In March 1964, when Yoko Ono was 31, she performed Cut Piece, a piece that she would go on to stage five more times in her life—four times in the 1960s, and once more in 2003, at age 70. In Cut Piece, Ono sits on a stage in her best clothes with a placid expression as she instructs audience members to, one by one, take the pair of scissors she’s placed beside her and cut off a small piece of her clothing. In the ’60s, these performances took menacing turns: male participants, products of the era’s fraught understanding of sexual freedom, felt emboldened to strip Ono bare. Spectators were turned into passive witnesses. 

Cut Piece—perhaps Ono’s greatest work—was lauded as a feminist statement about the subordination of women at a time when feminism had yet to meaningfully pervade the avant-garde. Although the performance testifies to the ease with which women are objectified, it communicates multitudes through the prism of Ono’s body: it also tells the story of her native Japan’s devastation during and after World War II, which she lived through as a child. And, it’s about her relationship with John Lennon, which transformed her private life into a public spectacle, as well as the sacrifice and surrender that Ono, a passionate anti-war activist, considers a precondition for peace.

Yoko, a new biography about Ono by David Sheff, opens with a prologue about Cut Piece, introducing her—as provocateur, martyr, and social experimenter—through the lens of her own creation. Sheff, who came up as a journalist in the eighties and nineties, knew Ono and Lennon when the latter was still alive, and his previously published interviews with the couple (and, more recently, just Ono) inform large portions of the book.

Source: artnews.com/Beatrice Loayza

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It is to Paul McCartney‘s credit that he has never based his songwriting or recording tendencies on what people expect from him. He follows his muse wherever it takes him, and that’s why his albums tend to be packed with variety.

For example, the 1975 Wings album Venus and Mars is a mostly rocking affair, as McCartney reestablished the band as a full unit. But he also included on that album “You Gave Me the Answer,” which hearkens back to a much earlier era of music.
“Answer” the Call

After a few years of false starts and disappointments, Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles band Wings hit its stride in a major way with the 1973 album Band on the Run. Ironically, that album was delivered by a piecemeal unit, as the group had been decimated by defections to just three members.

Coming off that triumph, McCartney looked to once again beef up the Wings roster so they could tour effectively. The band added two new members for the 1975 album Venus and Mars, which leaned into a hard-rocking sound so listeners knew what the reconfigured Wings lineup could deliver.

Source: americansongwriter.com/Jim Beviglia

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The recording of 1968's 'The White Album' was a tumultuous time for The Beatles. The avant-garde album was the band's follow up to their incredibly successful 1967 work 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' captured the zeitgeist of the so-called summer of love and spent 27 weeks at the top of the Record Retailer chart in the United Kingdom.

'The White Album' sessions were notoriously feisty. Ringo Starr left the band for a period as they recorded 'Back in the USSR'. The drummer was fed up with the mood, as The Beatles clashed.

About that period of recording, Paul McCartney said: "There was a lot of friction during that album. We were just about to break up, and that was tense in itself". John Lennon later added: "The break-up of The Beatles can be heard on that album."

Another song on the album which divided the band was 'Revolution 9'. The track is a sound collage and began as the extended ending to John's song 'Revolution', a song warning against violent revolutionary tactics that was released in several versions by the band in 1968.

Yoko Ono and George Harrison worked with John on 'Revolution 9', which John wanted to be a sonic representation of an uprising. About it, he said: "'Revolution 9' was an unconscious picture of what I actually think will happen when it happens; just like a drawing of a revolution.

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"All the thing was made with loops. I had about 30 loops going, fed them onto one basic track. I was getting classical tapes, going upstairs and chopping them up, making it backwards and things like that, to get the sound effects.

"One thing was an engineer’s testing voice saying, ‘This is EMI test series number nine’. I just cut up whatever he said and I’d number nine it.

Source: liverpoolecho.co.uk/Dan Haygarth

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The tape is said to be a demo for the Fab Four to sign to Decca back in 1962.  A rare Beatles recording has been unearthed in a record store in Canada.  The tape is thought to be a rare recording of a session they had to sign with Decca. History though would detail how Decca passed on the band, leading to their legacy with George Martin and Parlophone.

While Sir Paul McCartney continues to clean up previous songs by The Beatles through the use of artificial intelligence, will it be enough for a recent discovery found in Canada?  Billboard reported that a rare, 15 track demo of The Beatles was unearthed in a record store in Vancouver, with the record store’s owner thinking he had just found a bootleg of the band - a bootleg being an unofficial record of either a band’s demos or live recordings.

A tape long thought lost recorded by The Beatles before their debut album through Parlophone has been unearthed in Canada.A tape long thought lost recorded by The Beatles before their debut album through Parlophone has been unearthed in Canada.

“I just figured it was a tape off a bootleg record,” Rob Frith, the owner of Neptoon Records posted on social media, “after hearing it last night for the first time, it sounds like a master tape. The quality is unreal.

Source: yorkshirepost.co.uk/Benjamin Jackson

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Musical genres often weave in and out of themselves. There is a little pop to be found in rock, hip-hop to be found in pop, and country to be found pretty much everywhere these days…While that melting pot of sound is celebrated by most musicians, there is one genre in particular than John Lennon could never get on board with incorporating. Find out which genre Lennon hated, below.
The Genre John Lennon Hated: “Even More Stupid Than Rock and Roll”

Jazz isn’t a genre for everyone. In fact, it’s likely one of the most hated genres of music. That’s likely due to its unique musical language. In many ways, it’s a genre made for musicians–almost as if you need a whole new vocabulary to be able to understand it. While many rock stars of Lennon’s age infused jazz elements into their music, the former Beatle couldn’t stomach it.

While rock music is certainly not the most austere genre, Lennon once called jazz “even more stupid than rock and roll.” He found that jazz lacked direction and sounded more like a jumbled mess of chords and melodies. While many would likely agree with him, his opinion seemed to be informed by the Beatles’ early days, when they were shut out of many a jazz club…

“We were anti-jazz,” Lennon once said. “I think it is sh** music, even more stupid than rock and roll. Jazz never gets anywhere, never does anything, it’s always the same, and all they do is drink pints of beer. We hated it because in those early days, they wouldn’t let us play at those clubs.”

Source: Alex Hopper/americansongwriter.com

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If you’d been taking bets in 1970 on which former Beatle would be the most successful in the new decade, George Harrison was definitely – to borrow the name of one of his future hits – the dark horse. But as he’d sing in that tune, “Baby, it looks like I’ve been breaking out.”

In November, he turned the page on the Fabs with All Things Must Pass, a triple album brimming with artistic confidence and gorgeous, melancholy songs, not to mention the world’s first-ever God-conscious Number 1 single.

The album topped the charts around the globe, earned two Grammy nominations and had critics spouting superlatives about the formerly quiet one. As Melody Maker put it, “Garbo talks! – Harrison is free!”

Free maybe, but as 1971 unfolded, he was caught up in all kinds of trouble and strife. There was the prolonged legal drama of the Beatles’ split, the newly filed copyright infringement case over My Sweet Lord (in the context of its similarity to the Chiffons’ He’s So Fine), a marriage on the rocks and a drug-addled producer who was losing his mind.

Source: guitarworld.com

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To this, George had single-handedly taken on the Concert for Bangladesh, a combination concert-album-film, all to raise money for a country beset by natural disaster and genocide.