the great songs (vii) - walking on thin ice

I've held back a little from this one but it had to come at some point. Yoko Ono's Walking On Thin Ice is an achievement that it has never been possible to dispassionately assess or appreciate separately from the circumstances in which it appeared.

This is the song John & Yoko were working on the night that Lennon was murdered. The value he placed on the song is seen in the comments about it that formed part of Yoko's statement that filled the back-cover of the single sleeve.

When John and Yoko said in the summer of 1980 that their new work was dance-oriented, some of us (me especially) lamented the impact of the disco genre on their work. What we didn't know was that the dance club scene of New York in those days was anything but disco. This is dance music of a different order.

There is so much that can and ought to be said, somewhere, about the musical art of Yoko Ono. This is undoubtedly not that place...but I'll happily add a little grist to that particular mill.

The title is resonant of a deep stream of imagery in Yoko's musical work. The images of glass and ice recur regularly and stand as metaphors of pain and of a suffocating quiesence, a use made all the more startling by the anger that often surfaces with its own jagged edges. The pairing of 'knife' and 'life' is also the expected one; only the bleeding is absent here.

Yoko's winter mileau may be due to being raised in Japan (one assumes it cold there) but, whatever the origin, it's the dominant season in her work - Winter Song; Is Winter Here To Stay? and Looking Over From My Hotel Window on the album Approximately Infinite Universe all trade in its currency.

And so it's no surprise that this girl is walking on thin ice. There is danger - imminent danger. There is freedom - but it is fragile and threatened. There is death - and it is inevitable and irreversible.

It's a long track and benefits from a return (in the middle & closing sections) to some of the non-verbal vocal expression that marked Yoko's earlier work (one reviewer of the album that followed that summer, Season of Glass, asked where the primal screaming was when we needed it most - a rather lame grasp of the nature of her grief, and of her art).

The guitar work on this song by John (the last he would ever record) has been celebrated and it is certainly in keeping with the song's vehement fragility. The song would never have fitted on either Double Fantasy, nor what would become the posthumous release Milk & Honey. It was always intended to be a single in its own right, with Yoko both A and B-side*. Rightly so.

They say the lake is as big as the ocean.
I wonder if she knew about it?

Its dimensions and depths were only just to be discovered.

I may cry some day
but the tears will dry, whichever way;
and when our hearts return to ashes
it'll be just a story
it'll be just a story.

*The actual B-side is an older song of Yoko's - It Happened opens here with dialogue recorded between John and Yoko on a stroll through Central Park. The song is both sweet and sad and carries, along with its A-side, an almost prophetic quality ("It happened at a time of my life when I least expected...and I know there's no return, no way").

nb: Happily, but unintentionally, this has been posted on Yoko's 76th birthday.