Statement of Vindication

Yoko Ono Gets Her Due

"To a younger generation growing up after the baggage of Lennon's personal life had largely been laid to rest, Ono became an esthetic godmother. As the world itself got noisier, her scream seemed more and more legitimate as a response—to anything from the panic of AIDS to the specter of WMDs. "It is a scream of the human race, in a way," she says today, and it makes sense: you can think of her music as an aural accompaniment to the paintings of Munch or Bacon. It may have taken a couple of decades, but the world caught up to that sound. It's difficult to imagine the X-Ray Spex anthem "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!," the Riot Grrl movement of the '90s (featuring groups like Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill), or even contemporary dance-punk heroines like Peaches or Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs existing apart from Yoko's trailblazing, proto-feminist howl."


(Courtesy of Newsweek.)