Ep. 24: Voice of Yoko (Amy Skjerseth on Yoko Ono)

Today, Phantom Power's Amy Skjerseth brings us the story of perhaps the most famous vocal performance artist and avant-garde musician whose actual work probably doesn’t get the attention it deserves: Yoko Ono. Collaborator with the Fluxus group in the early 60s, creator of performances such as Cut Piece and her Bed In with John Lennon in the late 1960s, director of experimental films such as 1970’s Fly, and recording artist of experimental pop albums such as that Fly’s soundtrack... Despite this large body of work, her most famous role was that of wife to that guy in that band—a performance that made her the target of misogynous and racist criticism that persists to this day.

As Amy points out, much of this criticism centered on the sound of Yoko Ono’s voice. Of course, as we’ve explored on this show before, listening to the other with a racist or sexist ear is nothing new. But in Ono’s case, this prejudicial listening is compounded by the fact that, years before the emergence of punk rock, she was pushing the boundaries of acceptable vocal expression for anyone, let alone a woman—moaning, wailing, chortling, and screaming.

The vast majority of listeners immediately dismissed these sounds as a punchline. On today’s show, we’re going to actually listen. What is the purpose and meaning and effect of Ono’s vocal artistry? We’re exploring it in her recorded work, in her feminist and pacifist political agenda, and most of all, in her film Fly, in which she uses her voice to destroy boundaries between sound and touch, human and animal, self and other.

This episode includes elements from an audio essay Amy published at [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies.

Music by Yoko Ono, John Lennon, John Cage, Tanya Tagaq, and Graeme Gibson, as well as “Crickets, Birds, Summer Ambient” by Nikodemus Christian. You can hear most of the music again on this Phantom Power Spotify Playlist.

You can hear Yoko Ono's Twitter response to Trump (November 11, 2016) here.  

Transcript
 [00:00:00]
[Phone Ringing]
Voice of Yoko Ono: Hello?
Ethereal Voice: This is Phantom Power.
Voice of Yoko Ono: This is Yoko.
[Phone Hangs Up]
[00:00:22]
[Between the Takes by Yoko Ono Plays]
Mack Hagood: Hey everyone. It’s Phantom Power. Your monthly-ish deep dive into sound and music in the arts and humanities. I’m your host Mack Hagood.
Today, I am fully and completely psyched to bring you a story from a new member to the Phantom Power production team, Amy Skjerseth.
Amy’s a film scholar, a classical musician, a co-organizer of the Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies. She’s also a PhD candidate in film and media at the University of Chicago, wrapping up a dissertation on pop music in film and media.
And today, Amy brings us the story of perhaps the most famous vocal performance artist and avant garde musician around, but at the same time, someone whose actual work probably doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
I’m talking of course about Yoko Ono.
Collaborator with the Fluxus group in the early sixties. Creator of performances such as Cut Piece and her bed in with John Lennon in the late sixties.
Director of experimental films, such as 1970s Fly, and recording artist of experimental pop albums, such as that film’s soundtrack.
Yet, despite all of this work, her most famous role was that of wife to that guy in that band. A performance that has made her the target of misogynist and racist criticism that persists to this day.
As Amy points out much of this criticism centered on the sound of Yoko Ono’s voice. Of course, as we’ve explored on this show before, listening to the other with a racist or sexist ear is nothing new.
But in Ono’s case, this prejudicial listening is compounded by the fact that years before the emergence of punk rock, she was pushing the boundaries of acceptable vocal expression for anyone, let alone a woman.
Moaning. Wailing. Chortling and screaming.

Today, Phantom Power‘s Amy Skjerseth brings us the story of perhaps the most famous vocal performance artist and avant-garde musician whose actual work probably doesn’t get the attention it deserves: Yoko Ono. Collaborator with the Fluxus group in the early 60s, creator of performances such as Cut Piece and her Bed In with John Lennon in the late 1960s, director of experimental films such as 1970’s Fly, and recording artist of experimental pop albums such as that Fly’s soundtrack… Despite this large body of work, her most famous role was that of wife to that guy in that band—a performance that made her the target of misogynous and racist criticism that persists to this day.

As Amy points out, much of this criticism centered on the sound of Yoko Ono’s voice. Of course, as we’ve explored on this show before, listening to the other with a racist or sexist ear is nothing new. But in Ono’s case, this prejudicial listening is compounded by the fact that, years before the emergence of punk rock, she was pushing the boundaries of acceptable vocal expression for anyone, let alone a woman—moaning, wailing, chortling, and screaming.

The vast majority of listeners immediately dismissed these sounds as a punchline. On today’s show, we’re going to actually listen. What is the purpose and meaning and effect of Ono’s vocal artistry? We’re exploring it in her recorded work, in her feminist and pacifist political agenda, and most of all, in her film Fly, in which she uses her voice to destroy boundaries between sound and touch, human and animal, self and other.

This episode includes elements from an audio essay Amy published at [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies.

Music by Yoko Ono, John Lennon, John Cage, Tanya Tagaq, and Graeme Gibson, as well as “Crickets, Birds, Summer Ambient” by Nikodemus Christian. You can hear most of the music again on this Phantom Power Spotify Playlist.

You can hear Yoko Ono’s Twitter response to Trump (November 11, 2016) here.  

Transcript

 [00:00:00]

[Phone Ringing]

Voice of Yoko Ono: Hello?

Ethereal Voice: This is Phantom Power.

Voice of Yoko Ono: This is Yoko.

[Phone Hangs Up]

[00:00:22]

[Between the Takes by Yoko Ono Plays]

Mack Hagood: Hey everyone. It’s Phantom Power. Your monthly-ish deep dive into sound and music in the arts and humanities. I’m your host Mack Hagood.

Today, I am fully and completely psyched to bring you a story from a new member to the Phantom Power production team, Amy Skjerseth.

Amy’s a film scholar, a classical musician, a co-organizer of the Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies. She’s also a PhD candidate in film and media at the University of Chicago, wrapping up a dissertation on pop music in film and media.

And today, Amy brings us the story of perhaps the most famous vocal performance artist and avant garde musician around, but at the same time, someone whose actual work probably doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

I’m talking of course about Yoko Ono.

Collaborator with the Fluxus group in the early sixties. Creator of performances such as Cut Piece and her bed in with John Lennon in the late sixties.

Director of experimental films, such as 1970s Fly, and recording artist of experimental pop albums, such as that film’s soundtrack.

Yet, despite all of this work, her most famous role was that of wife to that guy in that band. A performance that has made her the target of misogynist and racist criticism that persists to this day.

As Amy points out much of this criticism centered on the sound of Yoko Ono’s voice. Of course, as we’ve explored on this show before, listening to the other with a racist or sexist ear is nothing new.

But in Ono’s case, this prejudicial listening is compounded by the fact that years before the emergence of punk rock, she was pushing the boundaries of acceptable vocal expression for anyone, let alone a woman.

Moaning. Wailing. Chortling and screaming. The vast majority of listeners immediately dismissed these sounds as a punchline.

On today’s show, we’re going to actually listen.  

What is the purpose and meaning and effect of Ono’s vocal artistry?

We’re exploring it in her recorded work, in her political agenda, and most of all in her film Fly, in which she uses her voice to destroy boundaries between sound and touch. Human and animal. Self and other.

Here is The Enduring Voice of Yoko Ono by Amy Skjerseth.

[3:11]

[Transitional Music]

Amy Skjerseth: Three days after Donald Trump was elected as the 45th U.S. President, Yoko Ono posted 19 seconds of screams to her Instagram and Twitter accounts. Her caption read:

“Dear friends. I would like to share this message with you as my response to @realDonaldTrump. Love, Yoko.”

[Ono’s screams]

Amy: At the end of the clip, you can hear someone laugh and say, “That’s an awesome quote.”

Several commenters took the screams to heart saying they identified with her rage and that it gave them hope. But others piped up that she broke up the Beatles and they hurled racist comments at her like Beatles fans did in the 1960s.

Back then she was portrayed as a villain and the archetype of the significant other who’s accused of ruining the band.

And on social media today, she is still demonized for being a noisy woman who doesn’t belong in Western music.

[Between the Takes by Yoko Ono plays]

Ono’s critics have yet to realize the political value of her screams. 

The screams addressed at Trump weren’t just a reaction against the election, but part of a resistance piece on a road back in 1961.

She called it Voice Piece for Soprano, which had three instructions: scream, one against the wind, two against the wall, three against the sky.

The piece is an open framework for many forms of resistance and Ono has performed it at both Carnegie Hall and the Museum of Modern Art.

At the 2010 MoMA exhibit a microphone was set up for visitors to perform their own interpretations of Ono’s three-part screams. Observers also participated by mashing up Ono’s own performance at the MoMA with Katy Perry song, Firework.

[Firework x Ono mashup]

From parodies to politics, Ono’s voice piece has protested what is allowed on museum floors and classical music stages, and nearly 60 years later, the political stage.

What’s so powerful about Ono’s piece is its open-ended framework, which allows listeners to identify screams with a large pallet of emotions.

From horror to despair to surprise.

Ono provided a way for people too shocked to voice their thoughts after the election, to imagine themselves screaming various emotions alongside her.

Despite her immense body of work and after so many years, she has now been recognized as an artist who has deeply contributed to social change.

[Mind Holes by Yoko Ono plays]

What if we take a step back from the persona given to her by Beatles fans and really listen to what her voice is saying.

To really understand what her words and screams mean, we need to go back in time to the origins of her work in World War II Japan and when she matured as an artist in a 1950s American avant-garde scene dominated by white men.

In her performance art, and in the films, she made with John Lennon, she has opened up new avenues for feminist thought and action.

The generosity and profound openness of Ono’s work has forwarded the causes of feminism, racial justice, and peace and still today gives us a chance to scream alongside her.

[Mind Holes by Yoko Ono fades]

[7:37]

Ono was born in Tokyo in 1933. 

As a child, she and her family hid from the Tokyo bombings of WWII.

[Japanese Radio message]

She was often hungry and exhausted during the war. So, to comfort herself, she would lie down and look at the sky.

She took solace in scenes from nature because, while they change constantly, they were also always a constant presence in her life. The war’s sudden changes inspired her to think about how her artwork could address life’s many uncertainties.

[Japanese Radio message]

She wanted to encourage people to view change as a positive force, by allowing them to actively participate in her artwork.

She expressed how this worked in a 2012 interview with New York Times columnist Michael Kimmelman.

[8:27]

Ono: I think that all of us are artists in many ways without knowing and you have to just get into yourself and you find that there is an incredible super power there and you got to bring that out.

And the way you bring it out is by not being affected by the situation that you can’t bring it out. You just bring it out.

And so all of us are bringing out all these superpowers and together we can change the world. 

Amy: Besides her wartime experience, the open frameworks of Ono’s art also arose from homework her music teachers gave her to listen to the sounds of her environment and translate them into musical notes.

She was only four years old when she received this training in composition and piano lessons at the Gakushuin school, where many famous Japanese composers also went.

Raised to appreciate both music and nature, her artwork often combines the two.

For example, her Secret Piece from 1953, tells performers to decide on one note that you want to play. Play it with the following accompaniment: the woods from 5:00 AM to 8:00 AM in summer.

[Sounds of the outdoors]

Ono initially studied philosophy at a Japanese university, but after her family moved to New York, she studied composition and poetry at Sarah Lawrence College.

She dropped out after marrying the Japanese pianist and composer, Toshi Ichiyanagi. They moved to Manhattan, where she quickly became familiar with the avant-garde art scene.

She met the composer, John Cage in the late fifties while he was teaching an experimental composition course at The New School.

This course had a profound influence on the Fluxus art movement, which Ono became associated with. It was there. That Cage’s student, George Brecht, developed the concept of the event score, written instructions to highlight actions that people perform every day without paying attention.

These short lines were intended to be performed as music, paintings films and events. Both Brecht and the composer LaMonte Yung are seen as early inventors of the event score, but Ono had already been creating instruction pieces like them since 1953, like Secret Piece

Ono also focused on everyday events, but she drew inspiration from the Japanese haiku and Zen Koan. She stressed open forums that allow audiences to insert themselves and become aware of their current state of being.

Ono invites participants to complete her instructions with their own personal and political desires. To read her work is to acknowledge the capacity for words to change how we experience everyday life. Her many instruction pieces, which are collected in the book Grapefuit she published in 1964, inspire audiences to reimagine what their own lives and communities can be.

We see this in Voice Piece for Soprano, where anyone can decide the political meaning of the scream, but also in the environmentally oriented Earth Piece from 1963, where Ono writes, “Listen to the sound of the earth turning.”

Many of her instruction pieces were made between the early ‘50s to late ‘60s and she has since then posted them on billboards and social media.

Her pieces are not at all far from the slogans and soundbites of 1960s protest marches, whether for feminism, civil rights or a sexual revolution.

[Midsummer New York by Yoko Ono plays]

Feminism is a major theme of Ono’s performance art and films and she also wrote manifestos on the subject.

For example, in her 1971, New York Times article The Feminization of Society, she urged women to use their feminine energy to overturn the patriarchy.

Ono’s 1964 performance work Cut Piece demonstrated early on her central project of bearing witness to internal and often feminine suffering.

Ono knelt submissively before the audience and invited them to come up one by one to cut out pieces of her clothing.

[Sound of Scissor Snips]

She ended the piece when there was little left to cut.

To Ono, the piece was about offering her whole self to the audience rather than elevating her ego as an artist. But spectators were uncomfortable with creating art while publicly violating a woman. Ono’s piece gave them a chance to wrestle with what to do as bystanders.

[Transitional Music]

[13:34]

Ono: I decided that people can take whatever heat they want to take not whatever I wanted to give, which was a very important because that is how my experience is as a woman in life.

Speaker: And people will take what they want, but that isn’t necessarily what you will give.

Ono: Exactly, and I thought that was because I was a woman, so I didn’t think of it like a feminist act, I just thought that was the real act.

That was how life was for me.

[Transitional Music]

Amy: In her body of work as a whole, Ono places value on voicing emotions, not just vocals that make sense.

As Voice Piece illustrated, Ono refuses to pin down one meaning for a scream. She uses her voice as a way to express different aspects of herself, including her feminism and motherhood.

When she heard the music of John Cage and LeMonte Yung, she lamented that the avant-garde guys didn’t use the voice and said that their music gave off a very “asexual kind of atmosphere,” that seemed mainly for the head.  

She turned to screaming because she wanted to, in her words, “Throw blood with her voice.”

It was the most direct way to channel her inner rage and project her voice like a ventriloquist, but for a political act.

A wordless scream rips to the throat and speaks in its own language of raw sound and emotion, expressing what might be buried deep inside.

This was the premise of Arthur Yanov’s “Primal Scream Therapy,” which Ono and John Lennon both practiced in 1970.

But this wasn’t new for Ono, who’d improvised screams long before. In fact, she screamed alongside Lennon’s tape loops and their first collaboration, the 1968 album Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins.

[Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins plays]

While Ono’s vocals repelled Beatles fans, Lennon was encouraged by her and his therapy to scream in his first solo LP, 1970’s, John Lennon Plastic Ono Band.

[Well Well Well by John Lennon plays]

Lennon had an impression on Ono’s music too. The soundtrack for Fly uses double tracking tape tricks from the Beatles. She and Lennon played back her vocals in reverse and put his guitar against them.

Although her screams might sound out of place in pop music, she has constantly pushed the possibilities for vocal expression forward.

By mixing cutting-edge techniques in avant-garde and popular music, Ono’s music has inspired a range of pop singers since, from Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth to tUnE-yArDs.

Ono took on a similar mission in the films she created. Many were joint efforts with her husband John Lennon. They met in 1966, by which time she had already made a few films for Fluxus.

For example, her film, Eyeblink used a high-speed camera to show an eye blinking in slow motion.

She was especially interested in having people experience ordinary things as if for the first time. The Russian critic, Viktor Shklovsky called this experience “de-familiarization.” Shklovsky wrote about how Leo Tolstoy’s descriptions could help readers see a new the familiar things their eyes might’ve skipped over.

Ono used special film techniques to give her images heightened textures that would make viewers rethink their knee-jerk reactions to ordinary objects.

She similarly developed vocal techniques that drew listeners in, almost like ASMR, when we hang on every whisper of a loved one, because it sends shivers down our spine.

One of Ono’s films showcases these skin crawling techniques in both its sounds and images.

This is her avant-garde film Fly from 1970, which is based on her 1968 event score To Let A Fly Walk on A Woman’s Body from Toe to Head and Fly Out of The Window.

[Snippet from Fly plays]

The 25-minute film preserves this chance event in black and white. It features extreme close-ups of flies crawling on the bare skin of actor, Virginia Lust.

The long static views of this woman covered in flies are at times repulsive and alluring. Equally fascinating are Ono’s improvised vocals, which charged the static close-ups with wild immediacy.

Ono’s disembodied voice often sounds like buzzing flies, which can be read as carrying alongside the site of Lust’s body, which is splayed out and seemingly dead.

But Ono also produces agonized and ecstatic moans that seem to come from the ravaged woman. Depending on the spectator’s gender and orientation, the flies meandering explorations of the woman’s body eventually elicit vicarious sensations of pleasure and discomfort.

Ono’s ragged whales, immediately induce squirms and breathy gasps set our hairs on end.

[Snippet from Fly plays]

The film Fly combines Ono’s Fluxus and feminist concerns with improvised vocals and fuzzy close-up images, which create an open framework for listeners to imagine themselves in both the subject positions of the violated woman and the fly.

The footage was shot over two days in a freezing New York loft and then edited with the soundtrack that Ono and Lennon improvised together in one night. Ono improvised her vocals in one take and Lennon overdubbed a guitar track that sometimes plays in reverse.

The result is a mashup of avant-garde voice and psychedelic guitar against images that are both grotesque and sensual.

[Snippet from Fly plays]

[20:08]

Mack: We’ll be back in a moment with more Phantom Power.

[Electric Transitional Music]

Mullock: Hey, what’s up guys, it’s Mullock, The Dark God of Information Capitalism. Mullock, whose eyes are a thousand blind windows. Mullock, whose soul is electricity and banks.

Just taking a quick break to remind you guys to rate Phantom Power on iTunes or Apple Podcasts, and even better write a review of the show, that’s what we in the industry call “engagement” and it lets Apple know that this podcast rocks.

Today’s five-star review comes from Dalek Van who writes:

“This is a very professionally produced podcast with great editing, research, and interviews. Most importantly, the interviewer has an open and inquisitive mind. Recommended listening for anyone interested in exploring the world of sound.”

Thanks Dalek, love you, bro.

So remember, do Mack a solid and leave a review.  Who knows? Maybe you’ll get a shout out from yours truly, Mullock, The Dark God of Information Capitalism.

Now back to the show.

[Electric Transitional Music Fades]

[21:21]

Mack: Let’s get back to The Enduring Voice of Yoko by Amy Skjerseth.

In part two, Amy does a close analysis of the soundtrack to the film, Fly, explaining how Yoko’s voice operates on the listener and forwards her political and ethical agenda.

[Snippets from Fly]

Amy Skjerseth: When the film was projected in the 2015 Yoko Ono Retrospective at MoMA, museum goers pointed and laughed at the films close-ups of intimate body parts. They also recoiled from the loud screams and wails on the soundtrack.

How can we get past the initial strangeness of these avant-garde images and sounds in order to understand what Ono has to say about feminism and sexual liberation?

One way in is through the heightened textures of both flies, images, and sounds. There’s already a way to talk about these images in film theory.

The scholar, Laura Marks calls images and close-up that we seem to be able to touch “haptic” because the close views emphasize textures of facial features, food, fabrics, or terrains. These surfaces spark our memories of touching those things in real life.

In Fly, the unrelenting extreme close-ups give us skin crawling sensations that makes seeing feel like touching. The images create associations unique to individual experience of watching flies, which could vary from disgust to enchantment.

Shots follow the fly’s movements, but also excavate nearly every crevice of Lust’s skin. As a result, some viewers may feel the urge to swat away a common housefly, while some may recoil as it occupies the woman’s body and revives memories of sexual violations.

Our reactions depend on the memories that this scenario triggers for us. This is not a phenomenon unique to Fly as film theorist, Jennifer Barker has shown in her book, The Tactical Eye.

[Intense Music Plays]

Camera movements in action films can make us feel like we run and jump alongside the film’s characters. Or shaky camera work in horror films can send us into a character’s state of visceral fear.

In these ways film techniques can give us tactile, muscular, or visceral reactions according to the sites we have stored in our memory banks.

So, if visual effects give us different bodily sensations, can we say the same for Yoko Ono’s highly textured vocal sounds?

Sounds also caused physical and emotional reactions depending on human and cultural associations. High, or screeching notes, tingle our arm hairs.

[Ono’s High-Pitched Whine]

Loud, or sudden sounds, make our muscles jump.

[Ono’s Sudden High-Pitched Yell]

 And whispering or dissonant sounds make us uneasy or tense.

[Ono’s Short Breaths]

According to our subjective experience, sounds could even make us feel nauseous or trigger fight, or flight responses if we hear sounds that are linked to bad memories.

In everyday life and as we watch films and listen to music, we accumulate a memory bank of sounds that recall tactile sensations and gut feelings.

Similarly, as Ono’s voice skims the surface of the actor skin on screen, her voice is at times associated with the wildness of the fly and sometimes with the violation of the woman.

In Fly, we see images with textured grooves that are fingers long to touch. We also hear Ono’s soft hums, which nearly brush our ears in sensual contact.

But whether that hum borders on a hiss or pleasurably tingles our spines, like ASMR, can change as quickly as her vocal gymnastics do.

[Ono’s High-Pitched Screech]

We can hear the fleshy materials of Ono’s teeth, lips, tongue, and breath as if she’s standing next to us.

Steven Connor writes about the sensation and his book Dumbstruck, a cultural history of ventriloquism.

When a ventriloquist projects their voice into a dummy, the voice seems to have a body of its own, what he calls a “vocalic body.”

[Transitional Guitar Riff]

A famous example is the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy.

[25:46]

Voice of Edgar Bergen: Well, Charlie tonight, we’re playing The Palace

Voice of Charlie McCarthy: Yeah, that’s right. I hope you won’t embarrass me like you did in Las Vegas.

Voice of Edgar Bergen: What about Las Vegas? I thought I gave a very moving performance.

Voice of Charlie McCarthy: Yeah, it was moving alright, especially your lips.

Amy Skjerseth: Like a ventriloquist, Ono is able to physically manipulate her voice so that it seems to travel in and out of the flies and women’s bodies.

Her vocals also pull the strings of our own memories, as the sounds she makes drudge up sensations from our sonic memory banks. If we listen closely, we can hear how she encodes pleasure with moans and pain with cries.

Through these emotions, Ono links what spectators see and hear to our previous memories of sights and sounds. 

Her hums and growls audibly convey the kinds of twisted movements our bodies make to express arousal or violation. Therefore, she’s able to conjure a site from a sound.

[Between the Takes by Yoko Ono plays]

Ono can produce a variety of extended vocal techniques that have been used in the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Cathy Berberian.

Extended vocal techniques today include yodeling, rapping, and vocal profession, but Ono most often uses glottal sounds like vocal fry

 [Ono’s Glottal Sounds]

Or growls.

[Ono’s Growls]

She also rapidly throttles her voice by vibrating her vocal folds.

[Ono’s Chopped Screech]

Ono’s wide array of sounds speak back to a certain emotional and physical category of memories.

As the fly lands on Virginia Lust’s fingertips and eyelashes, Ono’s voice also produces tactile sensations like chills running down the spine or hairs standing on end.

Her weighty aspirations recall a lover’s soft breath caressing the skin lending a tender curiosity to the flies wandering.

But when Ono’s breathy raspy becomes a hiss her glottal sounds are like sharp pinpricks on the skin.

As her voice grates like nails on a chalkboard, we now might recoil from the same image of the exploring fly. When the fly lands on less pelvis, Ono’s growls elicit palpable shutters, but her yips also border on excitement.

[Glottal Sounds from Yoko Ono]

As the fly disappears, Ono tactile utterances become low bestial growls from the back of her throat. These sounds evoke the practice of Inuit throat singing, traditionally a social activity for women while men were out fishing for the community.

In certain forms of throat singing, two women face each other and challenge one another to throat sing a certain pattern until one of them runs out of breath. They lock arms and gazes and sway from side to side in an artistic and athletic feat of voice.

We can hear a variation of an Inuk throat singing from 2014 Polaris Prize Winner, Tonya Tagaq in her track, Uvinik from 2005.

[Snippet from Uvinik]

Listening to Fly with these techniques in mind, we can hear connotations of a challenge or competition within Ono’s growls and grunts.

Against these images, these sounds suggest both the flies hunger for flesh and the woman’s defiance.

Ono has long positioned her voice as the primary force behind her artistic and political projects. In a 2013 interview with Helen Brown from the Telegraph Ono states:

“Why is woman always known for pretty voice and pretty songs? Because that’s what the world wants. They don’t want a woman to sound too strong. We feel we shouldn’t scream out. So, I thought we have to show what women are. We’re the birth givers of the human race. Why should we be ashamed of it or treated differently?”

As Ono describes it, her vocal stem directly from her embodied experience as a woman.

She encourages women to share experiences previously confined to the most hidden parts of their interior lives. By focusing on screams over pretty songs. Ono can more immediately translate emotions embedded deeply in the body.

Ono’s voice, whether jarring, inexhaustible, or mournful, punctures us to imagine how diverse inner lives can be, and as John Lennon praised her 16-track voice, she can throw her voice like a ventriloquist to address us from both the fly and the woman.

The violator and the violated.

By asking us to consider flies encounter from multiple orientations, Ono demonstrates her desire, not just for women’s liberation, but of the mind and the body from their habitual confines.

Her screams address the violence done to women, as well as spectators who become bystanders like in her 1964 Cup Peace. In Fly, Ono asks us to imagine alternatives to our normal ways of being.

Throughout Fly, we experienced utterances of tingling grazes against the skin, whales as the fly dares to probe the body’s orifices, and ultimately a visceral howling as the camera refuels host of flies on Lust’s body.

[Snippet from Fly]

John Lennon’s guitar riffs join in and increase the ambiguity of the situation.

His peaceful chords ease the militant invasion of flies. To this interpretation, Ono’s voice also responds with less intense shrieks and increasingly placid warbles.

[Snippet from Fly]

As with Ono’s earlier work, she leaves space for spectators to consider their complicity in violence, but also the stillness to contemplate the possibility of peace.

She grants us that stillness in the film’s final two minutes when the guitar and vocals suddenly drop off to nothing.

At that moment the camera flies out the window. The bottom seems to drop out as we hang suspended in the sky, shaken by what we’ve seen as the credits roll.

Before the film ends we hear Ono wailing as the fly. By this time it no longer sounds so strange.

[Ono’s Shriek]

[Will You Touch Me by Yoko Ono plays]

Mack: And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power.

Today you heard music by Yoko Ono, John Lennon, John Cage, Tanya Tagaq and Graham Gibson, as well as Crickets, Birds, Summer Ambient by Nicodemus Christian.

The Enduring Voice of Yoko Ono includes elements from an audio essay Amy published at InTransition, the journal of videographic film and moving image studies.

You can find a link to that essay and to everything we heard about today in the show notes or phantompod.org, where you can also subscribe and hear other episodes.

Today’s show was produced and edited by Amy Skjerseth with additional editing by me, Mack Hagood.

Phantom Powers production team includes Amy Skjerseth, Craig Eley, and Ravi Krishna Swami. Transcripts by Maggie Hansen and Ellie Pierce.

Our social media team consists of Bethany Sersion and Grace Carlos.

Take care.

[Will You Touch Me by Yoko Ono Fades Out]