Yoko Ono is positively charged

By Tara Murtha
Published: February 27th, 2009 | 10:55am

Yoko Ono is an interrupter. She doesn’t interrupt in a rude way, as if she thinks what she’s about to say is more important than what you have to say (though, considering, it probably would be). It’s more like Ono’s giddiness short circuits the conversational current. Everything’s on track, energy zipping back and forth, we’re picking up momentum, and then suddenly excitement surges and Yoko exclaims, “Isn’t that great?”

Officially, we’re talking about her latest project, Give Peace a Chance: the International Remixes (Mindtrain/Twisted Records), 14 sliced-up-and-slicked-back-out electronica remixes of the original John Lennon song. DJs on blender duty include Brazilian art-school rockers CSS and United Kingdom’s Richard Fearless of Death in Vegas. But we wind up talking topics like Obama, and how, in a way, Ono’s the original peddler of The Secret (the Rhonda Byrne book that promotes the idea of positive psychology), and how — seriously, people — isn’t it about time we really gave peace a chance?

Ono takes the peace mission very seriously and very literally, frequently advocating daily positive deed every day for three months. “The philosophy is to make you understand or show you that you can change your life that way,” she says. The recommendation echoes through the album like a mantra. On the “Alex Santer Peaceful Mix,” a track chock full of classic house hallmarks like a synthesizer bass line, and Casio SK1–sounding blips and beeps and screaming alarms, Ono repeats, “Think peace, spread peace, shed light in darkness.”

Many of the remixes barely relate to the original song; they’re more like electronic mash-ups glazed with Ono’s spoken-word on top. The exception is “Blow-Up Popism Mix,” a groovier track that begins with sing-song group vox and what sounds like tambourines rattling high on a hill and actually cycles through the song’s signature chord progression. (For such an iconic, infectious, hand-clapping, foot-stomping original, it’s probably best to keep the blender on low.) Then a funky, Meters-like bass line jangles on in, and Ono repeats, “We don’t have to do much, think domino effect, the message will circulate faster than you bet.”

Despite the upbeat beats and nonstop peace proselytizing, Ono’s also a jaded woman who knows that sometimes it’s best to hold your cards close. “People say, ‘Oh, you’re too positive, you’re too optimistic.’ So you don’t want to tell people you’re optimistic, maybe,” she says. “But it’s much better to be optimistic.”

It’s understandable. In our pop-culture canon, critics have pinned Ono as a weirdo, a creep, or the Bitch Who Broke Up the Band. She’s taken the black-widow bullet — over and over again in old interviews — like only a widow would. Of course, the tired, chauvinist accusation, “it was Yoko’s fault, man,” shortchanges the spirit and intelligence of John Lennon, a man whose memory still burns bright. And no one has been more interested in keeping John Lennon’s memory alive all these years than Ono.

It’s been 40 years since Lennon and Ono (and journalists and groovester celebrities) chanted about “This-ism, that-ism, -ism -ism -isms,” for the original recording at the Bed-in at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel. It’s been 29 years since Lennon was murdered by bullets in the back. Yet of all Ono’s projects designed to fan Lennon’s flame, the recycling of this song is most consistent and dynamic. The song spreads Lennon and Ono’s message to new audiences, splitting apart and coming back together again in covers and remixes by countless artists. (This collection alone is the third in a series of “green” remixes, so called because it’s available online only.)

About the original recording Ono says, “It was something that happened without us planning it. Because it was so unplanned, the people who joined us, most of them were not professional musicians,” she remembers. “They were gathering there for political reasons actually and it worked out very well, of course. At the time it was just sort of ‘OK, this is something nice to add to our songs.’” It’s a message that we need now more than ever, she says. “The climate nowadays is, well, I hate to say ideal, because it’s so sad that we still have to sing give peace a chance,” she says.

There was a different feeling in the air in 1969. “I liked to think, ‘OK, next year we won’t have any war,’ you know that kind of optimism. ‘We’ll sing this song, and within a year, there’ll be world peace.’ We didn’t voice it that way; but yes, we thought, it’s a cinch. But we’re still singing ‘Give Peace a Chance,’ and I think that’s very important to do that. At the same time, it’s sad, because while we’re still singing, wars are still going on in the world; people are dying, and children being maimed, and all of that. It’s unforgivable. It’s amazing.”

She says that her peace mission is more about one-person armies. “I believe strongly … that people can help people — not the work of professional politicians. They have so much red tape that it becomes very difficult for them to be free and maybe work the way they want to.” Though recently, Ono concedes, her expectations have risen in the politician department. “The situation that occurred with Obama becoming president — and all that — is a miracle, it’s an incredible situation, and maybe we are turning the page into a different era,” she says.

When your son is producing your next album and a generation’s anthem is remixed for club kids all over the world at 120 beats per minute, it’s a different era indeed. But Ono’s not slowing down. Giddy, vibrant, full of new projects and thoughts, the 76-year-old widow who was once a young melancholy girl with a heavy heart says she gave up reading about it for living it and marching for dancing. “It’s a very healthy thing to do,” she says. “Anytime I hear music, just a note of dance music and my body starts to dance,” she says. Isn’t that great?

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