Feeling the Space

Like many of the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators parading through downtown Los Angeles at the Women’s March on January 21, 2017, the young woman with pink streaks in her hair carried a handmade sign expressing its carrier’s personal sentiment. On the day after the presidential inauguration ignited a massive global protest, this marcher waved a distinctly original three-word message: In block letters on black paper it read, ‘Yoko Sent Me.’

The fact that the once-reviled Yoko Ono is inspiring a new generation of activists comes as no surprise if you’ve listened to Feeling the Space, her personal-is-political 1973 album that resonates remarkably forty-four years later. On such songs as the righteous chant ‘Woman Power’, the empathetic ballad ‘Angry Young Woman’, the hilarious proto-grrrl ‘Potbelly Rocker’, and the satirical ‘Men Men Men’, Ono sings in surprisingly straightforward fashion about the burdens carried by women and the mandate for feminism. Supported by such skilled studio vets as guitarist David Spinozza, sax player Michael Brecker, and drummer Jim Keltner, this is perhaps Yoko’s most accessible album, and her most intimate. Feeling the Space was recorded during the time when the avant-garde visionary artist became estranged from her rock-star husband John Lennon. He plays only briefly on the album (billed as ‘Johnny O’cean’); she produced and wrote all the songs.

The album’s sheer musicality should have shut up the detractors who denied her abilities. Yes, she sings; the album contains only a few examples of the raw vocal experiments for which she became famous. Mostly, Yoko’s pain and vulnerability, and also her declaration of independence, are communicated simply and gingerly, as if she were still sorting out very strong emotions that needed clear expression, not, this time, the purging power of a wail. ‘Run Run Run’, a gentle tune, is almost like a directed meditation, as a woman explores the territory that opens around her, that she forces open, as she takes flight (to a splendid keyboard dance by Ken Ascher). Ono was literally feeling her space. But rather than striking a separatist vibe, this album is also notable for the quality of the singer’s collaboration with the musicians, the way the instrumentalists answer her articulations with stirring solos.

The result is a definitive soundtrack/document of the era of consciousness raising and of radical critique of the family structure. Yoko and company deliver this hard message soft rock style, or as soft as Yoko could get – think of Feeling the Space as Tapestry with talons, or the second-wave godmother of Lemonade. Yoko was on the front lines of the women’s liberation movement. Dedicated ‘to the sisters who died in pain and sorrow and those who are now in prisons and in mental hospitals for being unable to survive in the male society’, it’s an emotional exploration of the psychological toll of oppression.

As an extra track in this reissue and also in the 1992 Onobox, there’s a live version of the eternally prescient ‘Coffin Car’ – as spectacularly right-on a song as her spouse ever wrote. In its prologue, she tells a humbling story about how the intense pressure on her as a Beatles wife – and an artsy, foreign, weirdo wife to boot – caused her to develop, in her 30s, a stutter. She’s humble and humorous, seeking not pity but to explain by example the cultural damnation of women, niggers of the world.

At the International Women’s Conference organized by the National Organization of Women in 1973, Yoko met an attendee from the Midwest who had left her husband and children. This figure inspired one of this album’s best tracks, ‘Angry Young Woman’, as well as, one guesses, Yoko’s own separation from John. She sings with impressive understanding about the everyday struggles of women in families: the way a demand for a shirt or dinner can become a daily insult, a reminder of patriarchal servitude, of domestic ‘duty’. After all, who more than Yoko suffered the sexist – and racist – derision of 20th century culture, both Western and Eastern (no refuge for Yoko!).

Yet one of the qualities that makes Yoko Yoko is her eternal optimism. ‘There’s no way back, so just keep walking’, she tells the ‘Angry Young Woman’. ‘When you turn the corner you’ll see the new world.’ It’s a message of encouragement that, tragically, is as needed in 2017 as in 1973. The young women are still walking, sent by Yoko.