When Yoko Ono first recorded “Warzone,” the first track from her new album of the same name, she painted a bleak picture — one where towns burn, throats choke, skin peels and bones melt. The only indication these lyrics referred to her own experience came with their inclusion in Ono’s 1994 autobiographical off-Broadway musical, “New York Rock.”
Unlike the original, the new rendition makes an explicit claim to currency, adding the declaration, “We are living in a warzone / It’s a warzone” to the song’s minimalist chorus. Other additions denounce machismo, gun culture, cosmetics and white-collar greed to broaden the song’s scope — “Men flashing their guns and balls / Women looking like barbie dolls,” and “Guys stealing zillions gets away / While we knock each other to make our day.” This, for Ono, is war.
The song’s music elaborates this definition, trading punk for an avant-garde collection of anguished animal sounds, the percussive discharge of a machine gun, anticipatory beeping, explosions and inexorable piano notes. The effect mirrors “Revolution 9,” the Ono-influenced track from The Beatles’ eponymous album. As the titles indicate, where that song collected the sounds of revolution, this one collects the sounds of war.
Despite using the word ad nauseam, Ono has never provided a workable definition for peace — last year’s exhibition “Peace Is Power” was hardly clarifying — so it’s striking she defines its opposite here. Peace for Ono is, by deduction, a political ideal — not just freedom from conflict, but freedom from consumerism and greed.
In the press release for her new album, Ono said, “The world is so messed up. Things are very difficult for everybody.” If a 16-second scream was her tweeted response to the 2016 election, “Warzone” is her musical one. It’s unsurprising, then, that the most-represented previous Ono release on “Warzone” — an album of covers — is “Starpeace,” her political rebuttal to the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative.
Rerecording old music is a reliable late-career move that Ono — underappreciated in her prime — has underutilized. Last month, fellow octogenarian Loretta Lynn deployed the strategy in the album “Wouldn’t It Be Great” for six new versions of songs from her own catalogue. Like Lynn’s new rendition of “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Ono’s songs take on a new political dimension in an era when politics and culture intersect. Unlike Lynn, Ono, with “I Love You Earth,” pushes environmentalism as Lynn defends coal.
Yet the shared message of Ono and Lynn is the endurance of their lyrics. Prior to “Warzone,” Ono had released a series of remixes, most recently 2016’s “Yes, I’m a Witch Too,” but the re-recorded vocals on “Warzone” afford her a flexibility mere remixes do not. Instead of working backward from extant vocal tracks, Ono can change phrasings, update lyrics and include a song she co-wrote but never recorded in-studio: “Imagine.” It took Ono 48 years to receive a songwriting credit for the song — but here it is, stripped to its lyrical core.
The recording forms part of a larger project for Ono, following remasters of the 1971 “Imagine” album, 1972 and 2000 films, and new Ono-designed mosaics at the 72nd Street subway station in New York. Why Ono did not postpone this blitz until the 50th anniversary of the “Imagine” project is unclear, but a gratuitous two-page spread in the book, “Imagine John Yoko,” released alongside the remasters could offer an explanation. On the left is a photo of the National Music Publishers’ Association’s 2017 Centennial Song Award for Lennon and — conspicuously — Ono, and on the right is a 1980 quote from Lennon crediting Ono for “Imagine.” With her cover of “Imagine,” Ono is reclaiming what was always hers.
What is remarkable about “Warzone” is how relevant Ono’s lyrics remain. With an extensive catalogue, Ono has the benefit of selecting only songs that endure — there’s no “Woman Is the N—r of the World” here — but she could have written many of the lyrics on “Warzone” in response to contemporary politics. “Children Power” is newly resonant after Parkland, and “Woman Power” becomes an anthem of the #MeToo movement with the lyrics, “Have you anything to say / Except ‘Make no mistake about it / I’m the president, you hear!’” If there’s a song on “Warzone” that does not hold up to contemporary scrutiny, it’s “I Love All of Me,” which, like Nina Simone’s “Four Women,” features multiple oppressed narrators. Unlike Simone, however, Ono makes her narrators crass stereotypes — her black man, for instance, has “come to terms with his anger.”
“Warzone” is nevertheless a warranted victory lap for an artist who was punk before punk and avant-garde before it went mainstream. Yet the question Ono raises when she re-records activist lyrics is what her original activism accomplished. It’s a question “Warzone” does not answer.
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