Yoko Ono

www.sergiomsoares.blogspot.com

Standard: American accent

Source: www.speakup.com.br

Language level: Upper intermediate

Opinions about Yoko Ono vary immensely. For her admires, like music critic Byron Coley, she is “one of the most important and enduring artist of the last half-century.” For her detractors, she is a mediocre performance artist whose dominance of her husband John Lennon led to the break-up of the Beatles. And yet, whether you love her or hat her, Yoko Ono is an important figure in the history of our times: who can forget the famous bed-ins that she and John staged in 1969, as a protest against the Vietnam War?

THERE WWILL BE AN ANSWER…

41 years later, the 77-year-old Yoko is still going strong. Last year she released an album on her son Sean Lennon’s Chimera label. Called Between My Head and the Sky, it features the first performance by the famous Plastic Ono Band since 1973. And whereas critics laughed at Yoko’s music in the past, this time she has received rave reviews. For The Daily Telegraph of London, for example, the album is “fantastically cool, fearlessly weird.” Here Yoko talks about the new album and the solution to the world’s problem:

Yoko Ono

(Japanese accent)

Oh, well, the solution is already here, but some people don’t realize it, and some people do. And the solution is to use the strong vibration that we discovered, such as music, such as art. They have (a) very strong vibration. One is auditory and the other is visual, but the visual vibration is very important, too. The visual vibration create future, creates things, and (the) auditory vibration heals things. So, between the two, if you can cover the earth with the vibration of art and (the) vibration of music, and this will become a planet of music and art, and that’s when everything’s going to be healed and we are going to have a peaceful world. Just like that. It’s going to happen very fast. And then, between us, we will still have this beautiful vibration of peace, which we will send it to the universe.

A WITCH

And Yoko doesn’t seem bothered about the criticism she received in the past. She called her last album, which was released in 2007, Yes, I’m a Witch:

Yoko Ono:

I had a life of my own, which had nothing to do with critics, you know. So, when they were attacking me, if that meant so much to me, I would be dead now. I mean, you know, spiritually dead. But it didn’t affect me so much because I was so much into my own music, and what to do about it and what to give to the world. And I was proud that I was giving so much, though they didn’t know that I was giving! And now this (is) very nice, I just don’t want myself to become sugar-coated.

IMAGINE

And she is positive about today’s artists:

What they’re doing now is incredibly revolutionary, and we don’t know it. I’ll tell you why: because, you know, they’re going into the area of communication, of imagining and communicating, no through words, but through vibration. And that’s really going to be the most important thing that’s going to happen to us, that we will be communicating and correcting the thing in the Planet Earth and everything through just thinking, through imagining.

THE NEW MEDITATION

Nor is she worried about today’s youngsters:

Yoko Ono:

In Japan there’s a group of children who don’t want to come out of their own room. And that’s being a very, very difficult thing for parents. And they’re all so upset that “My child is always in the room, and we have to just put a plate of food in front of it, and they just take it in.” And they’re thinking that that’s a terrible thing that the children (are) doing, but I think that those children are (the) equivalent of gurus 5,000 years ago, something like that, who’s being meditating, and it’s a form of meditation, and they are trying to not be with other people in their rooms meditating and somehow changing the world through meditation. And I don’t know if they (are so aware of that, but that’s what’s happening. And it’s a beautiful thing that’s happening, but, of course, the parents think (sic) it’s a terrible thing that’s happening. And it’s interesting, interesting that some of the kids decided that that’s the only way that they can survive or be alive.