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.
What Did I Do
Yoko Ono Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
I was sure it would be there.
But to my surprise it wasnt there
And I had to look all over the world.
I was telling anybody I need to find it now,
Its very important to find it now.
I wasnt surprised that they didn't care,
Where is it? Where is it?
Oh, where could it be?
Why don't you help me look for it?
Why don't you help me look for it?
I kept on looking for the thing they say was there,
But I couldn't find it anywhere.
And to my dismay, I didn't even remember
What I was supposed to look for anyway.
What is it? What is it?
Oh, what could it be?
Why don't you tell me what it is?
Why don't you tell me what it is?
I was looking for something I knew was in my head,
I wasnt sure if it were dead.
But to my dismay, it was still there,
I had to close the door real fast.
What did I do? What did I do?
Oh, what did I do?
Why didn't I look in the closet instead?
Why didn't I look in the closet instead?
I was looking for my head in the closet,
I was sure it would be there.
But to my surprise it wasnt there
And I had to look all over the world.
Where is it? Where is it?
Oh, where could it be?
Why don't you help me look for it?
Why don't you help me look for it?
The lyrics of Yoko Ono's "What Did I Do" can be interpreted in different ways, but it seems to describe the experience of searching for something valuable and essential that the singer believed they owned or had access to, but that has mysteriously vanished. The opening lines, "I was looking for something in the closet / I was sure it would be there / But to my surprise it wasn't there / And I had to look all over the world," suggest a place where one keeps their belongings, but also hint at the idea of hiding or burying things that one doesn't want others to find, or that one wants to forget or lose. The person seems to have lost both the object and their sense of certainty, and consequently embarks on a quest that takes them across the globe, asking people for help but getting no response.
The repetition of the chorus, "Where is it? Where is it? / Oh, where could it be? / Why don't you help me look for it?" and "What is it? What is it? / Oh, what could it be? / Why don't you tell me what it is?" reinforces the frustration, confusion, and desperation of the singer who feels lost, alone, and powerless. At one point, the lyrics shift from the external search to an internal one, as the singer realizes that what they were looking for was "something I knew was in my head" but wasn't sure if it was "dead." This ambiguity suggests that the thing in question could be a memory, a feeling, a dream, or a sense of identity. The line "I had to close the door real fast" implies that discovering this thing would be a disturbing or unwelcome experience. The final stanza repeats the same scenario as the first, except that the singer realizes they were looking for their own head, which adds a surreal and absurd note to the song, as if to suggest that what we think we possess or control can easily slip away from us.
Line by Line Meaning
I was looking for something in the closet,
I was searching for a specific object that I believed to be in the closet.
I was sure it would be there.
I had a strong conviction that the object I was searching for would be in the closet.
But to my surprise it wasnt there
I was astonished to find out that the object was not in the closet.
And I had to look all over the world.
I had to search far and wide to find what I was looking for.
I was telling anybody I need to find it now,
I was expressing to anyone who would listen the urgency I felt in finding the object.
Its very important to find it now.
The object was crucial and its acquisition was of significant importance to me.
I wasnt surprised that they didn't care,
I wasn't taken aback that others were indifferent towards my plight in finding the object.
And I had to look for it myself.
I was left with no choice but to look for the object single-handedly.
Where is it? Where is it?
I wondered where the object could be situated.
Oh, where could it be?
I had a great sense of curiosity in terms of locating the object.
Why don't you help me look for it?
I implored for someone to assist me in my search for the object.
Why don't you help me look for it?
I reiterated my plea for help from anyone who could have offered it.
I kept on looking for the thing they say was there,
I persisted in the search for the object despite being advised to give up on it.
But I couldn't find it anywhere.
I was unsuccessful in locating the object in any possible spots.
And to my dismay, I didn't even remember
Regrettably, I realized that I had forgotten the specifics of what the object actually was.
What I was supposed to look for anyway.
I had lost knowledge about the actual target of my search.
What is it? What is it?
I felt puzzled and uncertain regarding the identity of the object.
Oh, what could it be?
I was both curious and confused concerning the nature of the object.
Why don't you tell me what it is?
I pleaded for some clarity and guidance from anyone who could have given it to me.
Why don't you tell me what it is?
I reiterated my plea for assistance to those around me.
I was looking for something I knew was in my head,
I was searching for an idea or thought that I was convinced was present in my own mind.
I wasnt sure if it were dead.
I had doubts regarding the relevance and vitality of the idea I was seeking.
But to my dismay, it was still there,
To my despair, the idea persisted, despite my doubts and indecision.
I had to close the door real fast.
I was forced to stop searching for the idea to inhibit further distress.
What did I do? What did I do?
I asked myself in confusion and frustration over my failure to find what I was searching for.
Oh, what did I do?
I expressed my frustration and confusion aloud.
Why didn't I look in the closet instead?
I berated myself for not checking the closet first, where the object was supposed to be located initially.
I was looking for my head in the closet,
I was searching for a sense of self or consciousness in a place where it could not be found.
I was sure it would be there.
I held a misguided belief that my conscious identity could be found in a physical space.
But to my surprise it wasnt there
I was astonished to discover that my sense of self could not actually be located in a physical realm.
And I had to look all over the world.
I was forced to expand my horizons and search for my sense of self and purpose beyond physical limitations.
Where is it? Where is it?
I was in a constant state of uncertainty and confusion regarding the location of my sense of self.
Oh, where could it be?
I expressed my curiosity and frustration about my fruitless search.
Why don't you help me look for it?
I appealed for assistance from anyone who could have offered guidance or support in my search.
Why don't you help me look for it?
I reiterated my plea for assistance to those around me.
Contributed by Harper S. Suggest a correction in the comments below.