Few women in the history of rock & roll have stirred as much controversy as Yoko Ono. Although her romance with Lennon was hardly the only factor straining the relationships between the Beatles, she became a convenient scapegoat for the group's breakup and was repeatedly raked over the coals in the media for her influence over Lennon, both in his life and his music. Ono's own work as an artist and musician didn't mitigate the public's enmity toward her; to the average man on the street, her avant-garde conceptual art seemed bizarre and ridiculous, and her highly experimental rock & roll (which often spotlighted her primal vocals) was simply too abrasive to tolerate. That view wasn't necessarily universal, and in fact the merits of her work are still hotly debated.
Regardless of individual opinion, Ono has left a lasting legacy; she was an undeniably seminal figure in the history of performance art, and elements of her music prefigured the arty sides of punk and new wave (whether she was a direct influence is still debated, although The B-52's did admit to drawing from her early records). Moreover, between Lennon's assassination and the myriad drubbings she's taken in the press and public opinion, an alternate portrait of Ono as a strong, uncompromising survivor has emerged in more recent years.
Yoko was born into a wealthy family in Tokyo. Her childhood was somewhat lonely and isolated; her father, a banker and onetime classical pianist, was transferred to San Francisco a few weeks before she was born, and her socialite mother was often busy throwing elaborate parties. Yoko didn't meet her father until age two, when the whole family moved to San Francisco. However, they returned to Tokyo three years later to avoid the anti-Japanese backlash that was beginning in the United States in response to Japan's growing military expansionism. Ono was educated at the Gakushuin School, the most exclusive private school in Japan (the Emperor's sons were her classmates). She began classical piano lessons at a very young age, and later received vocal training in opera. In 1945, her mother took the family to the countryside in time to survive the massive Allied bombing of Tokyo. However, rich city dwellers were unwelcome, and the Ono children were often forced to beg for food.
After the war, Ono's father transferred to New York, and she moved to the U.S. in 1952, where she studied music at Sarah Lawrence College. During this time, she became enamored of classical avant-gardists like Schoenberg, Webern and especially Cage. She also began dating Juilliard student Toshi Ichiyanagi, who shared her interests and became her husband (over her family's objections) in 1956. The couple moved to Manhattan, and Ono made ends meet by teaching Japanese art and music in the public school system, among other sporadic jobs (she'd rejected her parents' wealth and the attendant lifestyle). The couple's Chambers Street loft soon became a hot spot in the nascent downtown art scene; Ono frequently staged "happenings" (sometimes in partnership with minimalist composer LaMonte Young) that featured music, poetry and other performance, and John Cage used the loft space to teach classes in experimental composition. During this period, Ono's art was largely conceptual, sometimes existing only in theory or imagination; she created a series of instructional pieces suggesting nonsensical activities, later published in book form as Grapefruit in 1964. Her first solo show was at George Maciunas' gallery in mid-1961; the same year, Ichiyanagi and Ono separated, with the former returning to Japan.
That November, Ono performed at the Carnegie Recital Hall (not the main hall), an event that featured a miked-up toilet flushing at various points throughout the show. It received negative reviews, however. With her parents' encouragement, Ono returned to Japan in March 1962, seeking a resolution to her marriage.
Once in Japan, Ono became lonely and depressed; not only was her marriage effectively over, but she received more negative reviews for her performances in conjunction with Cage. After an overdose of pills, she was committed to a mental institution and kept under extremely heavy sedation. Fortunately, she was rescued by Anthony Cox, a jazz musician, film producer and friend of Young who had traveled to Japan hoping to study calligraphy with her. Cox threatened to publicize the callous treatment Ono had received at the institution (her sedative dosage was abnormally high) and secured her release; the two became romantically involved, and when Ono became pregnant, she made her divorce from Ichiyanagi official and married Cox. Their daughter Kyoko was born in 1963, but Cox's sometime volatility put a strain on the relationship, and they separated in 1964. Cox returned to New York, and Ono followed a few months later, after which the couple reconciled.
Ono resumed her art career to considerable attention from the New York avant-garde community; by this time, George Maciunas had become the leader of an art movement dubbed Fluxus, whose philosophies were compatible with (and even influenced by) Ono's, prizing abstraction and audience interaction. Ono performed at the Carnegie Recital Hall for a second time in early 1965, and debuted her seminal "Cut Piece," in which audience members were invited to cut off pieces of her clothing with scissors. In September 1966, she traveled to England for an art symposium, and "Cut Piece" helped make her a sensation in the London art world. In November, she got her own exhibition at the famed Indica Gallery, which was ardently patronized by John Lennon. Lennon was impressed by her work, particularly a piece where the viewer was required to climb a ladder and hold up a magnifying glass to read a small inscription on the ceiling that said "Yes!" The two read each other's writings, and Lennon financed an exhibition in which Ono painted various everyday objects white and cut them in half. In the meantime, Ono and Cox had begun making experimental films, usually centered on the repetition of simple movements; their fourth effort, Bottoms, consisted of 365 close-ups of nude buttocks (the idea was to fill the screen with motion when the subjects walked). British film censors were scandalized, and Ono became an even more notorious public figure with "Wrapping Event," in which she wrapped the lion statues beneath Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square with white cloth and tied herself to one. She also sang in concert with pioneering free jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman at the Royal Albert Hall. The avant-garde was becoming increasingly suspicious of her visibility, which only intensified when Ono and Lennon began having an affair that spring.
Fans of Lennon couldn't understand what he saw in Ono, but Lennon was an art student prior to falling in love with rock & roll and had long harbored an interest in avant-garde art. The difficulty with understanding Ono's art was that its impact came largely from her ideas; from putting new contextual frames around everyday objects, or asking her audience to complete an experience with their own imaginations. For example, most of Ono's pieces were white, so that the audience could imagine their own colors; even her so-called "Blue Room" was all-white (viewers were supposed to stay in the room until it turned blue). Her first musical composition, 1955's "Secret Piece," existed only in her mind (she was unable to transcribe the notes of a bird song effectively), and, in 1968, she announced a 13-day dance festival that would take place entirely in the imaginations of anyone who participated. In 1971, she took things a step further by presenting an imaginary art exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and filmed the spectators as the real works of art. As an artist, Ono dealt in concepts, not craft (i.e., practiced, developed technique and training in a specific medium). Her work wasn't what most people recognized as art, which was why many Beatles fans dismissed her as a talentless charlatan. Lennon, on the other hand, saw someone who could help him find a new direction.
Lennon and Ono's first musical collaboration was on the highly experimental Unfinished Music, No. 1: Two Virgins, which was recorded around the beginning of their affair and released toward the end of 1968. None of Lennon's fans knew what to make of any aspect of the album; not the odd snippets of noise, faint dialogue and sounds from the immediate environment, and not the fully nude photographs of the couple on the record jacket, taken from the front and rear. They were further dismayed with Lennon's participation in Ono's bizarre public events, such as appearing together in black plastic bags as a statement about judging by appearances. (Ono herself long suspected that fans' hostility was due to their discomfort seeing Lennon with a woman who was not only strong-willed, but of a different race.) After Ono's divorce from Cox, the couple married in Gibraltar on March 20, 1969, and took advantage of the publicity surrounding their honeymoon to hold "Bed-Ins for Peace" in Amsterdam and Montreal (the latter of which produced the single "Give Peace a Chance"). Cox was later able to gain custody of Kyoko, pointing to Lennon and Ono's drug intake, and disappeared with the child, whom Ono would not see again for 25 years.
The second Lennon/Ono album, Unfinished Music, No. 2: Life with the Lions, was released not long after their wedding; it spotlighted Ono's cathartic, wailing vocal improvisations, as well as addressing her first of several miscarriages. It was quickly followed by The Wedding Album, one side of which featured more Ono improv, the other of which consisted of nothing but the couple calling each other's names. Over the next few years, Lennon and Ono continued their peace activism and entered primal-scream therapy with Dr. Arthur Janov, which began to inform both of their individual careers. In 1970, they each recorded an album backed by the Plastic Ono Band; predictably, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band was the less structured, more avant-garde of the two. Ono followed it in 1971 with the double-LP Fly, which featured more conventionally structured songs as well as her typical experimentalism. In 1972 the Lennon/Ono protest-song album Sometime in New York City was released, and was roasted for the simplicity of its sentiments.
Ono returned in 1973 with two of her strongest solo statements, the brutally intense, explicitly feminist Feeling the Space and the more varied Approximately Infinite Universe, both of which featured less musical involvement from Lennon. Perhaps that was symptomatic of the problems the couple had been having; they split up for a year and a half toward the end of 1973, exhausted from their constant time together and their battles with U.S. immigration over Lennon's threatened deportation. Ono recorded a more accessible album, A Story, in 1974, but it was shelved and remained unavailable until 1997.
The couple got back together in early 1975, and Ono was finally able to bear a child, Sean Taro Ono Lennon, who was born on John's birthday, October 9. Lennon dropped out of show business for several years to raise his son and effectively become a househusband, while Ono took charge of his business affairs. Although she contributed some of her most accessible songs to his 1980 comeback album, Double Fantasy, she did not return to solo recording until after Lennon's assassination on December 8, 1980. The harrowing, grief-stricken Season of Glass was released the following year to highly complimentary reviews. Ono followed it in 1982 with the more hopeful, pop-oriented It's Alright (I See Rainbows), and had a minor success with the single "Never Say Goodbye." Released in 1985, Starpeace continued that optimistic trend, and teamed Ono with producer Bill Laswell and other downtown New York scenesters, but failed to connect as her previous two efforts had.
Ono gradually returned to visual art, creating installations and also exploring photography. Interest in her previous work led to several retrospectives over the course of the '90s, and in 1992 Rykodisc reissued her complete back catalog on CD, as well as the six-CD box set retrospective Onobox. In 1995, she recorded a new album for Capitol called Rising, which featured son Sean Lennon and recalled the harsh experimentalism of her early recordings. The same year, her musical play New York Rock debuted off-Broadway. In 2001 another new album, Blueprint for a Sunrise, arrived, updating the feminist tone of Feeling the Space while being somewhat more accessible. V2 reissued several of her albums once again in early 2007. Also during this year, she issued Yes, I'm a Witch. For this album, she assembled a number of previously released tracks and collaborated with artists such as Cat Power, The Flaming Lips, DJ Spooky, Jason Pierce, and many others. In 2009, Ono re-formed the Plastic Ono Band with Sean and added collaborators such as Yuka Honda from Cibo Matto and members of Cornelius; she released the album Between My Head and the Sky on Sean's Chimera imprint.
For Your Information :
Yoko Ono was married to Toshi Ichiyanagi (一柳慧) from 1956 to 1963.
Nobody Told Me
Yoko Ono Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
Everybody's making love for no one really cares
There's Nazis in the bathroom just below the stairs
Always something happening and nothing going on
They're starving back in China so finish what you got
Nobody told me there'd be days like these
No one told me there'd be days like these
Nobody told me there'd be days like these
Strange days indeed, strange days indeed
Most peculiar honey, boogie
Everybody's running and no one makes a move
Everyone's a winner and nothing left to lose
There's a little yellow idol to the north of Kathmandu
Hey now, everybody's flying and no one leaves the ground
But everybody's crying and no one makes a sound
There's a place for us in the movies you just gotta lay around
Nobody told me there'd be days like these
No one told me there'd be days like these
Nobody told me there'd be days like these
Strange days indeed, strange days indeed
Most peculiar, mama
Everybody's smoking and no one's getting high
Everybody's flying and never see the sky
There's a UFO over New York and I ain't too surprised into the middle
Nobody told me there'd be days like these
No one told me there'd be days like these
Nobody told me there'd be days like these
Strange days indeed most peculiar, most peculiar
I mean I never seen anything like this, hey hey
Rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling, polling, polling, hey
Okay let's do it now
Yoko Ono's song Nobody Told Me is a commentary on the chaos and confusion of the world. The first verse suggests that people are too caught up in their own lives to pay attention to what's going on around them. Everyone's talking, but no one's really saying anything. Everyone's making love, but no one's really caring. The mention of Nazis in the bathroom is a reference to the fact that even in the supposedly safe haven of a bathroom, danger can still lurk. The line, "always something happening and nothing going on," highlights the sense of aimlessness and lack of direction that can pervade modern life.
The second verse continues this theme of confusion and chaos. There's always something happening, but nothing in the pot – a metaphor for the fact that people are always busy, but never seem to accomplish anything. The reference to people starving in China highlights the fact that while some people have everything they need, others are struggling to survive. The repetition of the line, "Nobody told me there'd be days like these," underscores the feeling of surprise and bewilderment that can come from living in a world that seems to be constantly changing.
The chorus of the song brings together all of these different themes. The mention of the "little yellow idol" and "UFOs over New York" suggests that there are strange and inexplicable things happening all around us, and that we can't always make sense of them. The line, "everyone's flying and no one leaves the ground," is a metaphor for the fact that even though we may seem to be moving forward, we're not really making any progress. The sense of confusion and disorientation that pervades the song is summed up by the final line, "most peculiar, Mama."
Line by Line Meaning
Everybody's talking and no one says a word
Everyone is talking but nobody is really communicating anything of substance
Everybody's making love and no one really cares
People are engaging in sexual activity without any emotional connection or care for one another
There's Nazis in the bathroom just below the stairs
There are dangerous individuals present, lurking in unexpected places
Always something happening and nothing going on
There seems to be constant movement and activity, but no real progress or meaningful change
There's always something happening cooking and nothing in the pot
There is a lot of activity and effort being put forth, but no tangible results or rewards
They're starving back in China so finish what you got
There are people in need in other parts of the world, so be grateful for what you have and don't waste anything
Nobody told me there'd be days like these
The unpredictable nature of life can be overwhelming and unexpected
Strange days indeed
The circumstances and events of the present time are unusual and unexpected
Everybody's runnin' and no one makes a move
People are busy and active, but not actually progressing towards any goals or meaningful change
Everyone's a winner and no one seems to lose
People are only concerned with success and personal gain, rather than having any sense of empathy or compassion
There's a little yellow idol to the north of Katmandu
There is an object of worship or reverence in a faraway place
Everybody's flying and no one leaves the ground
People are distracted or living in their own worlds, without any real connection to the world around them
Everybody's crying and no one makes a sound
People are experiencing emotional pain, but are not expressing their feelings outwardly
There's a place for us in movies you just gotta stay around
There is a place for anyone in the world of entertainment or media, as long as they stick with it and continue to pursue their dreams
Everybody's smoking and no one's getting high
People are engaging in self-destructive behaviors, without actually experiencing any real pleasure or enjoyment
Everybody's flying and never touch the sky
People are living in their own illusions or fantasies, without confronting the realities of the world
There's Ufo's over New York and I ain't too surprised
Unusual events or phenomena are occurring, but they are not shocking or unexpected
most peculiar, Mama
The circumstances and events of the present time are particularly baffling and unusual
Lyrics © O/B/O APRA AMCOS
Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind
@ExtremePainGames
Top singer song writers in my opinion. And this doesn't refer to who's the most entertaining but top top writers. In no particular order. Stevie wonder he had 3-4 albums that were masterclass as far as writing and so much fun to sing along to. His greatest work had to be " Songs in the key of life " a double album that entered Stevie's head after a bad car crash. He recovered from the accident and wrote songs like he was pouring water out of a bathtub.
Prince: There is no album comes near the " Purple Rain " album. But again as years passed Prince kept proving he could write.
Michael Jackson: Total genius writer and could make a hit from staring into a dumpster full of garbage.
The writing of Paul McCartney is better than any of the last 3 artists I just mentioned and that is one heck of a thing to say. I lock John Lennon and McCartney into the same box. John was capable of trippier tracks than Paul, Paul had huge huge hits even the magic from WINGS was unreal. Tracks like , Let Em In , Silly Love Songs, Band On The Run, Nineteen Hundred And Eighty-five, With A Little Luck, Juniors Farm, the list goes on and on and on.
But by an edge over Paul. Now Paul had in my mind 5 times the hits John had, But by a millimeter I give John Lennon the top singer songwriter of all time. John's songs were written with more use of manipulating the English language. The journey Paul's songs sent you on were as epic as the journey johns sent you on. But John with songs like : " How " Cold Turkey, Scared, Steal And Glass, Bless You, Jealous Guy, Woman, Just like Startin Over, Watching The Wheels , Nobody Told Me, Gimmie Some Truth, Mother, God. I mean you felt when you were singing Johns tracks that he had a real strong center inside him almost like he had a bus terminal inside his song writing and all us human beings were the buses pulling into the station for recharging. Its very hard to explain.
I can say that I worship Paul McCartney's song. I love them that much. Listened to more of McCartney's material while being alive. But John wins the top spot. His song writing had a purity whereas Paul's a lot of it had chart climbing implants in it. Haha.
John Lennon for me. The G.O.A.T. on writing songs for the world to enjoy.
26 minutes later after playing some Mccartney. The long version of With A little Luck.
I return here to say ....mmmmm no Paul was the song writer of the planet of all time.
Lets just say John is the bus terminal and Paul is the runway at the airport. Both are rocking talents.
Jeeze Im arguing with myself here, hahahaaa.
@AnthonyPoschet
He died in 1980. That's 43 years ago and before I was born. Still, I miss him. What a human. ❤️👏
@JamieJones-gh7kp
I remember that day John was murdered by Mark Chapman you know why? Because of John's remark of saying the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
@giseleaponte4516
John Lennon was so way ahead of his time. So missed by (Me) 1 of his fans. You were 1 Big Bright Star J. L. and You will not Ever be Forgotten!!!! ❤❤❤❤
@steveb5210
I’m 61 yrs old and there are some many incredible artist, but Lennon is one of a very few who was a notch above the rest. Just incredible! He was the Beatles!
@ka92010rock
A voice like his is missing in today’s world.
@tbradtbrad
There's plenty of voices worth learning, but no one's listening...
@spkanava
1970
@arconeagain
What, about gun culture in America?
@colton8331
God I miss Harrison and Lennon.
@user-tx6lu6nz5r
We all do😞