Yoko Ono is a singer, songwriter, and peace activist from Japan. Ono lived in Japan from her birth in 1933 through World War Two until she went to New York in 1952, where she studied poetry and music composition at Sarah Lawrence College. She spent a good portion of her life before meeting her fourth and final husband, John Lennon, performing the music she created and showing the artwork she made.

In March of 1969, John Lennon, from The Beatles, and Yoko Ono married and spent their honeymoon in Amsterdam. They used their honeymoon to protest the Vietnam War by staging “Bed-Ins,” where the couple would stay in bed for days and answer questions from press. Together, Lennon and Ono wrote a few different very famous songs, such as “Happy Christmas (War Is Over,” which started as a protest song and has now turned into a Christmas standard.

Even with problems in their marriage, Lennon and Ono stayed together until his death in 1980. The night of Lennon’s assassination, the two were walking home from a recording session of Ono’s song, “Walking On Thin Ice” when a Beatle’s fan who had been stalking Lennon for months shot him. Ono released “Walking On Thin Ice” as a single less than a month later after the assassination with the version the couple recorded the night of his death as the final version. 

I thought that this song was an interesting pick because of the impact that it made on the world. Ono created in a very avant-garde style. Listening to the song, it uses instruments of a typical western band, but there are sound effects made with them that one would not typically think to be made from these instruments. She also uses vocalizations, not of words but just sounds, to move from one section of the song to another. It is also a very important song in Ono’s life since it was the last song that she was able to work on with her husband before he died.