To many, Yoko Ono's musical skills have always been a bit of a joke.
I remember back in high school, listening to Lennon and Ono's Double Fantasy album — where they trade off singing songs back and forth. We'd regularly fast-forward past the Ono tracks. Well, most of the time. Sometimes we'd listen to them and be flabbergasted by how darned weird they were, and how creepy and strange Ono's voice was.
I recall one friend hysterically imitating Ono's orgasmic vocal explosion in "Kiss Kiss Kiss." Was this supposed to be music? Give me Lennon's "Watching The Wheels" any day, right? So who was Yoko Ono the musician? Just a novelty act, riding on her famous husband's coattails? A cult performance artist with more style than substance?
Fade in to 2007, and Ono's slowly been undergoing a bit of a rethink. At 74, she's still pushing the envelope, giving her blessing to an audacious set of remix discs of her earlier work. Two recent releases by Astralwerks try to give us a new take on Ono – by stripping her work down to its core, and entirely rethinking it. A variety of artists including Cat Power, The Pet Shop Boys, and Antony and the Johnsons were asked to choose songs from Ono's catalog to rework however they saw fit.
The result is an all-star cast over two often-excellent CDs, Yes, I'm A Witch and Open Your Box. Far more so than The Beatles' rather too reverent "modernization" Love, these two Ono discs succeed at "remixing" the old into an ultra-modern take on her tunes.
Ono's music is far less sacred to most listeners than the Beatles of course, and perhaps that's what makes it so ripe for reinterpretation. It's a kind of musical transplant, lifting Ono's vocals and grafting them onto club-friendly beats and rhythms. Like any such alchemy, some of this stuff works better than others. But what's surprising is mostly how well it all works.
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