Word: ono
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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...
...Ono's songbook is a museum basement of scattered treasures (she is trained in classical Japanese vocal techniques) and trash (she is also the world's most infamous banshee). Ono has long needed a curator, and in 2001 she gave a New Jersey duo called Orange Factory approval to go through her material and remix the 1970 innuendo-filled Open Your Box. "I'm a very difficult person," says Ono, "but when I heard it, I just thought it was beautiful. I cried...
...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