[Jim Moonan]

x
Who would have predicted this poem would spark such response? Answer: everyone : )

Aaron N.'s response is by far the most enlightening. If that is the kind of thought this poem provokes then I'm the one who doesn't get it. It is too minimalist in its expression for me to flesh it out and feel it. I admit I am largely talking in the dark on this one, though I do fully understand that her art is attractive to some. I truly wish I did understand her work. I just can't grasp it.

Here's one reason why, I think:

In 1973 I was naive. I was excited to think I could walk into Apple Studios and get an interview with Lennon for my school newspaper about his Mind Games album. I was told by the receptionist that he was "marooned in the U.S." and she gave me an address to write to him and send him my questions. I did that, but never heard back.
I'm still naive. I've tried, with some success, to rid myself of it but it has a hold on me.
So, my hunch is that Ono's art is not for the naive...
x

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Coming back to say I'm listening to Greenfield Morning/I Pushed an Empty Baby Carriage All Over the City and reading comments about it and Ono's impact work. Here's one of the comments:

A brilliant sound picture. The title is taken from a poem Yoko had written about her miscarriage the previous year. To me, the loop of Ringo's drumming is like the wheels of the 'baby carriage' going across the cracks in the sidewalk. Yoko's singing brings to mind the ululating of mourning women in many cultures around the world. Genius.

That helps. The piece reminds me of a sparse Revolution #9 that Lennon pieced together (with the help of Ono) on the Beatles' White Album. I listen to that song as much as any the Beatles produced. I know every nuance of it. The White Album was the album that turned me on to the Beatles' work. I've never been a fan of their early work except for it's formative impact on their later work. Their later work (Revolver and later) is stellar IMO.
x

[Jan D. Hodge]

"...Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent."

--W.B. Yeats, "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop"

[Jim Moonan]

x
Jan,
That shit's good poetry.
x

[Rob Wright]

Odd her thinking of the earth way up in there in the lonely Dakota. I suspect she has a good view of the park. But thinking of her rattling around in those big rooms I do feel some sympathy. And she must feel rather like a hostage to her notoriety, and subject to the interest of all sorts of nutters. I must say that each time I've seen that full-page "War is Over" add in the Times I've had to ask myself, is this some form of myopia. I hope – truly hope it is not meant ironically, for it would be a very dark verity indeed if so.

[Andrew Szilvasy]

Yeah, my critique of the poem is not a critique of her. The poem is bad because it doesn't say anything interesting, or say what it says in an interesting way. It's been done before, and done better, countless times.

Now, the critiques of her as a person have always struck me as sexist and simplistic. The music Walter posted was, to me, good. I don't have a taste for really good music, but pop music is essentially the Rupi Kaur of music: it's designed to bring people in and entertain, but not necessarily to challenge. And on one level that's fine; there is a need and a space for it. But there's pretty much no pop music that is doing anything actually fresh; when it seems like it is it is always borrowing from others. But even that feels rare. Because pop music has to sell, it sells comfort, and so it essentially sells nostalgia. That includes the Beatles. Because I have not developed a taste for music that tries to do more, I enjoy the Beatles, but they rarely challenge me lyrically, thematically, or musically. Say what you will about Yoko Ono, but her music always does that.

[Erik Olson]

Originally Posted by Andrew Szilvasy

I don't have a taste for really good music, but pop music is essentially the Rupi Kaur of music: it's designed to bring people in and entertain, but not necessarily to challenge... Because pop music has to sell, it sells comfort, and so it essentially sells nostalgia. That includes the Beatles. Because I have not developed a taste for music that tries to do more, I enjoy the Beatles, but they rarely challenge me lyrically, thematically, or musically.

That The Beatles solely deal in comfort and nostalgia, and that they never challenge you for all intents and purposes lyrically or musically are curious claims. Many a doctor of music, according to this university, cannot lay claim to it: The Beatles are among the most successful groups ever, ‘yet underneath the fame and fortune, there are rich, complex chords and harmonies that to this day still baffle musicologists.’ This is no fluff and no Rupi Kaur of music. I should think it simply too reductive likewise to claim that the sole province of popular music is recycled nostalgia and comfort; the assertion would follow for some artists in the category, but surely not all alike. I would distinguish the Brian Wilsons and Kate Bushes from the Lady Gagas and Justin Timberlakes; the consummate from the commercial artists.

If the lot from Liverpool really trafficked solely in mere nostalgia and unchallenged comfort, how then did they change the sound, the form, the ambition, and the language of popular music? How then were they continually curious about all types of music and reinventing their own by infusing it with influences from multiple cultures? To quote some doc: ‘With Pop music still in its infancy back in the early sixties, The Beatles broke so much lyrical, musical, stylistic, and cultural ground that by the time they split up in 1970, they left little territory for successive generations of musicians to explore.’

Would you believe? I am not even that into pop or a diehard Beatles guy, truth be told. But I know enough to know that there is more to the panoply of the genre than nostalgia and comfort regurgitated, with The Beatles a case in point. Granted, the top of the pop charts nowadays is really that monolithic fare of comfort sans innovation you describe* (the charting singles were not always thus, as has been scientifically substantiated; for pop music nowadays that challenges and does more, one had better look to less commercial niches outside The Billboard Hot 100.) Much more could be said on this head. I could not forbear saying something though.

* The studies concur with what is basically intuitive: that the pop acts that make the most money and chart the best are least complex and most repetitive, unless, of course, they fit into the Mumford & Sons/Lumineers pop-folk mold.