When Yoko Ono met John Lennon at a preview of her exhibition at London’s Indica Gallery in November 1966, she was already an established force in the avant-garde art world. She was the first woman admitted to the philosophy program at Gakushūin University in Tokyo and had studied at Sarah Lawrence College. Known as the “High Priestess of the Happening,” she was a pioneer in performance art, drawing from sources ranging from Zen Buddhism to Dada. She had performed at Carnegie Hall, created groundbreaking conceptual works, and was a central figure in the Fluxus movement. John, still married to Cynthia Lennon, pursued her, captivated by her work. Yet within a few years of their marriage in 1969, Ono would become one of the most hated women in the world—not for anything she had done, but for who she was and whom she loved.
Before Lennon: An Artist in Her Own Right
Ono was born into a wealthy family in Japan on February 18, 1933, and grew up mostly in Tokyo where she attended an exclusive school and received classical training in piano and voice. She lived through World War II’s bombing of Tokyo, an experience that profoundly shaped her worldview and her later commitment to peace activism. After moving to New York in 1952 to join her family, she became deeply involved in the city’s downtown art scene.
Her artistic work in the early 1960s was revolutionary. She created instruction pieces—conceptual artworks that existed primarily as ideas rather than physical objects. She staged daring performance pieces like “Cut Piece” in 1964, where audience members were invited to cut away her clothing until she sat naked on stage, a powerful commentary on vulnerability, objectification, and the disposal of materialism. Her work was considered too radical by many and was not well received initially, but she gained recognition after working with jazz musician Anthony Cox, who became her second husband, after Lennon’s death, and helped coordinate her interactive conceptual events.
By the time she met John, Ono had already made significant contributions to conceptual art and performance. She was, in every sense, his artistic equal—and in many ways, ahead of her time.
The Marriage and the Maelstrom of Racism
When Ono married Lennon in March 1969, she stepped into a firestorm of hatred that mixed misogyny, xenophobia, and outright racism in toxic proportions. The attacks were relentless and often explicitly racial. Fans would surround Beatles company headquarters in London, calling Ono racist slurs and insisting she should return to her own country. A 1970 Esquire magazine article mocked her Japanese accent.
The violence wasn’t just verbal. Ono suffered three miscarriages during a time when she was being physically attacked by fans in England. While pregnant, many people wrote to her saying they wished she and her baby would die. The abuse was so severe that after Lennon’s death, she received death threats through the mail, including a bullet-ridden copy of their album Double Fantasy with a note saying the sender was in New York to kill her, requiring round-the-clock security for herself and her son Sean.
The racist dimension of the attacks cannot be overstated. Ono was regularly labeled a “dragon lady,” a racist trope suggesting Asian women are conniving beings who use seduction in manipulative, dangerous ways. Attacks on Ono’s appearance, with media repeatedly describing her as “ugly,” had roots in racism—she didn’t fit European standards of beauty with her Japanese features and was compared unfavorably to the white partners of the other Beatles.
The contrast with Linda McCartney is instructive. Both women were older than their Beatle husbands, both had children from previous marriages, both were blamed for the Beatles’ breakup, and both faced attacks on their musical talent. But only Ono faced the additional burden of racism.
Ono as Musical Artist: Decades Ahead of Her Time
What’s often forgotten in the mythology of “the woman who broke up the Beatles” is that Yoko Ono was a genuinely innovative musician whose work prefigured punk, no-wave, post-punk, and riot grrrl by years—even decades.
Her debut solo album, released in December 1970 alongside Lennon’s own Plastic Ono Band album, was initially met with near-universal contempt. The album was poorly received upon release, with the exception of supportive reviews by Billboard and Lester Bangs of Rolling Stone. Her vocals mixed hetai, a Japanese vocal technique from Kabuki theater, with rock vocal styles and raw aggression influenced by the primal therapy she and Lennon were undertaking. Critics and audiences didn’t know what to make of her ululating screams, her experimental improvisations, her refusal to conform to conventional song structures.
The album was seen as an extreme affront against propriety and possibly civilization, something so revolutionary that even free-thinking radicals couldn’t embrace it because they weren’t as free as they pretended to be.
But time has vindicated Ono’s vision. The album has been credited with launching a hundred or more female alternative rockers, from Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson of the B-52s to L7 and Courtney Love of Hole. NPR ranked it at number 136 on their 2017 list of “The 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women,” deeming it “jarring, experimental and stunning” and citing its “fearless curiosity” as influencing experimental rock, experimental electronic music, post-punk, and sound art.
Songs like “Why,” “Touch Me,” and “Open Your Box” wired the post-punk and no-wave engines more than half a decade early, with no choruses, searing outsider-style guitar, vein-popping vocal performances and hypnotic grooves that presaged bands like the Slits, Public Image Limited, Gang of Four, the Raincoats, and the B-52s.
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Yoko: The Biography
Author: David Sheff
An intimate and revelatory biography of Yoko Ono from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Boy.
John Lennon once described Yoko Ono as the world’s most famous unknown artist. “Everybody knows her name, but no one knows what she does.” She has only been important to history insofar as she impacted Lennon. Throughout her life, Yoko has been a caricature, curiosity, and, often, a villain—an inscrutable seductress, manipulating con artist, and caterwauling fraud. The Lennon/Beatles saga is one of the greatest stories ever told, but Yoko’s part has been missing—hidden in the Beatles’ formidable shadow, further obscured by flagrant misogyny and racism. This definitive biography of Yoko Ono’s life will change that. In this book, Yoko Ono takes centerstage.
The Lennon Collaborations: A Musical Dialogue
John and Yoko’s musical partnership was genuine and deep, though critics and fans often refused to acknowledge it. Their collaborative work ranged from experimental noise albums like “Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins” (1968) to their 1980 comeback, “Double Fantasy.”
“Double Fantasy,” released just three weeks before Lennon’s murder, was initially savaged by critics. Kit Rachlis of the Boston Phoenix admitted to being “annoyed” by Lennon and Ono’s assumption “that lots of people care deeply” about them, while Charles Shaar Murray wrote that their domestic bliss “sounds like a great life but unfortunately it makes a lousy record”. Three weeks after the album’s release, Lennon was murdered and several negative reviews by prominent critics were withheld from publication.
Following Lennon’s death, “Double Fantasy” became a massive commercial success and won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. But the reassessment came too late for John to see it.
After Lennon: Preserving a Legacy While Building Her Own
Lennon was murdered on December 8, 1980, shot in front of their apartment building, the Dakota, with Ono at his side. In the years that followed, Ono worked tirelessly to preserve his legacy while continuing her own artistic career. She funded the Strawberry Fields memorial in Central Park, the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland, and the John Lennon Museum in Japan. In 2017, she was finally credited as a co-writer on “Imagine,” Lennon’s iconic 1971 single that essentially adapted her instructional art pieces into song form.
Ono never stopped creating. She continued recording albums, mounting art exhibitions, and engaging in activism. She has had twelve number one singles on the US Dance charts, and in 2016 was named the 11th most successful dance club artist of all time by Billboard magazine.
The Enduring Question of Race and Gender
The treatment of Yoko Ono represents one of popular culture’s most disturbing case studies in how an accomplished Asian woman was scapegoated for the dissolution of a beloved white male institution. Sexism, racism and xenophobia all contributed to Ono’s vilification, creating a toxic mythology that persisted for decades and, in some circles, continues today.
Ono herself lamented how the other Beatles added fuel to the fire by refusing to speak up for her despite knowing the truth, noting that whenever she was asked about the Beatles, she praised them, but none of them made any positive comments about her in the press—”That’s male chauvinism,” she told Remind Magazine.
What makes Ono’s story particularly poignant is the gap between who she actually was—a pioneering artist, an innovative musician, a peace activist—and who the public believed her to be: a manipulative outsider who destroyed the world’s most beloved band.
In recent years, there has been a slow reckoning with how Ono was treated. Younger generations, particularly women in music, have embraced her as a foremother. Her experimental vocal techniques, her fearlessness, her refusal to compromise her artistic vision—all of these are now recognized as groundbreaking rather than aberrant.
Yoko Ono’s story is ultimately one of survival and vindication. She survived physical attacks, death threats, decades of hatred, and the murder of her husband. She survived having her artistic accomplishments erased and her voice dismissed. And she survived to see a new generation finally understand what she was doing all along: creating fearless, uncompromising art that challenged the very foundations of what music and performance could be.
She was decades ahead of her time. The world is only now catching up.
