Feb 182008
Why? Today, I suggest we celebrate Yoko’s unfulfilled promise – or should I say the unfulfilled promise of the Plastic Ono Band. While The Back Office works to set up Rock Town Hall’s first official listening party, giving rock nerds who shockingly have not yet heard either of the Plastic Ono Band albums a chance to do so while sitting cross-legged in a semi-circle with the rest of us, let’s contemplate why anyone ever suggested to Yoko that she ever try to sing like a regular human being, why John stopped making records that had the excitement of real musicians playing in real time, and so forth. Why.
Advanced mathematics!
Why Yoko ultimately deserved rock’s rotten tomato?
I love Yoko’s Plastic Ono Band and I’m not sure if the above statement is intended as a compliment or not, but my feeling is that it’s not. Regardless, one of her main advantages is that she doesn’t sing like “a regular human being” (whatever that is).
On Plastic Ono Band, her version, she sings like a lunatic. She’s really good at that. It’s on later albums, when she tries to actually sing regular melodies that the insults are intended.
I still see Yoko as an avant-garde-ist who sort of latched onto rock and roll as a vehicle for art that didn’t match well with it. I got no problem with art, I got no problem with strong/controversial women (even if they catalyze the breakup of the Beatles!), I got no problem with caterwauling vocals. I have a problem with half-baked artistic concepts being sort of glommed onto rock music. Doing so doesn’t fully bake them, which is what I suspect Yoko wanted to achieve.
Sometimes not understanding the conventions of one’s medium results in revolutionary, interesting approaches to it. I don’t think Yoko’s lack of understanding of conventional rock and roll produced any music that excites me in the same way that, say, the best Beefheart does. She tried, she failed, she fascinated John anyway, life goes on.
It seems to me that Yoko wasn’t really interested in expanding the boundaries of rock and roll; she just misunderstood it and missed the mark. Her stuff reminds me of this weird album of “rock” music I have, written by L. Ron Hubbard. Both Yoko and L. Ron thought they could get in on the teen beat game, but just didn’t know how, despite their belief that they understood what made it rock.
I second bakshi’s point of view here. Artistic mediums can be difficult to move between. Yoko’s music might have been better if she had just gone more purely for weird sound textures and skipped the pop elements, which she didn’t give a damn about anyway.
I’ve liked pretty much everything I’ve ever heard by Yoko (well, maybe not that ‘song’ on the Rock & Roll Circus video, but that wasn’t her fault). I always say, I liked her songs on those last two albums with John better than his. I think it’s foolish to judge all music on whether it ‘rocks’ or not. It’s a very constricted way of experiencing music.
One thing that went unmentioned is that she’s 75 today. Wow.
To clarify, for me, it’s not a matter of whether she “rocks” or not but whether she goes with what I feel are her strengths or not. I’d rather hear a school kid sing “normal style” than her, although I do like her voice in the background on “Bungalow Bill” and “Instant Karma”.
Wow indeed. I saw her play last year in Chicago and she was still great. Happy belated birthday Yoko!
For the record, I’ve never heard any of her other records, so thanks for the clarification. Based on this statement, I’d probably agree with you.
Do you really wanna go there? OK fine. Yoko’s influence on The Beatles is a bit like the arms buildup under Reagan in the ’80s. Sure the Soviet Union would’ve collapsed on its own due to the state its economy was in, being bankrupt from a war in Afghanistan, but no doubt that trying to catch up with Reagan’s careless military spending exacerbated its collapse.
What I’m saying is this. As everyone on here should realize, The Beatles were already fracturing in ’68 (quite obviously). Yet people just LOVE to blame Yoko for it. I bet it wouldn’t be the same if she was hot and blonde or something. They would say something like “I can see why John would just wanna spend all of his time with her”. And yes, some of this is clearly subconscious (or sometimes overt) racism as well as sexism, especially in the relation to fear of strong, independent-minded women with something to say.
Hey, Berlyant — you may want to leave Ronald Reagan out of future posts about rock and roll; the simile is somewhat distracting. More importantly, please ponder the following:
Catalysis — a modification and especially increase in the rate of a chemical reaction induced by material unchanged chemically at the end of the reaction