YOKO ONO
Fly/Approximately Infinite Universe/Feeling The Space 9/10, 8/10, 7/10 Perfecting the voice-as-weapon
Yoko Ono’s career has taken in many turns – avant-garde artist, filmmaker, conceptualist – but her lasting discovery is her utterly unique vocal scream, which she found almost by accident. Recording and replaying her invocation of a childhood memory, where Ono overheard servants reenacting the sounds of childbirth, she accidentally spooled the tape in reverse and, spooked by the uncanny outcome, trained herself to reproduce the backwards groans. By the time of 1970’s Plastic Ono Band, Yoko had perfected this voice-as-weapon, and was directing some of the most furiously disciplined rock music of her time: “Why”, its opener, was as mantric and manic as Krautrock at its most unrelenting.
1971’s double album Fly is just as revelatory. the first two sides have her group – husband John Lennon, regular bass foil Klaus Voormann and Jim Keltner on drums – locked in and tightly guiding a shamanic, hypnotic rock music, the 17-minute “Mindtrain” as higher-minded as Can’s “Halleluwah”, while “Don’t Worry Kyoko” draws wild playing from Ringo starr and Eric Clapton as Ono calls down the Furies. And if one of the miracles of Fly is Ono’s capacity to unlock players more traditionally hemmed in by genre and cliché, on side two she liberates herself from song entirely, Fluxus artist Joe Jones’ clangorous, clamorous music machines duelling with Ono’s vocal incantations.
the side-long title track is Ono solo, soundtracking one of her most audacious feats – the film of the same name, with the titular insect crawling over a naked woman, tracing an alternate geography of the body. Ono would extend and amplify the feminist politic of the film through 1973’s Approximately Infinite Universe, where songs such as “What A Bastard the World Is” and “What A Mess” trace the gender contours of both intimate relationships and the socio-political with fierce honesty, the latter’s “If you keep hammering anti-abortion/We’ll tell you no more masturbation for men” eerily echoed, earlier this year, by American politician Jessica Farrar’s Man’s Right to Know Act.
Musically, on both Approximately Infinite Universe and Feeling The Space, Ono nudged her songs closer to mainstream pop/rock, aided on the former by New Yorkers Elephant’s Memory: the playing is limber and joyous, stretching out blues-rock motifs here, teasing out piano-led pop charmers there. By Feeling The Space the music skirted the lugubrious, but the songs are often strong, and Ono’s not yielded one jot on her politics – after all, this is the album with the unflinching liner, “this album is dedicated to the sisters who died in pain and sorrow and those who are now in prisons and in mental hospitals for being unable to survive in the male society.” Extras: 7/10. Bonus tracks with each album.