‘Give Peace’ a dance

All Yoko Ono is saying, is remix your idea of a revolution

 

Ono

 

 Yoko Ono laughs when we suggest that we need “Give Peace a Chance” more now than when it was originally recorded in 1969.

“Exactly,” she replies, the shortest answer she’ll give during our conversation, and leaves it at that. Perhaps this is reason enough for the release of “Give Peace a Chance (The Remixes),” a digital collection of eight remixes of the Plastic Ono Band protest anthem with Ono’s newly recorded spoken-word vocals. Though the commingling of protest anthem and block rockin’ beat may seem incongruous to some, for Ono it’s a completely natural method to get the message to the masses. “If you want to get through to somebody, you go to their stomach with your soup,” she says. “[The remixes] are like soup. People give in to their bodies; their bodies will know what’s

important.”
Ono, 75, has led an unprecedented lifelong career as a visual, conceptual and musical artist of the avant-garde, a fact overshadowed by her marriage to John Lennon. In the late ’60s, Ono and Lennon spearheaded a number of peace rallies and Bed-Ins, the second of which, in 1969 in Montreal, produced the original recording of “Give Peace a Chance.”

Ono herself seems surprised by the song’s lasting impact, not to mention the remix project’s recent topping of Billboard’s Hot Dance Club Play charts.

“We just did whatever we could and never looked back,” she says of her musical and activist collaborations with Lennon. “At the time, the Bed-In was the most important thing we were doing.”

All of Ono’s pursuits, from music to activism to art, are manifestations of this sort of in-the-moment sensibility.
When talk turns to Ono’s art, she describes how each piece divines a path to pragmatism, or will the means of reality to an idealistic end: how “Sky TV,” a television that displays a real-time image of the sky via a camera installed on the roof, was a “practical thing,” prompted by her apartment’s blasé view of the building next door; how “Telephone Piece,” a phone placed in a gallery that Ono would occasionally call and speak to whomever picked up the receiver, was conceived “so that people could communicate directly, rather than just [passively] walk through.” The remixes of “Give Peace a Chance” are no different — they plant the ideas of social change in an otherwise innocuous social situation.

“It’s part of my life,” Ono says of her art, and, inescapably, a part of those whose lives intersect with it.