Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind opened at Tate Modern this week. If you had asked me, before I went to have a look at the exhibition, I’d have told you that I didn’t know anything about Ono. Which would almost have been true.
I knew one thing about Yoko Ono – the same thing everyone else “knows”: She’s the Japanese woman who shacked up with John Lennon. The one who broke up The Beatles. Drove a wedge between Lennon and Paul McCartney. The one who convinced Lennon to hang out in bed all day. The biographical information peters out there.
I don’t know where I got this from – I’ve never googled her, never read a book or watched a documentary about her. But it’s just one of those cultural things that we all absorb somehow – that Yoko, like Wallace Simpson, is a villainess, swooping in and taking a sledgehammer to an established British system that brought people joy.
Perhaps no surprise, then, that when the rift opened between Prince Harry and the rest of the Royal Family, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, was dubbed “the next Yoko Ono” – an easy, lazy, sexist way to blame a woman for decisions made by a man about his own future.
It must be a very weird sort of slander to hear your name, the one you’ve used since birth, become synonymous with an action, to be turned into a verb. But if it bothers her, Yoko hasn’t railed against it. Instead she’s continued calmly creating art. Through the murder of her husband and the the backlash towards her for wanting to write about this loss, she carried on. But through the whole thing she was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t. The coverage of her work universally included references to the man she had previously been married to.
I thought, as I wandered around the exhibition, how crushing it must be to have made this much, this beautifully, to have such a staggering mind, and to still be described as an acolyte of Lennon. And I wondered if Meghan, Yoko’s successor apparent, might be slightly paralysed by the same thing.
I’m surprised to find myself about to describe a podcast as “brave”, because… well… it’s a podcast made by a rich and beautiful woman, probably for quite a lot of money. But I do think it’s rather brave that Meghan is returning to the world of broadcast with her new series, this time with Lemonada rather than Spotify.
Much was made of Meghan’s Spotify podcasting snafu, wherein an executive called her a “grifter” because she didn’t deliver adequate content to justify the amount of money he spent on acquiring the Sussexes. Like lots of other people, I’m inclined to roll my eyes at Meghan when she talks about how difficult her life is. But looking at the extraordinary performance art that Yoko made, which was then ignored or sneered at because of her romantic relationship, I think maybe I understand it better. If you know that you will always be defined by the person you married, and that definition will be used to cast you as the sole villain of every piece, where do you find the courage and the drive to keep creating?
But then I wonder, what’s the alternative? Wallis Simpson, another American woman with whom Meghan is regularly compared, never really did much else with her life after she and the Duke of Windsor left the UK. She threw parties and made witty comments, but now, almost 40 years after her death, the only thing she’s remembered for is being the woman for whom the king abdicated to marry. Of course all the discussions about her driving a wedge into the Royal Family and forcing the Duke of Windsor’s hand were horribly sexist, just as they are when the same allegations are levelled at Meghan. But Simpson never gave anyone much else to talk about.
The world seems to be waiting for Meghan to fail, in punishment for her alleged crime of stealing away the once beloved and erstwhile most popular royal. Looking back at the public’s reaction to Yoko’s attempts to continue creating after Lennon’s death, she seems to have encountered much the same public appetite for failure and humiliation.
But she gets the last laugh – it might have taken decades, but no one could walk around the Tate Modern exhibition of her work and deny that, Lennon or no Lennon, she’s a staggering talent.
I doubt Meghan has any intention of popping back to London any time soon, but it’s a shame she’ll miss the Yoko Ono exhibition. I think it might be quite inspirational.
Rebecca Reid is an author and journalist
