With the announcement of the four Beatle biopics due in 2027 from director Sam Mendes, one thing has been plaguing my mind: the villainization of Yoko Ono.
For as long as Yoko has been in the Beatles picture, roughly sixty years now, she has faced some of the worst racism and misogyny that can be hurled at anyone. Never once has she caught a break, being ridiculed by magazines, fans, fellow creatives over nearly everything she’s done. She hasn’t known a life in over half a century where she has been able to do much of anything without it being dissected and ridiculed under a microscope. But is it deserved? The short, and only answer there has ever been is: NO.
It’s so easy for racism and misogyny to get swept under the rug in rock music, as it's a predominantly white genre even if its strongest roots are from black music and 95% of its biggest stars have become just that from the writing about or associations with women. Women would be ridiculed from all sides of the spectrum, be told they were ruining the music even if they weren’t affecting anything or be attacked for “stealing” the men away. The second was particularly prevalent when it came to The Beatles and their respective girlfriends. Cynthia Lennon was a secret from the world in order to not ruin the image of four eligible bachelors, Maureen Starkey and Pattie Boyd became painted into the background, and Jane Asher could never really speak about her own career without being asked about her boyfriend. The biggest pushback was consistently leveled toward the two longest Beatle girls: Linda Eastman and Yoko Ono. Linda was dragged for nearly everything about herself: her age, her status as a single mom, her musical ability, all for marrying Paul McCartney, the last unmarried Beatle. She was a famous rock and roll photographer before meeting Paul, the first female photographer to have her photo grace the cover of Rolling Stone magazine,
the last thing she needed was publicity from getting with a Beatle. She was arguably better off within her career before she met Paul, the same of which could be argued for Yoko.
Portraits taken by Linda McCartney during the mid to late 60s, before her first meeting and eventual marriage to Paul in 1969 [L to R: Mick Jagger in 1966, Aretha Franklin in 1968, and Jimi Hendrix in 1967]
Before meeting John Lennon, Yoko was a pioneer in the art world. The year the Beatles came to America was the year Yoko became a spearhead in the world of performance and conceptual art. Her art has a focus on cultural issues like identity, class, gender, and was some of the first of it’s kind. She has met John at an exhibit, as he was viewing one of her pieces that featured a magnifying glass that when looked through showed a small inscription of the word ‘yes’. While she was an important figure in performance art, she also experimented with film and music. Her work wasn’t to become popular, but instead to push boundaries of what these mediums could be used for. Her performance art first became big in her native Japan, but soon took her and her ideas all over the world. Her art was respected by many of the most famous artists in modern history, she was even one of the few speakers at Andy Warhol’s 1987 funeral due to his admiration and friendship with her. John called her “the world’s most famous unknown artist”, expanding with: “everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does.”
Yoko at various of her art exhibits thorough the 1960s.
Yoko’s art is often viewed through a very western, normative lens. It’s often compared as opposed to being viewed as a stand alone piece. Her work was genre bending, expansive, and never catered to making those who heard it feel comforted. It’s not for everyone, but it’s not intended for everyone. And you’d be dammed to listen through a complete body of her work and not find a great song. I think her 1973 solo album is a great example of this, as anyone who is quick to write off her musical ability as none has clearly never listened to Death of Samantha. I won’t pretend I love all her work either, but that’s the nature of music and art: that you don’t like or connect to all of it. Yoko has consistently been involved with and released some of the most thought provoking music of her time and has never gotten her flowers from it because people are so quick to judge what they see as different as opposed to appreciate a different kind of art. There’s something to be commended about Yoko and how she has never changed her art because of the very public and loud adversity it has received. I think it's safe to say that if Yoko was never involved in the Beatle circle, she would be upheld as a master of her crafts for being as experimental and multitalented as she is, but she's lived in the shadow of her name much too long.
Yoko was also a peace advocate long before John was, as it was that even introduced that concept to him. When they were on the brink of a divorce in the 1970s, it was her to offer him the ability to move away and have his affair, his freedom, his lost weekend. It’s not often counted to many how much she truly put up with and allowed to happen to remain with John. There can be no sense she ever just loved him for popularity or money, as everything that’s happened to her since becoming linked with him has been some of the worst abuse ever faced by anyone in the public eye. The narrative she broke up The Beatles has haunted nearly every piece of media that’s ever attempted to tell their story, despite the lack of truth behind it. Yoko Ono did not break up The Beatles. The Beatles, by 1968, were a very flawed, toxic group towards and around each other that held so many issues both personally and in a working aspect with each other that it’s a wonder they didn’t break under it immediately. Yoko walked right into the worst era of the band’s interpersonal relationships, and as she was the most noticeable change to the band public persona, she was labeled as the sole reason they buckled. Do I think she helped any of the issues in the band? No. Do I think her presence within the bands circle is their cause of fracture? No, because that’s crazy. Yoko had disadvantages to being in the public eye as much as she was early on: she had the misfortune of being a woman involved with a Beatle, she was non-white, non-European, and a divorcee by the time her and John got together, and she was an artist whose work did not fit into a western-centric lens. Her treatment has largely nothing to do with anything about her as a person, more so all these things about her that are rooted in racist and misogynist ideas that should’ve died long ago.
I won’t say there aren’t valid criticisms of Yoko. She, very similar to how John was, is a deeply flawed person but she is just that: a person. John is still upheld as one of the greatest artists of his generation with a disregard for more unfavorable aspects of his past because of the simple facts of he died and young and was a white man with the world at his feet since 20. Yoko doesn’t get to be like John, who had his past scrubbed clean, and I fear that even if roles were reversed Yoko would still have the hurtful labels projected on to her. Cynthia Lennon wrote in her autobiography that if she had known what knowing John would do to her, she would’ve turned the other way and never looked back. Yoko has worn the pain of knowing John since the moment she first had, and never traded an easier life to one not connected to him. Her legacy has moved to protecting his, acting as an ambassador for his entire life for the past 40 of hers. No one deserves an apology more than her, and she’s never asked for one. When the documentary Get Back was released it started changing a lot of tides in how the public viewed her connection to the band. The stories that had been spread were dispelled as the public watched eight hours of Yoko doing nothing more than what any of the other wives and girlfriends were doing, but it took almost 50 years for people to see the truth behind the stories around her. That’s 50 years of horrible names and harmful stories, remarks so horrible they would’ve made a lesser person break.
Yoko Ono is one of the most important women to ever contribute to art. From performance to music to museums to showcases about the horrors of gun violence, she has proved herself time and time again as someone tirelessly important to the modern landscape of what we view as good art. She was a pioneer and visionary for countless avenues and genres of the art she holds so dear. Her legacy has been, in many ways, mutilated due to the casual racism that is still permitted to exist when deemed inoffensive in a public setting. People still fear to bring up her name or a positive note about her work in fear of odd looks and distant whispers of backhanded remarks. I deeply hope that these films don’t take a cheap way out of pining even some of The Beatles own self imposed drama on a woman that has done too much to be pushed once more into a space of undeserved and unnecessary criticism.
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