Yoko Ono is rereleasing her albums from the 1970s.
The music of Yoko Ono, for too long a punch line in the mainstream, is finally getting the popular acclaim it deserved all along.
In July, three of her seminal 1970s albums were rereleased by the American indie label Secretly Canadian. Ono’s “Fly” (1971), “Approximately Infinite Universe” and “Feeling the Space” (1973) have been remastered for CD, vinyl and streaming services. It comes on the heels of last November’s re-issue of “Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band” (1970), which recently appeared on NPR’s list of the 150 greatest albums made by women.
It’s all part of a mission to recontextualize the story of Ono for the 21st century — not only to people who first heard her on vinyl 40 years ago, but, more importantly, to younger listeners. Millennials don’t know, don’t care for, or are unsurprised by the polemics that made Ono, in 1970, one of the most hated women in Western pop culture. Now, Ono is being listened to on her terms, on the basis of her sonic savvy.
It’s frustrating that it’s taken this long.
The reissue of Ono albums helps dismantle a popular narrative that only places Ono in relation to her marriage with Beatle John Lennon. Yes, Ono’s and Lennon’s music was symbiotic. Right up to Lennon’s last album “Double Fantasy,” Ono and Lennon always foregrounded their inseparability. But people are quick to forget Ono’s positive influence on Lennon’s best work. Look at the flabbergasted and angry reaction she provoked in June, when the National Music Publishers Association declared her, rightfully, as a co-writer with Lennon on his most famous single, “Imagine.” Fact is, Lennon couldn’t have imagined “Imagine” without being exposed to Ono’s sparse-minimalist lyrical style in her 1964 artist’s book “Grapefruit.”
But the resentment goes on. And much of the mocking is xenophobic and racist in nature. Ono is mocked for her “hetai” singing style (developed from kabuki theater) and denigrated by the ears of Westerners (and Beatles fans) who don’t try to expand their own. But after being a Beatles fan for many years, one comes to reap its unspoken benefit of being exposed to a variety of great people associated with them: Richard Lester, Ravi Shankar and, of course, solo Ono.
Where to start? If you’re looking for a hard edge, go for her at her heaviest: “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking For Her Hand in the Snow),” the second song on “Fly.” It’s dedicated to Ono’s then-missing daughter Kyoko, who was taken by ex-husband Anthony Cox after he violated a custody order. Against the sounds of Lennon’s and Eric Clapton’s looping electric guitar, Ringo Starr’s drums and Klaus Voorman’s bass, Ono howls in pain and anger and disgust at the absurd, abstracted, patriarchal systems that bind her. There are no lyrics except the title, but Ono doesn’t need them. Her voice cuts through the pleasurable rock, refusing easy gratification.
“Don’t Worry Kyoko” is typical of all the “Plastic Ono Band” and “Fly” songs — solid and punchy rock grooves on the ground, and Ono’s sax-y oscillations in the sky. Her undulations, her babyish growls and roars are like a journey through the strangeness of the human voice, untethered and let loose in the world. Ono’s vocalizations — her stereotype, but also her core — are haunted by the feeling of things left hanging in the air without a solid foundation. It’s natural, then, that an MP3 or Spotify listen to one of her songs is the perfect introduction to the indefinite quality of Ono songs.
Ono loves the loud and punky with a definite warmth, but she can be frightening when she goes soft and introspective. Her “Mrs. Lennon” is a sparse piano ballad in the vein
of her late husband’s “Love”/“God”/“Oh My Love” melancholia, but her cryptic pessimism (“Half the world is always killed, you know”) is squarely at odds with Lennon’s cathartic resolution. Regardless of their bleak conclusions (“The dream is over”), you feel at peace at the end of Lennon’s piano ballads. But Ono at her most morose (“If Only,” the personification of an internally screaming fly in “Fly”) leaves you unhinged. In 1981, she would fill an entire album with this nerveracked sadness with “Season of Glass,” released in the aftermath of Lennon’s murder, and among the next batch of Ono albums to be reissued.
With “Approximately Infinite Universe,” Ono did a near one-eighty — from the untethered noise and primal sounds of “Fly” and “Plastic Ono Band” to the world of threeminute pop formats and album-oriented rock gentility. But that doesn’t mean her music became more “accessible.” On “AIU,” she can crow a mean blues, dolphin-chirp in sharp staccato and smash the patriarchy on the dance floor in the space of a single side. It’s hard to achieve this mix of pop pleasure and intellectual discourse, but Ono has managed it.
Love it or not, Ono has silently shaped our world. There’s Lennon’s apocryphal story on how he was inspired to go back to the recording studio after he heard the B-52s’ “Rock Lobster” in a Bermuda disco club and claimed, “That’s Yoko!” Indeed, Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson, riot grrrl, punk, American new wave pop — they all owe something to Ono’s pioneering cries. You can hear the coming of Talking Heads in the jerky “Move on Fast.” The Women’s March could have made any of the songs from “Feeling the Space” its anthem. (I’d nominate the backto-back sucker punch of “She Hits Back” and “Woman Power.”)
Years of sexism, racism and resentment against Yoko Ono’s role in the Beatles’ breakup has focused attention away from her challenging audio works. But the canon of great recorded music — defined alongside troubling political lines we don’t want to acknowledge — is always being revised. Ono, one of the more recent additions, gives us cause to celebrate and open the box of our minds.
Carlos Valladares is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cvalladares@sfchronicle. com
Ono can crow a mean blues, dolphin-chirp in sharp staccato and smash the patriarchy on the dance floor in the space of a single side.