Yoko does not deserve this

on

I have been busy with my real life lately and haven't had any time to play Second Life, but I do have a Second Life blog and have been real life thinking a lot while driving around in real life, and have a few things to get off my chest.


First. Yoko Ono doesn't deserve this.

The other day a friend of mine used her name as a metaphor for what seemed to be a bad situation approaching. Then, when I called him on it, he swerved around it by asking if I'd seen the clip of John and Yoko singing with Chuck Berry.

I gathered from his description it was gonna be a "let's make fun of Yoko" clip and refused to watch it. Later, realizing that my resistance to see his video is the same kind of willful ignorance that drives me nuts about the current political climate,  I watched the video he was talking about- first I posted a link to it but it bothered me that someone might make money from it so here's a link to the full performance instead- you can see a screenshot above of the person who went to the trouble of isolating it and everything to drag Yoko Ono.

Here's the full performance. I will say she take's Chuck by surprise during Memphis, Tennessee.





John and Yoko took over the Mike Douglas Show for a week in 1972 and had all kinds of guests on that the typical American housewife would not have seen otherwise. They felt the gap between young and old was becoming too wide and this would be an attempt to bridge it. The had Black Panthers, hippies, anti-war activists, and then John got to play with his hero, Chuck Berry.

There was a time I bought the whole Yoko Ono "joke" and went along with the common wisdom at the time that she broke up the Beatles. I don't understand her music and don't know much about her art, so she could be a very easy target for my jokes. But then I heard this:



I love a lot of early John Coltrane. He was a musician without peer for a while and he came out with this album, Cosmic Music, which sounds to me like cats being murdered. I have no idea what's going on in these songs, or with other artists like Ornette Coleman. 

People who know a lot more about music than I do seem to appreciate this stuff, so I just assume there's a level of knowledge required that I don't possess here. Yoko does not get that from the masses, however. She gets belittled. The life of an artist turned into a punchline.

She married one of the most successful musicians on the planet and he wanted to be in a band with her. 

Did you know that Yoko wrote most of the words to the song Imagine? Think about that the next time you sing along with them.

How on earth do people feel they have the right to make fun of her? Because she's small. Because she's not pretty. Because she's Asian. Because she's female.  I don't know why the far less talented Linda McCartney didn't take all this "she broke up the Beatles" heat, but it seems tragically unfair. And racist. And honestly, Linda and her dad had more to do with than Yoko did but really...

The Beatles broke themselves up. 

Now, here's where it gets really unfair because today one of my mouth-breathing Facebook "friends"
posted a meme, then I found others-


Funny. Haha. Not.

I am soo sick of racist white people who are threatened by change. 

The recent Dr. Seuss "controversy" was ridiculous.

The current trend of blaming Meghan Markle for the hot mess that the Royal Family has been ever since Prince Charles wanted to be Camilla's tampon (remember that one?) is the new Yoko Ono, and thank you to the pigs who actually went to the trouble of making these memes so that we can see that y'all are still the same white, male chauvinist pigs you were in April, 1970 when Paul broke up the Beatles.

FWIW- If you really believe Meghan Markle or Yoko Ono are bad people, do some research. Yoko was not responsible for the break-up of the Beatles. "The heir and the spare" was a common term for William and Harry for years, and it was only a matter of time before "the spare" retired from public duties as "the spare" has done for centuries. 

Oh. Back to Yoko. Did you know she worked with John Cage before she met John Lennon? Cage is considered by many to be one of the most important composers of the 20th Century. The more you know!