Word: ono
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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MUSIC: The return of Yoko Ono; the Deftones...
...Yoko Ono once thought she had a hit. The song was called Walking on Thin Ice, and it was such an eerie and intense piece of avant-pop that her husband John Lennon was sure it would finally transform the public perception of Yoko from a shrieking fraud who broke up the Beatles to an important musician on the fringe of the mainstream. Ono and Lennon had just finished mixing Walking on Thin Ice and were entering their apartment building on Dec. 8, 1980, when Mark David Chapman pulled a .38 from his pocket...
...Ono released Walking on Thin Ice in February 1981 with the dedication "For John," but it failed to crack the Top 40. "I was so in shock at John's passing," says Ono, "that I forgot about the song and pretty much everything else. I certainly wasn't going to any clubs." Thus she had no idea that influential Paradise Garage DJ Larry Levan remixed Walking on Thin Ice into a dance-club anthem in the summer of '81. Levan died in 1992, and since then his many disciples in the DJ world have occasionally paid dual tribute to Levan...
...piece is overexplained by a title card from Ono that calls it, among other things, an "atonement" for the sufferings of the 20th century, a syntactical slipknot that implies that she inflicted them. Never mind--she's not the first person to remind you that the sentimentality of the hip New York City art world can make Norman Rockwell look like Voltaire. What matters is that this bullet-riddled freight car has a rough force. With its big steel undercarriage and its wounded sides, it has the injured presence of a Spanish bull. Its weeping tonnage can speak...
...this art? Spend a minute with it, put aside any reservations about Ono's overstated explanations, and you have to say yes. Is this Asian art? It's enough to say it belongs to all of us. Does all of this mean that the future is a place where the U.S. finally opens itself to what Asia has to give? Bring it on. --With reporting by Chris Taylor/San Francisco