Complicated Facts About Yoko Ono, Music’s Ultimate Scapegoat

“Oh, Yoko!”

As an artist, Yoko Ono’s goal was to provoke big feelings. As the wife of John Lennon, she unintentionally did the same—and most of those feelings were pure venom. Fab Four fanboys still fixate on Yoko Ono 14 years at Lennon’s side, but that was just a brief chapter in her long, bizarre life. She survived WWII, shook up the art world, and watched her husband slain in cold blood. She also married three times, preached world peace, and became entangled in everything from fortune tellers to cults and the FBI.

There’s probably a reason Yoko Ono is famously secretive: the deeper you dig into her life, the more bonkers it gets. 

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1. She Was Old Money

Yoko Ono was born into wealth, but there was much more to her family tree than old money. On February 18, 1933, she was born in Tokyo to a banker father descended from a long line of samurai, and a mother who came from the powerful Yasuda dynasty. In other words, Yoko had warrior blood on both sides. She would eventually claim that her famous resilience came from her “samurai spirit”.

She would need it. Yoko’s life was about to test her in ways no family fortune could prepare her for.

Michael Ochs Archives, Getty Images

2. She Was Deeply Lonely

Young Yoko had everything a child could want—except affection. Her father traveled constantly, and when he first met her at age two, he barely noticed her. Her glamorous mother was always off somewhere, but she left strict instructions with the nannies not to rock Yoko when she cried or pick her up if she fell. Even more confusing, in the home videos they sent to Yoko’s dad, her mother would play the doting mom, cuddling the little girl like crazy.

Yoko’s mother barred her from having friends, fearing they’d take advantage of the family. It got so lonely that Yoko would order tea from one of their 30 servants just for company. She learned to escape into her daydreams, staring at the clouds for hours. Soon these survival skills would be put to the test. 

Eric Koch for Anefo, Wikimedia Commons

3. She Survived An Apocalypse

Later in life, Yoko wasn’t just cosplaying as a peace activist. She had experienced the horrors of WWII firsthand as a young girl. On March 9, 1945, as the rest of her family huddled in a backyard air-raid shelter, Yoko stayed in her bedroom, too sick to join them. The earth shook as the US dropped explosives on Tokyo. Yoko stood at her window and watched the city burn before her eyes. More than 100,000 people lost their lives that night. 

While huddled in their shelter during the nightly air raids, Yoko would listen to radio broadcasts of the kamikaze pilots saying their final goodbyes. She later said that it was “just the most horrific thing that I’ve heard”. 

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4. She Couldn’t Escape

Yoko had seen things no child should have to see. And she had no real support system to help her process them. As she entered her teens, her anxiety grew into terrifying nightmares and panic attacks. She had earaches that were so intense, she would put sanitary pads over her ears to block out the sound. Eventually, her depression became too much to bear: “As a teenager, I was always trying to cut my wrists or take pills”.

In a few years, one more attempt would change everything.

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5. She Couldn’t Be Tamed

If you could ever call Yoko Ono normal, it would be during university when she started testing the limits of her strict upbringing. She took up cigs, drinking, and falling in love. One cousin described her as going “from man to man”. Among them was a slightly older man with a powerful father, a prince who was infatuated with her, and an assistant professor at Gakuishin University, where she was on track to become its first female philosophy student.

But Yoko decided to walk away from it all.

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6. She Found Her People

Much to her parents’ dismay, Yoko dropped out of Gakuishuin and joined them in New York, where her father was president of the Bank of Tokyo. In 1953, she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College, where she discovered avant-garde music, poetry, and people who thought differently. As one classmate said, the school “attracted a certain artistic, high-strung nonconformist, which described Yoko perfectly”.

Another classmate remembered Yoko’s ambition, saying, “She would roll over anyone she perceived as standing in the way of her artistic vision”.

Joost Evers / Anefo, Wikimedia Commons

7. She Had Better Places To Be

Living at home with her parents, and their increasing disappointment in her life choices, started to wear thin. Sarah Lawrence was beginning to as well. “Whenever I wrote a poem, they said it was too long; a novel was like a short story, and a short story was like a poem,” Yoko said. “I felt that I was like a misfit in every medium”. At the end of her third year, she dropped out, saying she felt “asphyxiated” by conservative teachers.

It probably didn’t help that her real education was happening after dark in Greenwich Village at the peak of the Beat Generation.  

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8. She Met Her Match 

At a recital, a young man approached Yoko Ono. He remembered her from a party in Japan a few years earlier where he’d been the piano player. Toshi Ichiyanagi was now a Juilliard prodigy and fellow piano obsessive. Like Yoko, he was 23 years old, and he’d grown up studying both Western and Japanese art. He also loved the same obscure experimental composers that Yoko did.

A struggling musician who was not from a prominent family? That was exactly the kind of man her parents would hate, but to Yoko, he was perfect.

Toshi Ichiyanagi, Wikimedia Commons, Modified 

9. She Married The Wrong Man

Eloping with Toshi came with a steep price: Yoko’s parents cut her off financially. So Yoko supported them both, doing secretarial work and teaching traditional Japanese art. Years later, Toshi spilled the tea about their marriage: “Yoko was never pleased unless she was treated like a queen…she was indeed an artist, in the sense that she played and spent as she pleased”.

Ah, yes, Yoko did indeed “play”. It’s all fun and games until someone gets their heart broken.

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10. She Didn’t Use Protection

Yoko was ahead of her time in a lot of things—including free love. It was only the late 1950s, but she wanted the freedom to have affairs. It was deeply painful for Toshi, but he gave her permission. In a 1970 Esquire article with the spectacularly offensive title “John Rennon’s Excrusive Gloupie,” Yoko recalled, “In New York I was always having abortions because I was too neurotic to take precautions”.

She said she would go out and have an affair and come home “a mess”. Toshi, she said, was “very kind”.

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11. She Had Her Ah-Ha Moment

Infidelity aside, Toshi gave Yoko one priceless gift: a golden ticket into New York’s wild avant-garde scene. The star of which was composer John Cage, whose most famous work consisted of a pianist sitting at a piano for over four minutes without playing a note. The point was to force the audience to listen to the sounds around them, but many walked out furious. Yoko, however, was hooked. 

Before long, she tagged along with Toshi to one of Cage’s lectures. “What Cage gave me was confidence that the direction I was going in was not crazy,” Yoko later said. It also gave her the confidence to leave Toshi behind.

Rob Croes for Anefo, Wikimedia Commons

12. She Shook Things Up 

Yoko Ono had a new dream—to become an avant-garde artist—and Toshi wasn’t part of the plan. She moved into a loft at 112 Chambers St. ($50.50/month for 2,000 square feet!). Sure, it didn’t have hot water or electricity, but the vibe was perfect. Along with composer La Monte Young, she held a series of candlelight shows. One of Yoko’s early works was called “Pea Piece”. The instructions read: “Carry a bag of peas. Leave a pea wherever you go”. When she performed it at the loft, she threw peas at the audience while whipping her hair in circles. 

She was finally right where she wanted to be.

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13. She Had Nothing To Lose

Yoko’s life was getting complicated—and expensive. She was now roommates with a Sarah Lawrence classmate, Erica Abeel, who remembers that despite Yoko having lovers “coming out of the woodwork,” she would occasionally help herself to Erica’s beaus. Erica didn’t mind that, but she was annoyed that Yoko left her with a $700 phone bill from talking to Toshi in Japan. Toshi was trying to convince her to come and show her work.

Although Yoko’s first major solo show at Carnegie Recital Hall had been “a big moment” for her, her career was stagnating, and her thoughts of ending it all had returned. It seemed like she had nothing to lose.

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14. She Walked Into A Trap

To Yoko’s parents, the only thing worse than being married to a non-aristocratic musician was her chaotic bohemian lifestyle and multiple affairs in New York. When she arrived in Tokyo in 1962, she thought she was making a great career move. Wrong. Her parents had orchestrated the whole thing to force a reconciliation—and finally tame her.

Too bad the whole thing blew up in their faces. 

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15. She Brought Chaos To Tokyo

Instead of settling down, Yoko doubled down by staging a very Yoko performance—and a local TV station captured it in all its eccentric glory. The performance succeeded in mortifying her parents, and the reviews were abysmal. One critic even accused her of borrowing ideas. Humiliated and crushed, Yoko began getting out of bed in the middle of the night and trying to jump out of her 11th-floor window. Toshi always stopped her.

Until the night she took a handful of pills. 

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16. She Had A Superfan

When Yoko Ono woke up, she was in a padded room in a Tokyo mental hospital—and things only got stranger from there. An artist from New York showed up with flowers, claiming to be a fan of her loft shows with La Monte Young. After several refusals, Yoko finally agreed to see him. She didn’t wonder how he knew so much about the medication she was taking or why he’d sold everything he owned to buy a boat ticket to Japan. 

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17. She Thought He Was Her Knight In Shining Armor

Tony Cox was handsome, charming, and according to his aunt, gifted at “getting anything out of anybody”. He also had a talent for trouble. He was a dealer, he owed money all over town, and he was mixed up with the Mafia, which had put a contract out on him. By 1962, the FBI was after him too. That’s when Cox remembered La Monte Young telling him about a beautiful Japanese artist from a wealthy banking family who had ended up in a mental hospital.

When Toshi asked Tony to get Yoko out of the hospital, Tony was the perfect man for the job.

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18. She Didn’t Slow Down

Yoko’s life went into overdrive. Still fragile after her hospitalization, she married Tony Cox in November 1962—before finalizing her divorce from Toshi. Oops. They annulled the marriage and, once her divorce was official, Yoko and Tony married again in June 1963. Needless to say, her parents were horrified. At least Toshi had been Japanese. Tony was a foreigner without a career—and Yoko was seven months pregnant.

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19. She Thought A Baby Would Fix Her

Yoko knew she was not ready to have a child, but it didn’t matter: “Tony and the doctors frightened me into thinking that I could not safely have another abortion”. Tony’s concern for her safety didn’t exactly extend to the delivery. In August 1963, he showed up at work buzzing about how he’d delivered the baby himself. A worried colleague bolted to their house and found Yoko crumpled on the floor with her newborn. He rushed her and baby Kyoko to a hospital. 

Yoko was already struggling before the baby. Afterward? Things only got worse.

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20. She Was Drowning

Motherhood can be a lot, even when your life is on track. Yoko loved Kyoko, but later admitted she was “still struggling”: “I felt that if I didn’t have room for myself, how could I give room to another human being?” In 1964, she returned to New York, leaving Tony and Kyoko in Tokyo. When they joined her the following year, Yoko still wasn’t ready. Kyoko spent months at an acquaintance’s house, and even after returning home, was often left alone.

Yoko and Tony immersed themselves in the art world. Yoko was determined to create something unforgettable.

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21. She Blew Their Minds

What Yoko Ono wants, Yoko Ono gets, and in 1965, her “Cut Piece” shook the art world. Returning to Carnegie Recital Hall, her performance involved a large pair of scissors and an unusual request. Fully clothed, Yoko knelt silently onstage. She invited the audience to come up one at a time and cut off a piece of her clothing with the scissors. As the audience grew increasingly bold, even cutting her bra straps, Yoko’s face remained expressionless.  

Yoko said she was inspired by a Buddhist story. Others saw alienation, cultural identity, WWII, and the male gaze. Either way, she had just created what many consider to be her best work.

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22. She Entered Beatle Territory

What could be more perfect for Yoko than a Destruction in Art Symposium in London? Notably, she was the only woman invited to perform. While there, she, Tony, and Kyoko were broke, couch-surfing, and hustling hard. Yoko ended up landing a show at the Indica Gallery, where the Beatles were regulars. On November 7, 1966, the day before her opening, sleep-deprived and acid-fueled megastar John Lennon wandered in.

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23. Her Yes Became A No

Even though Yoko was still hanging her show, she grabbed John’s arm and gave him the grand tour. To view her Ceiling Painting, he climbed a ladder and used a magnifying glass to read one tiny word on the ceiling: “Yes”. John was caught off guard and delighted by the positive message. It would become part of their meet-cute lore.

But according to Lennon’s limo driver, when John tried to leave the gallery, Yoko followed him into the street, asking to come along. “No, we’re too busy!” he snapped—and sped away. 

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24. She Was Relentless

Yoko Ono wasn’t giving up on John Lennon—and her husband Tony Cox was right there cheering her on. She talked her way into Abbey Road Studios, but was quickly shown the door. She also hung around out front with the legendary Apple Scruffs, and one night she even jumped into John and his wife Cynthia’s limo. She also fired off note after note, asking John to fund her art.

One night, Cynthia watched John open up a package from Yoko. It was a broken cup smeared with red paint inside a Kotex box. For Cynthia, it was a giant red flag.

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25. She Had His Attention

Cynthia’s instincts were right. Despite John assuring Yoko’s calls were about getting money for her “avant-garde [nonsense],” by September 1967, he was sponsoring her solo show Half-a-Wind in London. The relationship was more than business, though. A few months later, while in India, John slipped a Yoko Easter egg into the song “Julia” with the lyric “Ocean child calls me”. “Ocean child” is the translation of Yoko’s name. 

Little did they know, their lives were about to be hit by a tidal wave. 

 Fairchild Archive, Getty Images

26. Her Life Was About To Get Messy

As John Lennon was in India, realizing he was in love with Yoko Ono , back in London, Yoko’s husband Tony was trying to keep his marriage together. Yoko refused Tony’s plan for a family trip to the South of France, but he and Kyoko went anyway. Conveniently, John’s wife Cynthia was also on vacation. John saw his opening and invited Yoko to his Kenwood estate. She went.

Kishin Shinoyama; Distributed by Geffen Records, Wikimedia Commons

27. She Mixed Business With Pleasure

Yoko wasn’t some random groupie, but walking into the home of the most famous people on the planet must have been daunting. After some awkwardness, they ended up in John’s recording studio listening to music. When Yoko suggested they make a tape together, they dropped some acid and got to work. “She was doing her funny voices,” John later recalled. “And then as the sun rose, we made love”. 

And then came the really awkward part: Cynthia came home early to find Yoko wearing her bathrobe and drinking tea with John. He looked at his wife and said, “Oh, hi”.

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28. Her Life Went Into Overdrive

Brace yourself: the May 1968 bathrobe incident was just the beginning. By summer, John had filed for divorce from Cynthia, who soon countersued. Then came a raid on John and Yoko’s flat by famous celebrity-busting detective Norman Pilcher. Before the dust from the bust had settled, John and Yoko dropped another shocker that would make headlines around the world.

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29. She Had Another Surprise In Store

Hard to believe, but John and Yoko managed to take the spotlight away from their chaotic substance bust: They were having a baby! On October 25, 1968, they announced that their child was due in February. One small snag? They were both still married to other people. Ouch. Fans and haters quickly calculated that the baby was conceived in May, when Yoko had visited John’s estate.

The couple had even picked a name: John Ono Lennon II. Then Yoko got sick.

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30. She Turned Tragedy Into Art

Life with John Lennon was already nonstop chaos, but on November 4, 1968, it turned into a nightmare when Yoko Ono was rushed to a London hospital with pregnancy complications. John slept on the floor beside her and recorded their fetus’s heartbeat. Two weeks later, Yoko miscarried. John blamed the relentless press and the stress of the bust. 

Instead of staying private, they released Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With the Lions. The album cover showed the couple in the hospital room, and tracks included the heartbeat recording followed by two minutes of silence. It was heartbreaking, unsettling—and very Yoko.

Unidentified (Michiganensian is the University of Michigan yearbook published by University of Michigan), Wikimedia Commons

31. She Broke An Unwritten Rule

The day after Yoko’s miscarriage, the Beatles released The White Album—and the cracks were starting to show. John later said, “The breakup of the Beatles can be heard on that album. Yoko had broken the band’s unwritten no-wives-in-the-studio rule, contributing to the polarizing “Revolution 9” while Paul McCartney was away. Paul later called her “an interference in the workplace…we just bottled it up and got on with it”.

As the Beatles were coming undone, John Lennon and Yoko Ono were about to make things official—in a very memorable way.

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32. Her Wedding Was A Farce

Yoko Ono may have been marrying a rock star at the height of his powers, but their nuptials weren’t exactly fairytale material. About a week after Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman, John and Yoko decided they wanted to tie the knot too. One problem: it was a logistical nightmare. They wanted to get married on a ferry, but Yoko lacked a visa. They flew to Paris, but were rejected by residency rules. They tried embassies and cruise ships without luck.

They finally got the job done in a 10-minute ceremony at the British Consulate in Gibraltar. Next came the honeymoon…

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33. Her Honeymoon Was A Circus…On Purpose

The couple had wanted to get married at sea to avoid the press, but when it came to the honeymoon, they invited the world into their bedroom. In March 1969, with Vietnam dominating headlines, John and Yoko staged a “Bed-In for Peace” at Amsterdam’s Hilton, while wearing pyjamas and giving more than 100 interviews in a week. It was pure performance art that “came directly from Yoko,” John said. 

Today it seems a little cringe (especially this photo of them waiting for the maid to change their sheets). But John didn’t care: “Yoko and I are quite willing to be the world’s clowns if by so doing it will do some good”. Yoko was just warming up.

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34. She Staged A Different Type Of Bed-In

Yoko’s next move wasn’t technically performance art, but it did involve a bed, and it definitely rubbed people the wrong way. Halfway through the recording of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, she, John, Kyoko, and Julian were in a car accident in Scotland. Yoko’s doctor ordered rest, but John still had a record to finish. Their solution? Bring a bed into the recording studio.

Let’s just say this bed-in achieved the complete opposite of peace.

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35. She Made Herself At Home

Most people can only dream of having a bed at work. Yoko Ono actually got one—and it was right on the Abbey Road studio floor. With visitors stopping by and the band trying to record around her, it wasn’t exactly helping the Beatles’ already strained relationship. Paul McCartney later admitted that the band “thought she was intrusive,” but added that John Lennon was “totally in love with her. And you’ve just got to respect that”.

Too bad one Beatle wasn’t feeling quite so generous.

 Art Zelin,  Getty Images

36. She Wasn’t Making Friends

George Harrison may have been known as the “Quiet Beatle,” but he didn’t keep quiet about Yoko. It was bad enough that George told her to her face that Bob Dylan thought she had a lousy reputation in New York. Things reached a breaking point when George watched from the control room as Yoko got out of bed and opened a package of his digestive cookies and helped herself. George blew up (and what he called her is best left unsaid).

As he later pointed out, “The group had problems long before Yoko came along”. Meanwhile, Yoko was having some problems of her own.

David Hume Kennerly, Wikimedia Commons

37. She And John Had A Dark Secret

One of the visitors to Abbey Road was Yoko’s friend and neighbor, Dan Richter. He later recalled: “It felt weird to be sitting on the bed talking to Yoko while the Beatles were working across the studio. I couldn’t help thinking that those guys were making rock and roll history, while I was sitting on this bed in the middle of the Abbey Road studio, handing Yoko a small white packet”.

The packet contained H—aka the hard stuff. “When we were on it, we were both on it,” Yoko later said. “But it was self-destructive and unhealthy”.

 Andrew Maclear, Getty Images

38. She Screamed For Peace

In September 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono headed to Canada for the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival. John was supposed to emcee, but at the last minute he offered to perform instead—with Yoko. It was here that Yoko’s singing was introduced to the world. It enraged those who didn’t like her, but some found it thrilling. As bassist Klaus Voorman recalled, “Yoko chortled, whooped, screamed, and moaned” through John’s song “Cold Turkey”. 

The crowd who had come to see acts like Little Richard and Chuck Berry got much more than they were expecting. So did John—the confidence to leave the Beatles.

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39. She Took The Fall

When the Beatles broke up in 1970, Yoko Ono became one of the most hated women on the planet. Heartbroken fans and the media were quick to cast her as the villain. Decades later, Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary gave viewers a chance to judge Yoko for themselves. Previously unseen footage showed her knitting, chatting with Linda McCartney, and sitting quietly on an amp while the Beatles worked. Yoko later blamed chauvinism and intolerance.

But the public backlash was nothing compared to what was coming.

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40. She Experienced A Mother’s Worst Nightmare

Just when it seemed Yoko’s life couldn’t get more chaotic, her ex-husband, Tony Cox, vanished—and took their daughter with him. John and Yoko moved to New York in 1971 as the search for Kyoko dragged on. After a bitter custody battle, Tony had disappeared with eight-year-old Kyoko, defying a court order. “For two years, we’ve been chasing them all over the world,” John said in 1972.

Despite hiring the best lawyers and investigators, the trail went cold. 

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41. Her Daughter’s Life Took A Bizarre Turn

What happened next sounds like a Netflix special. Tony and Kyoko were living under assumed names in a religious cult in Iowa. Kyoko had no TV on the farm, and her father avoided anyone who would talk about Yoko and John. When Kyoko begged to contact her mother, Tony told her it wasn’t what God wanted, and that Yoko would put him behind bars.

It would be 23 years before Yoko Ono saw her daughter again.

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42. She Was Humiliated

Yoko’s relationship with John was about to hit a spectacular new low. At an election night party in 1972, John was high and panicking that a Nixon victory could get him sent back to England. When a woman started caressing him, they moved into the next room and started getting intimate. Unfortunately, the walls were so thin that everyone at the party could hear.

“I was just frozen, stuck there, sitting,” Yoko recalled. Worse, no one could leave the party because all the coats were in the room with John and his new companion.

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43. She Was Unorthodox In Matters Of The Heart

Clearly Yoko’s marriage was in need of life support, and Yoko’s solution was very Yoko. She arranged for John to have an affair with their 23-year-old assistant. “I thought it’s better to give him a rest and me a rest,” Yoko explained. “May Pang was a very intelligent, attractive woman…I thought they’d be OK”. Even though Pang protested, Yoko arranged everything. 

Then John and May headed for Los Angeles to promote the album Mind Games—and decided to stay.

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44. She Was On A Break

John and May’s so-called “Lost Weekend” lasted 18 months, but Yoko wasn’t totally out of the picture. According to May, Yoko called John constantly—sometimes 15 times a day. John even encouraged Yoko to see other men. “We missed each other,” Yoko later admitted. “I was prepared to lose him, but it was better he came back. I didn’t think I would lose him”. In fact, she did something that made sure she didn’t.

 Ron Galella,  Getty Images

45. She Made A Move

In November 1974, John Lennon joined Elton John onstage at Madison Square Garden. Even though he and Yoko Ono were estranged, he sent her some tickets. She sent orchids backstage, and when John wore one onstage, she took it as a peace offering. They met backstage and rekindled their relationship. 

As Sean Lennon would later joke with his godfather, Elton John, “I was born nine months later, approximately…If it wasn’t for you playing that show, I can honestly say I wouldn’t even exist probably”.

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46. She Had A Bad Feeling

After Sean’s birth, John and Yoko withdrew from the public eye for five years. But by late 1980, they were back in the spotlight—and Yoko had a bad feeling. One of her tarot card readers had warned her “[John] sleeps in blood”. On December 8, as they returned from a recording session, a deranged fan opened fire on John. He was rushed to the hospital by officers, and a frantic Yoko followed in a second car. 

At 11:15 pm, the emergency room doctor told Yoko, “Nothing we were able to do could revive your husband”. Yoko was left to pick up the pieces.

Ron Galella, Getty Images

47. She Took Charge

It’s ironic that the person blamed for breaking up the Beatles played a key role in keeping John Lennon’s legacy alive. Even while he was alive, he had trusted her with his business. She handled their investments, publishing interests, and other complicated affairs. As John said, “When I was cleaning the cat [poo] and feeding Sean, she was sitting in rooms full of smoke with men in three-piece suits”.

After he was gone, she took charge of his estate, overseeing his music, copyrights, and memorabilia. She also created the Strawberry Fields memorial in Central Park, near The Dakota. The supposed villain had built a multimillion-dollar empire around John’s legacy—with a little help from the paranormal.

 Jack Mitchell, Getty Images

48. She Couldn’t Let Go

Yoko Ono was deeply into astrology, psychics, and tarot. After John Lennon’s demise, several unscrupulous psychics took advantage of her grief, warning that she and Sean were in danger or claiming that John was sending messages from beyond. Her companion Sam Havadtoy even went so far as to wiretap one psychic’s phone to show Yoko this person was swapping stories with the other psychics behind her back.

It didn’t matter. Yoko, drowning in grief and loneliness, refused to stop.  

 Ron Galella, Ltd.,  Getty Images

49. She Wouldn’t Be Written Off

Yoko refused to become a dusty relic of Beatles history. Instead, she reclaimed her place in the art world with major retrospectives at museums around the world. She also got her revenge on the dance floor. While in her 70s and 80s, she turned her once-mocked vocal style into a mind-boggling 13 number-one dance hits. In 2016, Billboard ranked her the 11th most successful dance club artist of all time.

Turns out the woman everyone thought they had figured out still had a few surprises left.

The Peabody Awards, Wikimedia Commons

50. She Never Broke Character 

Yoko Ono knew what it was like to sit still while the world cut her to pieces. In Cut Piece, she turned that vulnerability into art. Despite the decades of ridicule, blame, and vitriol, she kept making art, kept provoking, kept being Yoko. She didn’t make herself smaller. If anything, she doubled down on the weirdness (just Google Yoko Ono’s Fly or Self-Portrait if you’re feeling brave).

She was a revolutionary long before the Beatles—and she’s still refusing to play by anyone’s rules.

Earl McGehee -  www.ejmnet.com, Wikimedia Commons

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Sources:  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31