Yoko Ono: Half A Century of Beatles Fans And Their Orientalism

My readers will know that no band on this planet annoys me more than the Beatles, an outrageously overrated band with decent tunes that function best as good children’s music. A band whose music and boring story is forced on us in an endless reproduction-loop through radio stations and music magazines which put the four mushroom-heads on their cover to celebrate Sgt. Pepper or the White Album for the billionth time, or to report on the band visiting a fucking Maharishi in India, trying to be as arty and eccentric as gormless people like Paul McCartney can be.

In addition, Beatles fans are the most cultish and musically boring ones that the world has ever seen, and are doing all kinds of evil things. They will try to convince you that it was this “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” brass band that invented Psychedelic Music (!) and even Heavy Metal (!!). In the finest brainless capitalist manner, they will buy every overpriced old fart by the Fab Four as long as the fart is dressed in new clothes, in the hope to hear a new sound that cannot be heard on their other 20 copies of the White Album. With this capitalist operation style comes the reproduction of wealth and success sociologically described as the Matthew effect: „For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. “ In other words: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, making the Beatles still the most-selling and most successful band of the Western world over 50 years after they broke up. It’s as if nothing new has happened in half a century.

As for the women in the Beatles cosmos, the roles are clearly assigned. John Lennon’s partner Yoko Ono is the bad one. She is blamed to have alienated Lennon from the band and, in the eyes of most fans, is to blame for the 1970 Beatles break up. Her opposite is Linda McCartney, née Eastman. The “sheltered daughter of a rich family” (Paul McCartney) stands for the maternal and good. Today we will focus on this shameful stain shared by millions of Beatles fans: the sexist and racist ways this woman was treated by band & fans for over 50 years now. And since this band’s cultish followers form such a vast crowd to this day, some generalizations about the state of Western men should be allowed.

The at times very public way John Lennon and Yoko Ono used to lead their relationship, overly proclaiming and analyzing it in mutual interviews, is definitely not my cup of tea, although I have to grant the two love birds that money and degenerate publicity stunts for the sake of fame alone were not their driving force. It is also not hard to figure out that it was Beatles-Überstar Lennon who was the bigmouth with the largest share of speech in these interviews. In hist last major interview with David Sheff for Playboy, one can witness in book-length how Lennon finds it difficult to let Yoko get a paragraph in. But it was her who got thrown into the maelstrom of a never-ending modern witchhunt.

Racist and sexist insults and nasty commentaries on Ono’s looks were the mainstream order of the day. She was called, “Jap,” “Chink” and “Yellow” in public. Lennon had to defend her from the attacks, sometimes physically. „You and your Jap tart think you’re hot shit“ is what Mc Cartney wrote on a postcard to the couple in 1968- which for me would have been enough of a reason to leave the band for good. Linda Mc Cartney refused until the very end to write Yoko Ono’s name on letters and invitations she sent to Lennon. As for the often claimed tensions Ono caused in the Beatles’ recording studio, George Harrison publicly complained that Ono was guilty of eating one of his biscuits during a recording session- apparently the most horrible crime a grown-up man can experience- and then he not-so-gently called her out: „THAT BITCH! She’s just taken one of my biscuits!“.
I wish this all was a joke, but it’s not.

Press stories Yoko usually read like this: “Vampire-woman-sucks-life-out-of-man-who-enjoys-every-minute-of-his-destruction.” (Geoffrey Stokes / Village Voice). While Linda McCartney was hailed as an angel who saved the bore that is Paul when he was low and depressed, the fact that Yoko Ono did the same and more for the most difficult and untamable member of the Beatles was glossed over. And after all, Lennon’s ‘sucked-out’ and ‘destructed’ life comprised raising the couples’ mutual son, cooking good, organic food, and baking bread for the family. Lennon got mocked a lot for that, but time has proven him to be a pioneer when since the last decade more and more young men started following in his footsteps. Conversely, Yoko did run Lennon’s businesses and managed and increased Lennon’s multi-million-dollar fortune without looting or ruining it unlike other famous widows like Priscilla Presley or Courtney Love. Yoko proved to be a prodigious investor in art and real estate and built up an own mini empire of properties and land. Today, she has reported assets of over $1 billion.

Other headlines attacked Ono’s music and are textbook examples for the misunderstood artist ahead of her time, faced with the masses’ ignorance: “Yoko Ono couldn’t carry a tune in a briefcase.“ Good old Lester Bangs couldn’t have been any wronger. He obviously never heard of bangers like “Woman Power” and also somewhat lacked the capacity and understanding for avantgarde. In sharp contrast to the Beatles’ overexposed music, Yoko Ono albums such as Approximately Infinite Universe (1973) sound fresh and interesting to this day, and like VU have a cool, cosmopolitan vibe that makes them timeless New York City records.

Yoko Ono must have loved John Lennon insanely, for that she was willing to take all the shit coming from Beatles members & fans and the Western music press. What does it say about the state of a society and its people, when large portions of it hated and bullied a Japanese woman whose crime was to be with the frontman of their most beloved and successful white pop-band? It is the most prominent example of racism / orientalism in the last half-century, all spiced with a good portion of sexism. The comparison between the different ways in which people treated Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney exposes this further.

On the one side we have a highly interesting and financially independent woman born into a Tokyo banking family, a woman that was already an accomplished avantgarde performance artist, poet, and musician long before she met John Lennon (who was the one that tracked her down since he was a fan of her work and Fluxus). Yoko was a well-known fixture on the art scenes in New York and London, and is to this day. And while John’s life enhanced intellectually and spiritually after meeting Yoko since she opened doors for him that were closed in the narrow world of the Beatles, Yoko was catapulted from Fluxus to Suburbia. She must have felt like living on the surreal alien planet KKK where everything is turned upside down. A planet where all achievements of persons of color and other outsiders get marginalized or demonized, while at the same time the most mediocre output or pastiche can get elevated to the status of superior art when a white person is its creator. It is a narrative that inevitably must lead to the downfall of all art in the long run, coming with a long period of descent which feels like torture for every true artist like Yoko, but also for enthusiastic art consumers like you and me.

On the other side we have Linda McCartney- ever been to an international art fair where people talk about her? I haven’t either. But you can be sure that all the artists and curators there know Yoko and respect her art and will very likely think about Grapefruit instead of the Beatles when hearing her name. It is ridiculous how Beatles fans, both on the consuming and writing side of things, have tried to push Linda McCartney and her uninteresting photographs of her family and other celebrities as sublime art, and are doing so to this day. Mainstream music and art publishers comply to this, because they know that the Beatles sell and boomers will buy everything connected to them.

What about the looks of both women? It’s hard to think of a public person whose looks have been mocked more than Yoko’s, an ongoing mobbing with a mind-blowing cruelty and consistency. Yoko’s features didn’t conform to the Western beauty standards, and while deviations from these standards are often been perceived as ‘interesting’, ‘sophisticated’ and ‘individualistic’ when it comes to European faces (f.e. Charlotte Gainsbourg), they were summed up as purely ‘ugly’ in the case of Japanese Yoko- as if this woman resembled the Elephant Man. Maybe it is my Asian heritage, but I think Yoko is an attractive woman with an austere beauty that is not just limited to superficial looks, but also a summary of her vision, talent, expressionism, and free attitude. These are aesthetic connotations that are rare in our societies, where supra-ordinate perceptions of beauty are usually tied to heritage and wealth. We can consider most ugly Royal offsprings as an example here, or the generous credit of beauty that a father and name like Serge Gainsbourg gives one. And maybe it is my Asian heritage again that when looking at Linda McCartney, I see no intruiging beauty, but a boring and daft display of freckled dreaminess.

Naturally, Linda was the perfect match for gormless Paul. But not just in terms of looks and attitude, but in how things have to be. Let’s not kid ourselves. The Beatles fans’ main objection on Yoko was that one of their golden boys had divorced a ‘pure’ white woman and settled with a Japanese ‘dragon’ instead. We got hints of that same objection when Mick Jagger married the Nicaraguan Bianca Jagger, Lady Di hit it off and got impregnated by Muslim Dodi Al Fayed, or Johnny Cash’s wife got bullied and threatened for being black because she had a rather dark complexion for a white woman… In the Western discourse represented by the Beatles fans, Yoko was viewed as ugly, savage, inferior, and evil; an inscrutable threat overall, a creature who must have surely used mysterious Eastern witchcraft and magical pussycraft in order to bind the prince to herself. Yoko answered this dryly when she titled her 2007 album: Yes, I’m A Witch.

While Orientalism is defined as one of white supremacy’s three pillars, the logic behind it is little understood or discussed. It describes racist Western narratives on the Asian and Arab world, fictional depictions that mark certain nations and their people as inferior and a constant threat to the well-being of empire. As always with racism, the backlash is an inevitable boomerang that hits the society of its origin most. The vast Beatles hemisphere missed a historic opportunity by dismissing Yoko Ono and her views and promoting the McCartney’s ‘adorable’ animal rights activism and enterprising vegetarianism instead. Meanwhile, Yoko’s pet cause is hunger, and that humans have anything to eat at all. She knew what she was talking about: “I remember being hungry and I know it’s so difficult to just be hungry.” Yoko had lived through wartime deprivations and her family faced starvation after fleeing Tokyo during Allied bombing raids in WW2.

As a consequence, her matter is about saving the entire planet by treating it carefully and advocating for the global peace movement. She makes a fantastic example of a strong yet sensitive and sensual woman, who is a free-spirited artist and successful businesswoman. In the aforementioned Playboy Interview from 1980, one learns that her feminism was profound and an expression of true sisterhood. She didn’t focus on sexual liberation and rejected capitalist alliances predominant in the movement nowadays. She criticized the capitalist system’s abandoning of families and fostering of singles and gays, only because they serve the capitalist work-buy slave system better. Gay-icon Yoko dared to address that the system produces more “5^th Avenue prostitutes” with the new, liberated working women in suits. Hers wasn’t an emotional feminism, but much more complex.

And she didn’t only talk about women. When listening to “I Want My Love To Rest Tonight“, one can easily imagine what Yoko meant to John and was able to give him. Rarely, if ever, did a woman pen such an empathic song about men and their burden, naming the exorbitant expectations they too are faced with. This holistic view and perspective on things makes Yoko a rare gem in our society. Long live Queen Yoko, or: Mother.

by Saliha Enzenauer

…Sisters, don’t blame our men too much,
We know they’re doing their best.
We know their fear and loneliness,
They can do no more, no less.
They were told by us to get ahead,
Be gentle and tender, yet hard and strong.
Nothing short of a living god,
Nothing short of James Bond.

If we all knew that no one’s to be ashamed,
But that the society is to be blamed.
We could then come together again
And direct our energies towards changing the world...