{"id":10100,"date":"2026-04-09T14:34:34","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T14:34:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/yoko-onos-season-on-glass-reviewed-a-moving-reappraisal-of-grief-and-power-154073\/"},"modified":"2026-04-09T14:34:34","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T14:34:34","slug":"yoko-onos-season-on-glass-reviewed-a-moving-reappraisal-of-grief-and-power-154073","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/yoko-onos-season-on-glass-reviewed-a-moving-reappraisal-of-grief-and-power-154073\/","title":{"rendered":"Yoko Ono\u2019s Season On Glass reviewed: a moving reappraisal of grief and power"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cWoman\u2019s career is not taken seriously,\u201d Yoko Ono told writer Joy Press in the mid-\u201990s, \u201cso no-one\u2019s keeping an archive for you.\u201d The subsequent reappraisals of Ono\u2019s body of work over the decades have been informed by many things \u2013 Beatles adjacency, feminist critique, art historical reimaginings, experimental film explorations \u2013 but shadowing it all has been a sense that we\u2019re never quite getting the full picture of all Ono has achieved over her seven-decade career in art, music, film and writing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWoman\u2019s career is not taken seriously,\u201d Yoko Ono told writer Joy Press in the mid-\u201990s, \u201cso no-one\u2019s keeping an archive for you.\u201d The subsequent reappraisals of Ono\u2019s body of work over the decades have been informed by many things \u2013 Beatles adjacency, feminist critique, art historical reimaginings, experimental film explorations \u2013 but shadowing it all has been a sense that we\u2019re never quite getting the full picture of all Ono has achieved over her seven-decade career in art, music, film and writing.<\/p>\n

That Season Of Glass<\/em> is often read as her best album tells us much about how context informs reception. Recorded after the murder of her husband, John Lennon, it\u2019s long been understood as an exploration of grief and personal crisis. The truth is more complex, as much of the material on Season Of Glass<\/em> was written well before Lennon\u2019s murder in December 1980. But even on its release, the album\u2019s depths were overwritten both by the resonant shocks of Lennon\u2019s passing, and some degree of the twin forces of sexism and racism that Ono\u2019s simple presence released in many observers.<\/p>\n

For Ono, making music became refuge in 1981, a space where she could begin to process the loss of her husband. It\u2019s tempting also to see the studio, The Hit Factory, as a kind of shelter and isolation from the spiralling and uncontrollable energies of collective mourning that Lennon\u2019s death unleashed. Co-producing with Phil Spector, Ono fashioned an album that seemed to capture the colliding emotions and reflections that take over our bodies after loss \u2013 sadness, obviously, but also rage and anger, a sense of unfairness, confusion, a desire for peace and resolution, and a recognition, ultimately, that grief is a thread that never fully unspools.<\/p>\n

The core of Season Of Glass<\/em> seems, in many ways, to be the songs that manifest frustration and unfairness \u2013 \u201cI Don\u2019t Know Why\u201d, where the tension and ferocity of the music, coupled with Ono\u2019s furious declamation near the song\u2019s end \u2013 \u201cyou bastards!\/Hate us, hate me!\/We had everything\u201d \u2013 never quite conceals a febrile fragility. \u201cNo, No, No\u201d opens with gunshots before an itchy rhythm shepherds the song into a space of tightly delineated anxiety, guitars clanging and scratching as they weave under Ono\u2019s perplexed delivery.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s often the seemingly softer, gentler moments that carry the most emotional weight. The overarching mood of Season Of Glass<\/em> seems to be one of baffled numbness \u2013 baffled in both senses of the word, both perplexed and restrained \u2013 with a surface that feels brittle to touch, antiseptic cold. It captures the shock and shutdown that so often comes immediately after unexpected and traumatic loss. In this respect, the hope against hope of \u201cGoodbye Sadness\u201d, the blank-eyed blues of \u201cMother Of The Universe\u201d, and the dissolving melancholy of \u201cEven When You\u2019re Far Away\u201d makes for some of the most powerful material here, trying to find a tenderness within existential heartbreak.<\/p>\n

Of course, towering over everything is the extra track, Ono\u2019s 1981 near-hit, \u201cWalking On Thin Ice\u201d. It\u2019s one of the great artworks of the late 20th century in any medium. It was a moment of creative rupture for both Ono and Lennon, the latter seemingly re-energised by hearing what was emerging from a nascent post-punk underground \u2013 he\u2019d already perceptively joined the dots between Ono\u2019s \u2018solo scream\u2019 and the vocals on The B-52\u2019s\u2019 \u201cRock Lobster\u201d, and \u201cWalking On Thin Ice\u201d\u2019s frosty, deoxygenated disco-not-disco sits neatly alongside soon-to-come productions from the likes of Arthur Russell and Bill Laswell.<\/p>\n

It also features some of Lennon\u2019s most extraordinary guitar playing, something that Ono alone seemed capable of teasing out of her partner. There\u2019s a throughline of incendiary guitar underpinning Ono\u2019s solo material, starting with the furious freedoms of the Plastic Ono Band\u2019s \u201cWhy\u201d, back in 1970; it was as though Ono\u2019s focused unleashing of the vocal furies in her performance challenged Lennon to embrace the possibilities of free music within a rock\u2019n\u2019roll context, something that relatively few guitarists had truly grappled with at the time \u2013 maybe only Jimi Hendrix and Terry Kath had made a similar contextual leap.<\/p>\n

On its release, Season Of Glass<\/em> marked the beginning of a slow-burn critical reappraisal of Ono\u2019s music. It was received relatively well, which tells us more about (predominantly male) critics, and their capacity only to praise female artists when they\u2019re exploring suffering, grief and\/or melancholy, than it does about Ono\u2019s art. After all, there is not a huge leap from some of the material on her final album with Lennon,1980\u2019s Double Fantasy<\/em>, to the deceptive placidity of the songs and production here.<\/p>\n

But perhaps the cover art is our biggest clue to Season Of Glass<\/em>\u2019s complicated sensibility \u2013 clarity hiding in plain sight. Setting Lennon\u2019s blood-stained glasses next to a half-empty glass of water, with Central Park and the New York skyline in the background, it\u2019s both an elegant and direct address of what had happened and what gave rise, ultimately, to Season Of Glass<\/em>, and a startingly direct rupture of the real into the listener\u2019s everyday. When her label baulked at the image, Ono stood firm. \u201cI\u2019m not changing the cover,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is what John is now.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The post Yoko Ono\u2019s Season On Glass reviewed: a moving reappraisal of grief and power<\/a> appeared first on UNCUT<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWoman\u2019s career is not taken seriously,\u201d Yoko Ono told writer Joy Press in the mid-\u201990s, \u201cso no-one\u2019s keeping an archive for you.\u201d The subsequent reappraisals of Ono\u2019s body of work…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,88,3333],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-album","category-reviews","category-yoko-ono"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}