Donald Brackett
Yoko Ono: An Artful Life
Toronto, Canada: Sutherland House Books, 2022
350pp., 15.75 x 3.05 x 23.11 cm., hardcover
Edition size unknown
I read this when it was first released earlier in the year and didn't have time to review it here, and now I've forgotten most of it. However, my friend Ruth Jones, used the publication as the springboard for a great piece on Ono in the Toronto Star last May, which can be read here.
The one thing I recall is that - despite declarations that Ono's work needed to be viewed outside the lens of being a Beatle wife- the majority of the book is occupied with Ono's fourteen years with John Lennon (which amounts to just over 15% of her 89 years). To use music as a quantifiable example, she has released nine solo studio albums since his death in 1980 and only four prior.
The recent Sinead O'Connor documentary Nothing Compares (which couldn't even secure the rights to the title track) suffers from the same problem - lots of talking heads bemoaning that her career was cancelled after she ripped up the picture of the Pope on live TV (which I always thought ranked among her better achievements) but the documentary itself spends almost no time on her life since. It goes to great lengths to stress that babies are better than fame, and that fame is toxic, but there is very little about her babies in the film, and the focus is primarily the few years that she was famous.
The best way to illustrate the point that Ono had an interesting and important career before and after Lennon, is to spend more time on both.
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