanks! I love Yoko Ono, and I get *so tired* of the 'yar yar yar broke up the beatles hate her' thing. Death of Samantha got me through the loss of my own child.
posted by frumiousb at 8:00 PM on April 27, 2016 [2 favorites]


I never understood the Yoko hate.

You admire some guy who writes great songs. He falls in love with someone who obviously must be an amazing person if guy you admire loves her.

And if you read any interview with her, or see any of her art, it all becomes perfectly clear why guy you admire loved her.

End of story.
posted by freakazoid at 8:13 PM on April 27, 2016 [22 favorites]


I don't hate Yoko, I just find her art tedious and forgettable. I could do without pretty much all of Fluxus, and I say this as someone who's a fan of art of that period. I'm glad the author and the folks here like her art, I don't mean to diminish that. But there's other possible negative reactions than "OMG she married this guy I loved 47 years ago".
posted by Nelson at 8:22 PM on April 27, 2016 [16 favorites]


I used to have to defend my wife from joking comparisons to being like Yoko relative to my life in a very small part of my social orbit that didn't like my wife and that ridiculously over estimated my worth as a songwriter to make the comparison, but I've never understood the hatred directed Yoko's way either. I've seen it claimed she could be really controlling of John, but that's not my business, and even if so, he seemed happy enough being controlled. But I feel a little like the avant-garde, in general, isn't really so avant garde anymore. It doesn't seem like conceptual art in America has developed much at all since the 50s and 60s. Ever since then, it always seems to come down to somebody being or getting naked in a startlingly public way or breaking the fourth wall to prank people or murder hoaxes or something about bodily fluids, and by this point it's not so much that that stuff still really makes people genuinely uncomfortable and affects them deeply as it just signals "here's more of that usual boring pretentious art nonsense you probably won't understand." Not sure if that's true of Yoko's work, so I'll take this post as a jumping off point to educate myself before saying anymore than that.
posted by saulgoodman at 9:08 PM on April 27, 2016 [2 favorites]


I never understood the Yoko hate.

Because she latched,,,,forget it, just watch the Beatles' documentary on the making of the White Album, and you can judge her behavior for yourself.
posted by Beholder at 9:22 PM on April 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


She did some interesting art, though Fluxus was never quite my cup of tea (and unlike Nelson, I actually dislike most art of the period, and see Fluxus as part and parcel of a movement I never really liked, and thought itself much more innovative than it was, being kind of warmed-over zombified dada/deconstructionism mixed with more than a little weird hippy-utopian naivete).

She also had an interesting vision for music, which a bit of the clearly-not-John aspects of the Plastic Ono band, as well as her solo work in the 80s can attest.

But for the love of science, she should not have been in front of the microphone during anything approaching a pop song. And I say this as a person who has a fairly.... undistinguished... singing voice.
posted by chimaera at 9:40 PM on April 27, 2016 [2 favorites]


Fools hate foreigners, and fools hate women, but a lot of people who ought to know better hate the avant-garde, and a lot of people who ought to know better hate the politically engaged, and a lot of people who ought to know better hate polymaths, and Ono is all those things.

I just hated her singing.
posted by philip-random at 9:46 PM on April 27, 2016 [10 favorites]


But for the love of science, she should not have been in front of the microphone during anything approaching a pop song.

Disagree.
posted by chococat at 9:50 PM on April 27, 2016 [5 favorites]


Yoko Ono is one of the top all time performance artists. No doubt about it. Her music though is, to most ears, a horrible thing.
Linda McCartney was a very good photographer, even David Bailey was a fan, but she was not a good backing singer or keyboard player in Wings.

So somehow both Paul and John married very talented smart women but who had little musical talent, and then incorporated them into the band.

This is so weird that I have to wonder if some kind of bet was in play between John and Paul. I can just imagine them sitting in a back room at Apple Records in 1970 betting which one would be the first to transform their tone-deaf missus into a solo star.
posted by w0mbat at 9:57 PM on April 27, 2016 [3 favorites]


Punk was 40 years ago and we're still not over singing having to be "nice".
posted by solarion at 10:02 PM on April 27, 2016 [32 favorites]


I never understood the Yoko hate.

Misogyny, basically.
posted by happyroach at 10:36 PM on April 27, 2016 [13 favorites]


I have to wonder if some kind of bet was in play between John and Paul.

She didn't break up the Beatles, she transferred John's love from Paul (and music) to herself. John then completely abdicated as a pop star, which he'd been wanting to do since 1963, but Paul's entire subsequent career has been about dealing with the shock of the loss, which he felt as a bereavement. That's why he was so calm and almost cheerful when John really did die.

Her conceptual art was startling, witty, generous, playful, brilliant, and totally of its time... but to hear her screaming or doing sentimental vaudeville numbers seemed like an insult to our intelligence. You don't need to turn The Beatles, what they meant, and/or the whole of pop music into material for your conceptual art - or at least you shouldn't be surprised if people get grumpy if you do.
posted by colie at 11:09 PM on April 27, 2016 [3 favorites]


she transferred John's love
Or maybe he fell in love with her?
posted by chococat at 11:18 PM on April 27, 2016 [11 favorites]


He did far more than fall in love with her. He was obsessed with her, as she was the only force big enough to supplant the enormity of what he had spent his entire adult life creating with Paul. I didn't mean to imply any evil plotting on her part.
posted by colie at 11:21 PM on April 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


Disagree.

I'll see your disagreement and raise you Chuck Berry's expression when she begins singing.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 12:02 AM on April 28, 2016 [7 favorites]


And yet for some reason, nobody complains when Bob Dylan opens his gob and tries to attract a female cat- no wait, sorry, that's an insult. To cats in heat.

So basically, you can have an absolutely shitty voice and be considered a great talent...as long as you have a penis to go with it.
posted by happyroach at 12:20 AM on April 28, 2016 [19 favorites]


Punk was 40 years ago and we're still not over singing having to be "nice".

Or female musicians having to be "nice", for that matter. Sigh.

Victor Boris's Patti Smith biography notes that Yoko was an influence on many of the first wave of female punk singers on both sides of the Atlantic. Without her, we may never have had Poly Styrene, Siouxie Sioux or even Smith herself. Continue that line a little further, and you reach women like The Raincoats, The Slits and PJ Harvey.

I remember a late interview with Lennon where he drew an apt contrast between the condemnation of Yoko's vocals in the early 1970s and the praise directed at The B52s' Cindy and Kate five years later. "Ahead of her time," was the gist of what he said.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:33 AM on April 28, 2016 [19 favorites]


Dylan's voice was perfectly normal folk singing for the whole time he recorded the albums that made him famous. 50 years later, it's shot. There is no comparison.
posted by colie at 12:38 AM on April 28, 2016 [3 favorites]


I find it interesting that if you do not like her singing, you are immediately classified as a misogynist. Really? It's that simple?

I have a broad spectrum of musical tastes, including different genres, male and female singers - and singers of both sexes that have "less than ideal" singing voices. I'd even go as far as saying I liked "Walking on thin ice" when it came out. But generally, I find her singing (along with some other male and female singers) to be grating and painful to listen to (which may well be her intent). Does this immediately mean that I am now a hater of women?
posted by greenhornet at 2:37 AM on April 28, 2016 [6 favorites]


No, disliking Ono does not automatically make you a misogynist. However, if you look at the history of dislike for Ono, there is a strong current of misogyny (and racism) running through it. Kind of like the way that the "disco sucks" backlash had something to do with taste but at least as much with racism and homophobia.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:06 AM on April 28, 2016 [26 favorites]


Yoko Ono isn't trying to be Kate Bush or a pop singer at all, which is probably why her voice is a difficult listen.

She developed her own vocal techniques, parallel to and probably a little before the similar techniques of Meredith Monk, and used them to great effect. It's not unreasonable to call her musical work groundbreaking.

I wouldn't call the result "pleasant" or "nice" but why does music have to be pleasant? Many of the Great films are pretty unpleasant to watch, and horrible things happen - no one considers it unreasonable.

You don't put on a Yoko Ono record because you want to chill to relaxing music with a beer, but because you want to experience some art that might change your consciousness a little. If you are expecting the first of these, no wonder you're disappointed when you get the second.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 4:03 AM on April 28, 2016 [10 favorites]


I wouldn't call the result "pleasant" or "nice" but why does music have to be pleasant?

Totally - but there's still a reason why people continue to play 'Helter Skelter' but not 'Revolution 9'.

The problem with Yoko's singing and music is that she started hanging with the Beatles (inside the heart of their daily creative process - unknown territory for anyone but George Martin basically) around the post-Pepper time when they bestrode the music world but had also begun to put out slapdash, slovenly, stunt-based, overtly experimental work (e.g. the fade-out of All You Need Is Love, half of the White Album, crap on Mystery Tour, You Know My Name, etc). They stopped caring whether it was 'good' or bad but simply were content to explore their minds in the studio while thinking whatever it came out like, it had to mean something or other. Plus, LSD.

BUT they'd already done 12+ years and 10,000+ hours of performing music of every conceivable genre from blues to cinema scores, as a near-telepathic unit, live on stage to demanding audiences... and then hundreds upon hundreds more studio hours as well. It was like Mozart's youth. That was the 90 percent of the iceberg beneath their experiments. Yoko didn't have that foundation - she had some classical training but not much different to what upper class people usually get. However, she'd been living and working intensely among visual artists for many years, and her own multi-faceted, highly influential and memorable work in this field reflects this (in a way that Paul's very ordinary paintings don't). But she got into the heart of the Beatles' unique environment and went for it as a musician. Perhaps a very admirable attitude and hugely confident, but her musical results don't bear up well.
posted by colie at 4:45 AM on April 28, 2016 [3 favorites]


Its not impossible to enjoy some of her work and find other aspects of it tedious and dull. I don't love her musical work for the most part, and some of the visual/conceptual pieces seem to be half baked to me. That still leaves a pretty large chunk of things I find great.
posted by lownote at 4:48 AM on April 28, 2016 [3 favorites]


Some guy, the story goes, went up to Picasso to tell him he should paint things to look the way they REALLY look. Picasso said he wasn't sure what that would look like, exactly, whereupon the guy produced a photo of his wife. 'That's what she REALLY looks like,' he said, and Picasso answered, 'She's rather small, isn't she? And flat?'

I'm reminded of that story whenever I hear people complaining about Yoko Ono's 'singing voice'. Yoko Ono is not Joni Mitchell, and the reaction she's trying to evoke is not 'gosh, she sangs real purty, don't she?' Yet people talk about her as if she just didn't know she was a 'bad singer', and somehow Lennon didn't know either. Picasso is not trying to paint you a nice picture of a bowl of fruit, and Yoko Ono is not trying to sing you a purty song.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 5:08 AM on April 28, 2016 [15 favorites]


But Chuck and John are attempting a standard purty rock and roll tune.
posted by gnuhavenpier at 5:18 AM on April 28, 2016


Ono has plenty of form doing purty songs, with even more disastrous results. Try 'Yes, I'm your Angel' on Double Fantasy.
posted by colie at 5:22 AM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yoko Ono was an agent of change. Almost never popular to begin with, when those agents change things we already know and love, it's not hard to hate them. Add to this the fact that Yoko gives somewhere between nil and zero fucks what anyone thinks of her either as an artist or as an agent of change, and it's not hard to understand people not liking her.

I personally don't care for her musical exploits - she seems to pick a Stradivarius like a banjo by way of demonstrating our preconceived notions about violins. It may be art, but I don't like it much.
posted by Mooski at 5:37 AM on April 28, 2016


Ono influenced Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson of the B-52s on some of their early sound, which was awesome.

Pop culture has made it somewhat difficult to separate Ono from the myth of the fall of the Beatles. But the Beatles were already fragmenting due to creative differences and financial mismanagement. Everyone involved needed to do their own projects without the burden of sharing credit, which is the fate of most bands eventually.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 6:10 AM on April 28, 2016


The best part about threads like this are how one user calmly extrapolates upon what they don't realize is an absurd bullshit idea of how "art" happens, along lines that are clearly perfectly in keeping with the myth that Yoko somehow "ruined" the Beatles or "made" John Lennon "interested in realms of music beyond pop, though his interest clearly echoes even in tracks as early as the Beatles' second album", which definitely isn't misogynistic so long as we can prove that Ono is emblematic of all non-catchy music and that her love for John infected him AND THAT IS HOW ART WORKS, I PROMISE, IF I WRITE FIVE MORE PARAGRAPHS ON IT WILL IT PLEASE MAKE YOU SEE THAT I AM RIGHT

What's weird about hating Yoko's art is that literally nobody, anywhere, ever goes "hey let me put on this sick Yoko track that I'm sure everybody loves!", plunging detractors of her voice into a wharrgarbl tunnel from which they can never escape. Meanwhile, Selena Gomez is considered an acceptable middle ground. (I like Selena Gomez quite a bit, sometimes, but her flavor of pop is no less arbitrary than Yoko's is; her fans just don't recognize that nearly as much as the average Yoko fan understands why somebody else may not like Yoko. Selena gets shat on in sexist ways too, of course, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

And the Fluxus movement is silly and conceptual, but I think that it suffers from being positioned in the era that it came from. It anticipated the potential for "ludic art" and took it to many wonderful places—the Fluxus Handbook is a great party tool—but any conceptual interpretations of "play" were wholly eclipsed by the rise of gaming as a far more visceral and comprehensive art form. Even so, Fluxus was head and shoulders above the ambitions of, say, Mario (I mean duh), but as gaming becomes increasingly sophisticated, it overlaps with Fluxus's already-explored terrotory in more and more obvious ways. The overlap between Fluxus and ARGs, or between Fluxus and titles like Depression Quest, in which everyday behaviors are translated into "mechanics", is fascinating stuff. And it'll be decades before games catch up with where Fluxus has already been.
posted by rorgy at 6:12 AM on April 28, 2016 [3 favorites]


>But Chuck and John are attempting a standard purty rock and roll tune.

Yeah, but... no disrespect to either guy... but it really ain't much. The world needs another bog-standard rendering of a blues song like it needs more paintings of bowls of fruit. And Chuck hopping around on one foot, 'cause that's his Thing... it's an exercise in brand recognition; it's like the guy in Robocop saying "I'd buy THAT for a dollar!" over and over and over. It's not art, and it's not even particularly exciting as music; it's just folks going through their paces, doing what's expected of them. If anything, THAT's what broke up the Beatles--not Yoko, but the fact that their brand was that they were happy and funny and cute together, and they got sick of it and couldn't do it anymore. Anyway, Yoko is the only person up there who's not just fulfilling audience expectations, and for my money it's the only interesting and/or memorable thing about the performance; it's uncomfortable but it's compelling. Without it, the song is a throwaway.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 6:23 AM on April 28, 2016 [3 favorites]


Yoko Ono is my entire soul and I don't care how crazy or dumb or ignorant of modern art that makes me sound. She is a not particularly attractive, POWERFUL, talented as hell, weird as hell Japanese woman who just does not give a fuck and that means so much to me.

I discovered Grapefruit when I was 16 or 17 and living in a white suburban monoculture. To see a Japanese woman who so completely lacked sex appeal and was so devoted to her art was a revelation for me. The article made me smile because I guess my love for her is definitely a holdover from adolescence. If I came across a figure like Yoko for the first time now I wouldn't feel in such desperate need of her, which I think is a sign of personal progress, but I imprinted on her at an early age and the damage is done and I don't caaaaaaare
posted by sunset in snow country at 7:55 AM on April 28, 2016 [12 favorites]


Did anyone hate Linda McCartney? Exactly.
posted by gertzedek at 8:33 AM on April 28, 2016


The fact that Linda couldn't play but Paul had her in the band was a standard gag in comedy shows throughout the 70s. The media did indeed dole out the hate to her (and Paul's next wife). Germaine Greer.
posted by colie at 8:51 AM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


but there's still a reason why people continue to play 'Helter Skelter' but not 'Revolution 9'.

Consider me opposite to this. Helter Skelter is way overheard in my universe and thus bemusing at best, whereas Revolution 9 is remains fresh and weird and full of surprises. And yet ...

Victor Boris's Patti Smith biography notes that Yoko was an influence on many of the first wave of female punk singers on both sides of the Atlantic. Without her, we may never have had Poly Styrene, Siouxie Sioux or even Smith herself. Continue that line a little further, and you reach women like The Raincoats, The Slits and PJ Harvey.

Poly Styrene's vox don't immediately come to mind but every other name here is someone whose singing does not begin to annoy me as immediately and completely as Yoko's.

No, disliking Ono does not automatically make you a misogynist. However, if you look at the history of dislike for Ono, there is a strong current of misogyny (and racism) running through it. Kind of like the way that the "disco sucks" backlash had something to do with taste but at least as much with racism and homophobia.

Having endured disco while it was happening, let me reiterate one more time that ...

the overall musical/cultural experience of it very much did suck big time. By which I mean, in a very short period (1974-77), this fresh new sound went from being a nice part of the overall mix that made for the pop music stew of the time to THE OVERWHELMING DOMINANT ingredient, to the extent that you couldn't really taste anything else (kind of like a recipe with way too much cilantro). Add to this the fact that, as always with pop trends, the stuff that got the most exposure was usually the thinnest in terms of genuine quality, and you ended up with a perfect storm of SUCK by about 1978.

posted by philip-random at 9:49 AM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


colie: "He did far more than fall in love with her. He was obsessed with her, as she was the only force big enough to supplant the enormity of what he had spent his entire adult life creating with Paul. I didn't mean to imply any evil plotting on her part."

It's hard to overstate just how personally fucked up those two were - Paul and John. Just deeply, deeply unhealthy individuals, living on adrenaline and a certain goggle-eyed inevitability that hung about the whole enterprise that was The Beatles. Yoko Ono certainly didn't "break them up" - but if she had, good lord, it was probably the best thing for everyone involved.

The misogyny against Yoko Ono for all these years is interesting - and, at the risk of making it "all about the mens," it's worth saying, I think, that it was also rooted in a huge misunderstanding of what the Beatles themselves were. Everybody who loved the Beatles had this massive illusion that they were full of joy and light, as ecstatic and easy and free as their music; and therefore these mythic heroes of gentle rock freedom everybody had built up in their minds must always stay together, because nothing is wrong for them, and none of them could be dealing with things like domestic abuse (from their childhood and their current lives) or body disphoria or general dissociation and disenchantment with everyone and everything. Patriarchy demands that we see women as subjects to godlike creative males; the subjection is a lie, but so is the godlike creative male.

In fact I don't think John at least was ever capable of becoming a happy, healthy human being - although Yoko probably brought him as close as was possible. People remember now (well, I hope they do) that John was a serial physical abuser of women; but it is truly remarkable that Yoko had him admitting this in public, apologizing for it, and saying he thought it was wrong. I don't know whether he actually was true to those apologies in private, but the personal progress it took to own up to the abuse can, I think, safely be blamed on Yoko and her personal strength. Even many "weird" things she did during their relationship (the "lost weekend" f'rinstance) - which we've always seen as "weird" largely because we've always seen everything through the lens of "Yoko is nuts" - turn out to make sense when you rightly recognize her as a mightily powerful woman struggling to reform and renew a man who was brilliant but violently abusive, and to give him space to become a better person whilst demanding that she be allowed to retain her own dignity and sanity.

In short: Yoko Ono is someone I personally admire; John and Paul were lifelong victims of their circumstances, and they have some brilliance as artists, but they certainly weren't as dynamic and thoroughly interesting as Yoko is.

And, aside from all that, she's an amazing musician and artist.
posted by koeselitz at 10:05 AM on April 28, 2016 [19 favorites]


... artist of a conceptual variety -- yeah. Musician -- nah.

It's hard to overstate just how personally fucked up those two were - Paul and John. Just deeply, deeply unhealthy individuals, living on adrenaline and a certain goggle-eyed inevitability that hung about the whole enterprise that was The Beatles. Yoko Ono certainly didn't "break them up" - but if she had, good lord, it was probably the best thing for everyone involved.

I'd argue that Yoko probably kept the Beatles "together" for longer than would otherwise have happened, to the degree that she took John Lennon, flying high and weird after a thousand acid trips (and almost as many #1 records) and, to some degree, grounded the guy. He fell for her like a junkie falls for a drug, except unlike a drug, she loved him. Someday someone will make a movie (or whatever) that makes sense of their love, and it will be one for the ages.

But that won't improve her singing.
posted by philip-random at 10:17 AM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yoko was an great musician, yes – a more compelling and innovative musician than any of the other post-Beatles were. This vocal is an amazingly superb performance, a better and more accessible song than any other post-Beatle had produced – as much as I'm a fan of This Too Shall Pass, "Walking on Thin Ice" is more immediate and stunning and groundbreaking than anything there, very much on the cutting edge of dance music and what it could do. Neither John nor Paul had the perspicacity and musical forethought to be looking sideways toward Arthur Russell, but Yoko did.

And if you hate Yoko and "Walking on Thin Ice," well, you probably hate Arthur Russell's seminal 24→24 Music, and you probably think disco is just stupid, and you probably don't care about art in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the impact it had on house and techno, and we should probably stop talking because we just disagree about things.
posted by koeselitz at 10:25 AM on April 28, 2016 [3 favorites]


John nor Paul had the perspicacity and musical forethought to be looking sideways toward Arthur Russell, but Yoko did.

Just no way. The Beatles were making fully fledged avant garde recordings like 'Tomorrow Never Knows' (which incorporates gestures to Dada and Stockhausen) and taking apart the studio around them fifteen years earlier. They had considered recording Rubber Soul in the US because they were so influenced by R and B and the dance records from those studios. The cello parts on Eleanor Rigby or I am the Walrus were totally new to pop. I'm all for evaluating Yoko's music really openly and I agree with a lot of the points you make koeselitz, but if we're now saying Yoko evaluated the music scene with a more astute ear than the Beatles, then we're in Bizarro World.
posted by colie at 10:36 AM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


First of all, I'd like to qualify myself by saying that I am as old as dirt and have a pretty good memory for the pop fabric that swaddled me growing up. Hatred for Yoko was no more intense than the disdain for Linda Mc. Hell, zoo radio shows used to run isolated vocals of Linda's just for an opportunity to deride her. I just think some Beatles fans needed a scapegoat so they picked Yoko. They couldn't get over the butthurt that the band had reached a point that it couldn't be held together anymore.

I was always indifferent to Yoko. I'm not an avant garde fan so I don't judge anyone in that genre. Her music did nothing for me but it inspired nothing more than skipping the tracks she was on. We used to be pretty good at lifting that tonearm to avoid a song (or shudder, just record the songs we liked to 8 track).

Disco? No, it wasn't homophobia or racism. There may have been some cretins that joined the cause because of that but in general it was that to fans of rock, hard rock, prog rock, power pop, punk, or even pop it sucked. Especially the stuff that dominated the airwaves. Disco took Sturgeon's Law and doubled down on it. 198% of it sucked.
posted by Ber at 10:40 AM on April 28, 2016 [2 favorites]


colie: “... if we're now saying Yoko evaluated the music scene with a more astute ear than the Beatles...”

Yes – among the ex-Beatles, Yoko evaluated the music scene with a more astute ear than any of the others after the Beatles broke up. Certainly in 1980 this was true. Do we need to talk about Wings? Does anybody? "Mull of Kintyre" is nice and all, but I can leave the rest – and that stuff was all very, very far from having its finger on anybody's pulse. Even This Too Shall Pass, the greatest work by a male ex-Beatle, is pretty rooted in 1967-1968 American folk-rock; hence Harrison's collaboration thereon with a decidedly throwback New Morning era Dylan.

Sure, you can tell me all day long that Revolver was groundbreaking – and it was! – but I'm talking about the period after the Beatles broke up.
posted by koeselitz at 10:44 AM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


Ber: “Disco? No, it wasn't homophobia or racism. There may have been some cretins that joined the cause because of that but in general it was that to fans of rock, hard rock, prog rock, power pop, punk, or even pop it sucked. Especially the stuff that dominated the airwaves. Disco took Sturgeon's Law and doubled down on it. 198% of it sucked.”

Not that this is necessarily an argument we need to have here, but what's funny to me here is the unspoken assumption behind your comment. You say it wasn't homophobia or racism that led to disco-hate – it was rock fandom. Apparently you think rock fandom, on the one hand, and racist homophobia, on the other, are distinct phenomena. All I can say is: that might be an assumption worth sussing out a bit before you lean on it too heavily.
posted by koeselitz at 10:51 AM on April 28, 2016 [8 favorites]


and we should probably stop talking because we just disagree about things.

A. that version of Thin Ice is okay. Yoko's not screeching. I don't know about amazingly superb but it's certainly not off-putting. Maybe I'm still too traumatized by what she did to pretty much everything she touched on Sometime in New York City (including the bonus live sides) to give her a fair listen.

B. I certainly do not hate anything I've heard from Arthur Russell -- I find it infinitely listenable, pretty much the opposite of most of the Yoko music I've heard.

C. what colie said about the Beatles avant tendencies. In fact I'd flip things around and suggest, no Tomorrow Never Knows, no I am the Walrus -- no Arthur Russell blowing things wide open a decade and a bit later. Up to and including Rubber Soul, The Beatles were a divine pop band, the best of their time. Post Rubber Soul (with acid having entered their veins) they unleashed a genie that will (hopefully) never return to its bottle.

D. you may well be right about Yoko being more relevant than any ex-Beatle, but then so were Alice Cooper, Mark Bolan, David Bowie, George Clinton, Joni Mitchell, Brian Eno and well, many other 70s players too numerous to name.
posted by philip-random at 10:52 AM on April 28, 2016


in support of ber (and as I've argued elsewhere), the problem wasn't disco itself -- it was the disco ubiquity that was foisted on the world 1976-78. You had to be there in that pre-internet, pre-indie-underground, pre-anything-but-what-the-mainstream-was-offering to get how awful it was.
posted by philip-random at 10:56 AM on April 28, 2016


Oh sorry koeselitz, - I was thinking of an overall legacy rather than the solo years.

Although to keep some balance, John did still keep up a bit in the 70s, wanting to record with fresh musicians but finding that his ridiculous level of fame (and his hatred of it coupled with laziness) put too many barriers in the way. His collaborations with Bowie and Elton John (who was an interesting and respected artist at the time) got a bit of his voltage back, but you're right, both John and Paul were so traumatised by the break up and so mind-bent by fame and their past achievements that they couldn't really function as they used to.

Paul could still pull one of his trademark songs of preposterous originality yet instant accessibility out of his arse very occasionally - e.g 'Maybe I'm Amazed.'
posted by colie at 11:00 AM on April 28, 2016 [2 favorites]


philip-random: “in support of ber (and as I've argued elsewhere), the problem wasn't disco itself -- it was the disco ubiquity that was foisted on the world 1976-78. You had to be there in that pre-internet, pre-indie-underground, pre-anything-but-what-the-mainstream-was-offering to get how awful it was.”

Well, as I've argued elsewhere, the culture of that time was saturated in homophobia and racism, so we need to look back and realize that the very, very common idea that "disco sucks" – which turns out to have been more popular than the idea of disco was – was borne very often of a latent homophobia and racism, whether we like to admit it or not, whether we consciously intended it that way or not. And we need to constantly re-frame our history in order to recognize the limitations of our perception. Music is just music; hating it doesn't often make much sense. Yoko is an example of this, too – she was and is outrageously popular among other musicians, from the B-52s to Elvis Costello to Sonic Youth, and that popularity reflects an excitement at the shining newness of the ideas in her music – but that reputation is not shared by the general public.

I think that it's very important for us to learn to grow out of our tendency to hate whole genres of music, because when we're part of a society that is white supremacist and sexually normative at its root, those hatreds are very often going to turn out to have been rooted in very unfortunate prejudices. And in the case of disco, the incredibly vital and important artists involved were mostly ignored because the public at large was wrapped up in hating them so virulently – so that, when we woke up from our long national nightmare, almost all of them were dead, along with a generation of incredibly important artists and writers and thinkers, victims of a deadly plague our president laughed at while we were more interested in hating their musical style than in countering and easing a disease that was destroying whole communities. That's probably worth thinking about when considering the historical circumstance of disco.
posted by koeselitz at 11:09 AM on April 28, 2016 [8 favorites]


She is a not particularly attractive, POWERFUL, talented as hell, weird as hell Japanese woman who just does not give a fuck

Yasss queen! If I may sum it up in one word: Ono is fierce. Suck it, haters!
posted by todayandtomorrow at 11:23 AM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


Good lord, the culture of that time might have been saturated in homophobia and racism, but it still didn't have much to do with the hatred of disco. Hell, I lived in a midwestern frat house in the late 70s. The same guys that would crank up Aerosmith or Cheap Trick were just as likely to be familiar with Funkadelic or the Brothers Johnson. Even if the frat bros of the era didn't like R&B they acknowledged it was worthy of respect.

Disco drained all of the piss and vinegar, added a sickening veneer of corporate respectability. It was safe for radio, safe for the record labels, safe for most parents. You couldn't turn on TV back then without finding some soulless variety show with shills like Donne and Marie performing disco. If anything, it was the one thing going on in pop music that was embraced whole by the establishment, by The Reagan Voters. It was bland, simple enough to dance to, and none of them got the subtext of say, The Village People. "Oh isn't that cute Walter, they're singing about the YMCA." Sorry, I ain't buying your defense of that genre.
posted by Ber at 11:27 AM on April 28, 2016 [4 favorites]


So whether you like disco or not personally, as music itself, I think you have to give it the credit it deserves, and see that, historically, it was damned important. sonascope does a much better job than I can of contextualizing this: it's a music that played a very important role, and that was largely hated by people who didn't like it playing that role.
- koeselitz


I think koeselitz makes a great case, above here and in the linked comment he posted. You seem to be mad that disco "took over" so to speak, but that's an inclusive and happy thing that many wanted to participate. At any rate, our entire society is tainted with racism and sexism and homophobia so of course these things came into play in the pop culture hatred of disco. I honestly don't know how you can argue they didn't.
posted by agregoli at 11:49 AM on April 28, 2016 [3 favorites]


OK so I have been thinking about this some more and I have come to the conclusion that I also (maybe even especially?) love Yoko when she sucks. I'm more a fan of her visual and performance art and her persona in general, and I haven't actually really listened to anything of hers except Bad Dancer (which I love), but when people get het up about how terrible her music is it just makes me love her more because these people just hate her SO MUCH and it just bounces right off her as she keeps cranking out this terrible music. It's like that quote about how the true measure of equality is when everyone is allowed to be as mediocre as white men. I love that she gets to experiment and be creative and come up with some truly bad stuff.

But now some of the stuff people are saying in this thread is making it sound like some of the music is actually artistically worthwhile? So I may have to check it out, but I'm legitimately afraid that it might take away that part of the mystique for me. At least I know her floofy hair will always be there for me.
posted by sunset in snow country at 12:19 PM on April 28, 2016 [4 favorites]


At any rate, our entire society is tainted with racism and sexism and homophobia so of course these things came into play in the pop culture hatred of disco. I honestly don't know how you can argue they didn't.

I've never argued that racism-sexism-homophobia didn't inform at least some of the disco-hate of the late 70s. I've always argued (and suspect I will be a stuck record in this regard until I die) that to narrow it down to racism-sexism-homophobia is the worst kind of revisionism. Because I was there. There was WAY more to it than that.

koeselitz, you're in your mid thirties which means you would've been born pretty much at the moment that the whole disco-sucks thing erupted. So your expertise on the era is necessarily historical (ie: based on research, artifacts etc), similar to my expertise of the Beats (who I have a lot of opinions about), but was born in 1959, so all of my experience of the era is at best secondhand.

Here's an anecdote. In 1978, when I saw Bruce Springsteen on his Darkness on the Edge of Town tour (ie: post Born to Run), he played a three thousand seat venue. Because he wasn't big enough yet for anything else. Because his stuff got precious little radio airplay. Because every f***ing station in town that had once been rock or pop was pushing an overwhelmingly disco-focused playlist. That same year, 1978, the Village People came to town and sold out a 15,000 seater.
posted by philip-random at 12:44 PM on April 28, 2016


philip-random: “In 1978, when I saw Bruce Springsteen on his Darkness on the Edge of Town tour (ie: post Born to Run), he played a three thousand seat venue. Because he wasn't big enough yet for anything else. Because his stuff got precious little radio airplay. Because every f***ing station in town that had once been rock or pop was pushing an overwhelmingly disco-focused playlist. That same year, 1978, the Village People came to town and sold out a 15,000 seater.”

Not having been around is actually a perk as far as understanding the historical circumstance. Most of the people who you talk to about this who were around then have very, very limited experiences and memories of the time that are necessarily warped by their perspective as it was happening. For instance: the extent of disco's popularity (such as it was) has been vastly overstated in later years. It was a hitmaker for maybe 20 months at most, before being superceded and pushed aside; but people remember back, and it seems like it lasted forever. (The impact of "grunge" in the early 1990s is remembered in similar ways – but "grunge" was gone from radio by about 1994 or 1995. It only had a year, even if that year was more memorable for some people than other years.) For another instance: the thing people knew as "disco" was already mostly an appropriation of the original art form as it existed. Up above, the best example of an awful disco act that Ber could give was Donnie and Marie Osmond! Isn't that – well, just a touch... misremembering things? Or remembering things from a particular perspective, since all of us can't have been at the Paradise Garage watching Larry Levan spin Arthur Russell tracks or dancing to Walter Gibbons?

I mean – by this argument, shouldn't you be recusing yourself, not having actually experienced disco first-hand, but only having heard disco pieces appropriated by the corporate machine for radio airplay? Or are you just limiting yourself to arguing that your friends weren't actually racist and sexist for liking rock music and hating disco? Can you really be sure that was true for all of them? Because my disco-hating friends when I was growing up – that was a huge motivator.

Here's what we know now: rock was shitty in the 1970s. I'm not talking about musical quality; I'm talking about sheer evil. Rock was racist in the 1970s; Ber actually came right out and mentioned up above that there was basically a grudging segregation where "frat boys of the era" (read: most rock fans) didn't like "R&B" (the ghetto for black artists) but at least they respected it. But black people were almost nonexistent in mainstream rock – because rock was for white people, and mostly still is. Rock was sexist in the 1970s; we still remember the groundbreakers more than anything, and Heart gets some just props, but they deserve credit mostly because they were in a male-dominated medium that was absolutely brutal to women almost all of the time. Rock was homophobic in the 1970s; it was openly homophobic, and if you think people didn't get what the Village People were really doing and sneer at it, particularly rock critics, then you haven't read 1970s rock criticism. Lester Bangs says all kinds of very questionable things that edge right up to the line of saying that Led Zeppelin or whatever band he was hating that week was faggy. Heck, rock in the 1970s was pedophilic – really, it's an unrelenting parade of gross shit, and it's hard to see how anyone defends it now.

So then, when you say – oh, they weren't actually being actively racist or sexist or homophobic, they just hated that type of music and preferred rock – well, you can see how it's more than a little bit doubtful now, isn't it? It's like saying, these Klan members aren't being racist when they a black guy shouldn't be allowed to teach children – they just don't think he has the right qualifications. Well, fine, but you're completely that they're racist the rest of the time. That probably informs the way they're acting here, right?

And I can understand how, having lived through it, it's hard to look back and think, gee, a lot of my friends were actually sexists, racists, homophobes, etc. That's not a fun experience. But I've done it, and it turns out to be constructive, I promise you: learning to appreciate the degree to which bigotry has determined American history. And it was alive and well in the 1970s.
posted by koeselitz at 1:10 PM on April 28, 2016 [8 favorites]


I love (some) rock, but I can find music to enjoy in every other genre too - and of course that includes disco. The idea of adopting or dismissing a whole genre of music wholesale seems ridiculous to me.

Statements like "I hate country", "I hate disco" or "I hate jazz" are really just an indication that the speaker has never delved deeply enough into that genre to find the stuff there he'd genuinely enjoy. It's a stupidly restrictive and self-limiting attitude to impose on yourself. Who wants a steady diet of nothing but white boys with guitars?
posted by Paul Slade at 1:15 PM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


One of the best bits of music criticism and education I've read in the last year is that you're not going to like everything, and that's ok. I just can't get into Bela Bartok, no matter how closely I listen. The same is true of Yoko Ono for that matter.

But there's a certain level of personalization that her art is evidence of some kind of character flaw. And I find that uncomfortable to listen to when it pops up.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 1:15 PM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


philip-random: “I've never argued that racism-sexism-homophobia didn't inform at least some of the disco-hate of the late 70s. I've always argued (and suspect I will be a stuck record in this regard until I die) that to narrow it down to racism-sexism-homophobia is the worst kind of revisionism. Because I was there. There was WAY more to it than that.”

To maybe wind down a little: I think we both agree on this – there was some homophobia / racism / sexism in the disco sucks movement, but that's not all there was necessarily. What I think we differ on is the emphasis. And my feeling is that, historically, the "disco sucks" movement was (and even is) much more powerful than any "disco" movement ever could have been. Seriously, look back at the massive anti-disco riots and the anger people had, and the way that disco had mostly disappeared from radio by 1981. Or look at the way that "disco" was basically a dirty word in the music industry for well-on 30 years – through the 1980s, into the 1990s – so that whole swaths of music that never would have existed without disco (Michael Jackson, Prince, house music, techno music, etc) had to disavow all knowledge of their roots whenever the subject came up. I grew up in a world that absolutely despised disco. So I'm a bit intent on turning that back and pointing out that, yes, the hatred people have there is a little irrational.

I can understand that it might seem different to you. Again, we seem to agree on the facts (it was mixed) but disagree on the emphasis.

Anyway – I've learned to love disco, and if anybody wants to know why, here is a Spotify playlist I put together a while ago that has some reasons. I'm going to drop the disco derail myself, because I feel like I've really dragged this out a lot more than I should have, for which I apologize. People should feel free to respond to my comments of course – I just won't have much to say about disco from here on.
posted by koeselitz at 1:24 PM on April 28, 2016 [4 favorites]


was borne very often of a latent homophobia and racism, whether we like to admit it or not, whether we consciously intended it that way or no

The case for homophobia - or maybe I should say fear of effeminacy because of the degree to which a lot of straight people failed to fully grasp the gayness of disco - in the disco backlash is pretty straightforward . The racial politics strike me as more complicated - in my experience white Boomer rock fans are often big fans of Motown or Stax or Sly Stone or Little Richard, even while they may dismiss disco as a silly fad at best. Which is not to say there's no racism in the response to disco - you can also find people explicitly articulating that racism in writing from the era. It's just... more complicated. So I do sometimes feel like the way I now see the revisionist evaulation presented by people my age (mid-20s), as a nugget of recieved wisdom - disco backlash, racism, homophobia, bam - is still a flattening of a deeper story but it is better that "lol disco" at least.
posted by atoxyl at 1:42 PM on April 28, 2016 [3 favorites]


put it this way, I may have come to HATE disco at the time but on watching Vinyl, one of my fave moments in the series thus far is when the geeky-loser white guy Clark "introduces" disco ... and it works.
posted by philip-random at 2:15 PM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


(I've got to get around to watching that show. My wife says I need to read the book first – so maybe after the semester's over in a few days...)
posted by koeselitz at 2:19 PM on April 28, 2016


It's kind of a caricature that this thread immediately turned into a "Yoko is shrill, weird, and broke up the Beatles" pro and con deathmatch.

If you don't dig Yoko, maybe move on to a different thread?

Hey, how'd everyone like the writing in the original post? I thought it was pretty good myself.
posted by latkes at 3:04 PM on April 28, 2016 [5 favorites]


The case for homophobia - or maybe I should say fear of effeminacy because of the degree to which a lot of straight people failed to fully grasp the gayness of disco - in the disco backlash is pretty straightforward .

As another person who was there, I disagree with you about the homophobia for the very reason that you mention. Most straight people really had no clue about the gayness of disco. I know that I had no idea at the time that disco was a gay thing. As far as most people were concerned, disco was the Bee Gees and Disco Duck and stuff like that. And if you want to retreat from homophobia to fear of effeminacy, then why did glam rock (which was much more overtly effeminate than disco) not have the same kind of backlash? The fact is that the disco that we heard on the radio non-stop was pretty much all crap. As Ber pointed out, we had Donny and Marie doing crappy disco, and that was the sort of thing that most people thought of when it came to disco. I now know that there was actually plenty of interesting music happening in the disco underground, but none of that was to be heard on mainstream radio. What we hated about disco was the music that we were hearing. We couldn't have hated the gayness, because we didn't even know about it.
posted by klausness at 3:06 PM on April 28, 2016 [2 favorites]


but there's still a reason why people continue to play 'Helter Skelter' but not 'Revolution 9'

I have to agree with philip-random that Revolution 9 actually holds up very well. I also like Helter Skelter, but I've loved Revolution 9 since I first heard it at the age of about 10. It was probably one of the first pieces I heard that led me down the path of less-mainstream music, and I doubt I'm the only person for whom this is true. I think one reason many people hated Yoko so much was that she was their first exposure to this kind of thing, and they didn't like it at all. But rather than concluding that it just wasn't for them, many people ended up concluding that it was objectively worthless and that Yoko must just be a charlatan.
posted by klausness at 3:19 PM on April 28, 2016


1) I had always heard that Yoko Ono's music was avant garde, so I was expecting to like it a year ago when I finally heard it. No. I appreciate what she was going for, but no. [I like her art, though]
2) As for disco, I was around back then, but as a *teenager in rural Michigan*. I had no idea disco was gay or African-American or... good. I know better now.
3) I heard Arthur Russell for the first time two days ago and really liked him.
4) All of this heightened appreciation of the 70s comes from reading "Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever"by Will Hermes. I ended up buying too many CDs.
posted by acrasis at 4:31 PM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


Thanks for the redirect back to the article, latkes.

And to finish the post title,

... and that conversation can continue for so long.

pretty much sums up my definition of art. It makes me think & feel & sticks with me, on the long road of life.
posted by yoga at 4:42 PM on April 28, 2016


the overall musical/cultural experience of it very much did suck big time. By which I mean, in a very short period (1974-77), this fresh new sound went from being a nice part of the overall mix that made for the pop music stew of the time to THE OVERWHELMING DOMINANT ingredient, to the extent that you couldn't really taste anything else (kind of like a recipe with way too much cilantro).

All this had been true of Rock and Roll since about 1972 or so (and yes, I was there too) so when do we get OUR Cominsky Park?

And don't let me hear you say .. but Punk.. because within two or three years, Punk had pretty much morphed into mainstream rock music where it sits comfortably forty years later.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 8:10 PM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


Personal experiences of disco don't necessarily overlay with a discussion of the overall backlash against it.

I am not a huge fan of Yoko but have always felt the hatred of her was far more misogynistic than rooted in anything real.
posted by agregoli at 5:29 AM on April 29, 2016 [4 favorites]


Personal experiences of disco don't necessarily overlay with a discussion of the overall backlash against it.

But personal experiences do provide some evidence regarding the causes of the backlash. Specifically, (1) most anti-disco people didn't know that disco was particularly gay and (2) other popular musical styles that were actually perceived as gay (such as glam rock) didn't have the same sort of backlash. I haven't seen anyone who claims that the anti-disco backlash was rooted in homophobia present any substantial evidence for it. It seems that it's just supposed to be obvious.

I am not a huge fan of Yoko but have always felt the hatred of her was far more misogynistic than rooted in anything real.

I'd be inclined to agree with that (the part about misogyny, that is). Certainly everyone knew that Yoko was a woman, and people did often use pretty sexist language when talking about her, so I find this much more plausible than the homophobic disco backlash theory.
posted by klausness at 2:12 PM on April 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


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