Recently I’ve
started paying more attention to the tweets of Yoko Ono – and I’m starting to
wonder if she’s taking the piss.
I understand that
she’s a conceptual artist and therefore her work doesn’t follow the same
rigidity of structure as traditional art: it’s more about the thought behind
each piece than the aesthetic result. Some of her ideas are beautiful in their
simplicity: a good example is the card she gave to John Lennon on their first
meeting at the Indica Gallery in 1966, which simply
said “Breathe”. He couldn't really argue with that.
When it comes to her Twitter posts, though, I'm a little dubious.
Yoko’s tweets
are more than likely to contain the buzz-words ‘sky’, ‘sun’, ‘rain’ and ‘cry’
– and nine times out of ten, they tell you to bury something. It’s like a
one-woman attempt to create a time-capsule resurgence.
It’s similar to those
websites that generate spoof Daily Mail headlines – except with Yoko’s Twitter
feed, I suspect that nothing is meant to be tongue-in-cheek.
For me, the saddest
aspect of the coupling of John with Yoko was that with it, Lennon seemed
to lose his sense of humour. Watch any of his interviews from the early /
mid-sixties and his sparkling wit shines through; turn to pretty much anything
after that and it’s as if his pilot-light has gone out. He still has
passion – but most of the joy behind it was gone. He is either earnestly fighting his
latest cause, sniping at the other ex-Beatles, or sounding strangely passive
about it all.
The last one was probably down to the drugs.
A particularly
telling example is their 1969 interview with Sir David Frost. Frosty plays a
couple of excerpts from their latest album, ‘Unfinished Music 2: Life With the
Lions’, while John and Yoko listen on – and despite John’s typical
posturing to defend its concept, it’s almost as if at that exact moment he hears the album for the first time from another person's perspective. You can feel his awkwardness at its
lack of accessibility.
That's not to say that I'm anti-Yoko. It's obvious that John loved her intensely and that they both wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. They faced an almost constant battle - either with the public's perception of their relationship, or just to stay in their chosen country of residence - and evidently became all the stronger for it.
Also, no-one should ever have had to go through what Yoko did in 1980: watching the man she loved gunned down in front of her; murdered mere metres from the place she still calls home today.
In the case of this final tweet, however, I wonder if she could find it in herself to practice a little of what she preaches with her old adversary, Sir Paul McCartney:
