This vibrant review celebrates Yoko Ono’s transformative artistic path, highlighting her childhood and significant breakthroughs in New York, while deliberately setting aside her connection to John Lennon—a period Morley refers to as “that other business.”
John Lennon famously described Yoko Ono as “the world’s most famous unknown artist. Everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does.” In contrast, her detractors were often vicious, portraying her as a “family wrecker” (referring to the Beatles), a “cultural vandal,” an “Asian virus,” or a “shrieking harridan.” Paul Morley’s book, “Love Magic Power Danger Bliss,” captures this hostile sentiment, noting how some saw her as someone whose “sole reason to be on the planet was to drive them up the wall with her lack of talent and decency,” or more mildly, a “disorganised diva channelling the assumed genius of male creators.”
Morley’s compelling narrative centers on Ono’s life and art *before* her fateful meeting with Lennon at London’s Indica Gallery in 1966. He portrays her as a determined, inquisitive spirit. Born in 1933 into an affluent banking family—her schoolmates included Emperor Hirohito’s sons—she endured the firebombing of Tokyo. Seeking refuge in the countryside, she and her mother, reduced to near destitution, faced scorn from locals. Despite these hardships, Ono later achieved the distinction of being the first woman accepted into the prestigious Gakushuin University philosophy department. She departed early, a pattern she repeated by leaving Sarah Lawrence College in upstate New York after just two terms, always forging her own independent path.