Imagine, if you will, Yoko Ono’s life had she not met John Lennon at the Indica Gallery in London in 1966. As the meet-cute story goes, the gallery was featuring Ono’s conceptual artwork, and Lennon was entranced by a piece titled “Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting.” It consisted of a ladder painted white, and at the top a magnifying glass through which one could read a tiny “YES.” Lennon climbed the rungs and was moved by the positive message of the work. And a historic relationship began. At 33 years old, Ono was already a renowned artist. She had been associated with the downtown New York City art scene and the Fluxus group, a collection of Dada-ish avant-garde artists. She hung with John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Peggy Guggenheim. In 1961, she had performed her experimental music at Carnegie Hall—in a smaller theater, not the main room. Her major work “Cut Piece” was first staged in 1964. In it, she stood on a stage and invited members of the audience to take a scissors and slice off pieces of her clothing until she decided to end the performance.

So how might her public life have unfolded had she not partnered personally and professionally with Lennon? Would she be widely heralded as a pioneer of conceptual and performance art on par with Cage? Would she be regarded as an influential composer and musician? Another Lou Reed? Has her role in the story of the Beatles shaped—and limited—Ono’s legacy as a significant modern artist?

These questions are prompted by last week’s release of Ocean Child: Songs of Yoko Ono—“Yoko” means “ocean child” in Japanese—a compilation of various artists performing her songs. Through her collaboration with Lennon alone, she has had an undeniable influence on popular music. She was awarded co-songwriting credit for “Imagine” in 2017, and Lennon once said “Give Peace a Chance” should have been credited “Lennon-Ono” not “Lennon-McCartney,” given Paul had nothing to do with the song. Yet, released the same week as her 89th birthday, this tribute album demonstrates, in addition to her accomplishments as a conceptional artist, that she has built a significant legacy as a solo songwriter and musician.

The collection is an overdue antidote to Ono having long been cast as the key player in Beatles tragedy. First, she was blamed for the breakup of the group. This narrative was propelled in part by misogyny (a girl split up the boys!) and racism (an inscrutable Asian woman destroyed the iconic band!). A 1970s Esquire article about her combined the two and was slur-headlined “John Rennon’s Excrusive Gloupie” and featured a David Levine illustration of Ono towering over Lennon, who is drawn as a cockroach on a leash. But as Peter Jackson’s stellar documentary, The Beatles: Get Back, demonstrates, Ono was hardly the cause of the Fab Four’s dissolution. There were multiple stresses and conflicts pulling the lads apart. Her presence at the Let It Be sessions, chronicled in Jackson’s film, was certainly intrusive and weird—a piece of performance art in itself—but it appeared to have bolstered a strung-out Lennon through this tough stretch and possibly helped the Beatles finish what would become their last album.

After Lennon was assassinated in 1980, a new part was assigned to Ono: the grieving Beatles widow. By carrying all our pain, she now symbolized profound loss. The woman unfairly castigated for undoing the Beatles became the noble and sorrowful keeper of the Lennon flame. The kind of rock royalty equivalent of Coretta Scott King. It was a transformation of her roles—from villainous to sympathetic—but Ono remained defined by her relationship to Lennon.

During Lennon’s lifetime, Ono’s own artistic achievements were overshadowed by her musical work with him. Their last joint project, Double Fantasy, was released just weeks before Lennon’s murder and focused on their love and marriage. The album only became a commercial success after his assassination. Two months after his death, the first hit of her own music career, the song “Walking on Thin Ice,” which the couple had been working on the day Lennon was shot, was released. Until then and for many years after, Ono’s music has been generally overlooked.

Ocean Child, full of imaginative and respectful interpretations of her music, is a potent reminder of Ono’s talents as a songwriter. Often springing from unadorned fundamentals (think “give peace a chance”), her compositions are centered on delight, dreaminess, and whimsy—and, yes, sometimes primal and wordless expressions of rapture or rage, including screeching. On this new version of “Who Has Seen the Wind?,” which was the B-side of Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band’s 1970 work “Instant Karma,” David Byrne, formerly of the Talking Heads, and the band Yo La Tengo capture the ethereal quality that animates much of Ono’s music. (The first verse comes from 19th-century pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti: “Who has seen the wind? / Neither you nor I / But when the trees bow down their heads / The wind is passing by.”) Indie rock band Death Cab for Cutie covers “Waiting for the Sunrise,” a 1973 song about simple and happy moments. (“Waiting for the sunrise / So we can go on the streets and see the people smile.”)

Throughout Ocean Child, the poignancy is inescapable. The Flaming Lips contribute “Mrs. Lennon,” a 1971 composition that is all about her anxiety over her famous marriage. (“Husband John extended his hand / Extended his hand to his wife / And he finds, and suddenly he finds / That he has no hands.”) Japanese Breakfast brings to the album the heartbreaking “Nobody Sees Me Like You Do,” a love song and a farewell that Ono released months after Lennon was killed. (“I see your face with a trace of life / Being a wife and a woman / If I ever hurt you, please, remember / I wanted you to be happy.”) Yo La Tengo’s rendition of the 2013 “There’s No Goodbye Between Us” is both melancholic and reassuring. (“If one day we slip away / And maybe it's in the cards / We will know deep in our hearts / That there's no goodbye between us.”) Ono’s songs tend to have simple melodies and repetitive and aphoristic lyrics. They can be meditations.

Ben Gibbard, who fronts Death Cab for Cutie, curated Ocean Child, which is a benefit album for the WhyHunger charity. For him, the mission of the project was straightforward: "It's very important to me that people get a chance to really understand what Yoko's music is all about. My hope for the people who hear this music for the first time is that their idea of Yoko Ono is completely flipped upside down.” For those who find these songs, it certainly should.

Yoko was a Beatles wife for almost a dozen years. She has been a Beatles widow for over 41 years. But throughout, she has been a powerful artist across multiple genres and can boast of decades of work that has affected art and popular culture. Yet for too long her music was dismissed as not much more than a Lennon sideshow. Ocean Child offers a much-needed corrective. In a 2016 interview, Ono, who has never lacked for confidence, remarked about her music, “It’s my arrogance, but I thought it was beautiful all along.” She was right, and Lennon knew that from the start.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at thisland@motherjones.com.

A Trump-Russia Fantasy

Suppose that during the 2016 campaign the Republicans—with or without Donald Trump—had fully acknowledged that Russia thug-leader Vladimir Putin was attacking the US election as part of his wider plan to destabilize the West and undermine liberal democracy. Suppose further that the Republicans had joined President Barack Obama to fiercely condemn Putin’s actions and concoct a forceful response. Where might we be now as the Russian tyrant threatens peace in Europe with his invasion of Ukraine?

Under such a scenario, Trump might have lost the election—the drip-drip leaks of John Podesta’s emails stolen by Putin’s cyberthieves, which occurred throughout the final month of the campaign, were certainly one critical factor in the close election. Hillary Clinton as president would likely have spent the subsequent years focused on the threat posed by Putin and trying to forge an effective resistance among Western nations to his scheming and imperial ambitions. I know lefties feared that Clinton was a warmonger and will argue that, had she reached the White House, all sorts of hawkish disasters would have befallen the nation and the world. But we’re sticking here to a what-if regarding Russia. And let’s continue the thought experiment: If Trump had recognized and denounced Putin’s assault on American democracy in 2016 (yes, a very big if) and still had managed to win, there’s a chance that this might have led to a somewhat more vigorous stance toward Putin and his war on democracy.

In either of these cases, would Putin’s voracious policy toward Ukraine have been restrained? Of course, there’s no answer. And maybe there was no way to curb Putin’s illegal interventionism since he appears to be guided by a megalomaniacal and messianic impulse to restore Russia to its former glories as the Soviet Union. But a West more united in opposition to Putin might have provided him pause—if this guy is pause-able. One truism of foreign policy—and life—is that bullies who are not confronted keep bullying. That might be a simplistic framework for thinking about Putin and Ukraine. But it’s not a stretch to assume that Putin was emboldened when he succeeded with his 2016 attack on the United States. The sanctions applied on Russia by the Obama administration after the election—after Putin had achieved his goal of electing Trump—were not sufficiently robust. And Trump, as president, went further and denied that Putin had attacked the US election and didn’t press him on the matter. Consider how Putin saw all this: He could get away with a brazen attack and exacerbate political divisions within the United States, which could provide him greater running room for his anti-democratic adventurism. After he pulled off this operation, it’s unlikely he said to himself, “Now Ukraine is mine!” (He had already invaded and annexed Crimea by that point.) Yet unchecked aggression can breed further aggression. A green light is never a sign to slow down.

The Watch, Read, and Listen List

The Slow Hustle. There’s often an inherent conflict in how we think about policing: Cops protect us; cops threaten us. Whichever piece of this you focus on depends on your community and experience and on the nature of the police force in your area—and probably whatever event led you to think about the police in the first place. In The Slow Hustle, an HBO documentary, actor and director Sonja Sohn explores this dynamic, as she examines the vexing case of Baltimore police detective Sean Suiter, who was fatally shot in a vacant lot in 2017. Sohn, who played Detective Kima Greggs (of the Baltimore police department) in The Wire, one of the best series in television history, and who previously directed Baltimore Rising, a documentary chronicling the protests in Baltimore following Freddie Gray’s death in police custody in 2015, has a tough case on her hand. There are no known witnesses to Suiter’s death, nor any clear evidence of what happened. But the killing seems connected to corruption within Charm City’s police force, reputed to be one of the dirtiest and toughest-to-fix departments in the nation.

Investigating the Suiter case entails probing the force. The day after his death, Suiter, who appears to have been a devoted father and husband and a well-respected cop, was due to testify before a grand jury investigating a wide-ranging police corruption case. Years earlier, he had worked with an elite unit that was busted for faking arrests and stealing drugs and cash. His connection to these dirty officers may be the key to his death. Had he been in on it? What did he know? Was he killed by a cop to prevent him from testifying? Was he a culprit who killed himself out of shame and staged his death to look as if he had been murdered (so his family would receive benefits after his death)? In Baltimore, speculation runs wild. Maybe this detective was clean and merely the unfortunate victim of street crime.

Suiter’s family and community activists demand answers, but the police bungle the investigation from the start. If a Black cop cannot get justice, what can a Black civilian expect? The city needs to know if the police can serve the public and provide answers, or if they are the criminals. But the case is not cracked. In Sohn’s hands, the Suiter episode serves as a symbol of the department’s incompetence and, perhaps, its corruption. She deftly chronicles the frustrations of the family and the anxiety of lower-income Baltimoreans, who want both police corruption and abuse pursued, and a police force that can fight crime in their neighborhoods. That shouldn’t be too hard. And it shouldn’t be too difficult to resolve the Suiter case. But Sohn shows how elusive each one can be.

Read Recent Issues of This Land

February 19, 2022: A masterclass in both-sidesism from Washington Post columnist Matt Bai; Dumbass Comment of the Week; the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

February 15, 2022: Why is John Fogerty serenading Trump crony Steve Wynn?; can Trump be barred from running for president because he flushed documents down the toilet?; The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window doesn’t know if she’s in a parody or not; Elvis Costello tells us to listen to Ian Prowse; and more.

February 12, 2022: Would you want to look at photos of a massacre?; rebranding This Land; Dumbass Comment of the Week; the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

February 8, 2022: The Trump coup: Maybe we can’t handle the truth; Steve Martin and Martin Short shine in Only Murders in the Building; Invasion’s odd but conventional take on the sci-fi/alien-attack genre; and more.

February 5, 2022: Can we call Trump’s race war a “race war”?; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Michele Bachmann and Rick Scott); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

February 1, 2022: Please tell me: Why is Michael Flynn crazy?; an impressive film about Nicolas Cage and his pig; Wajahat Ali’s impressive memoir about growing up Muslim and nonwhite in America; and more.

January 29, 2022: The inside story of the banning of Maus—it’s dumber than you think; Dumbass Comment of the Week; the Mailbag; and MoxieCam™; and more.

January 25, 2022: The snowflake-ization of the right; would you buy cryptocurrency from this man (Steve Bannon)?; Belfast, a feel-good movie about a civil war; Elvis Costello’s delightful and cynical new album; and more.

January 22, 2022: Readers speak out: How to save the republic from Republicans; Dumbass Comment of the Week; the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

January 19, 2022: Why the Democrats must yield to Manchin to keep the Trump cult from gaining power; gushing about The French Dispatch; a true-crime podcast with political and international significance; and more.

January 15, 2022: We’re all tired of Trump’s crazy, but it’s dangerous to ignore; Dumbass Comment of the Week (US Senate edition); the Mailbag; (a harrowing) MoxieCam™; and more