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Yoko: Love her or loathe her? Take the poll.
 

 
The 75-year-old widow of Beatle John Lennon has never won rave reviews for her musical output. But over the course of the past few years, she’s managed to score a handful of hits in the one genre where looking—and sounding—bizarre are critical calling cards: dance music.
 

 
This month Yoko Ono hit #1 hit on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart with her remix EP of club takes on “Give Peace a Chance,” the infamous song she and Lennon recorded in June of ’69 during their weeklong Bed-In-For-Peace in a Montreal hotel room.

Ono said she re-recorded the simple folk song as an “uplifting poetic narrative resonating with a contemporary sense of urgency and optimism.” As you might imagine, in addition to Ono’s spoken mantra recitation of the track’s title, she’s also thrown in some of her patented spoken-word poems into the block-rockin’ mix.
 
 
Now I may be the only person I know who has an entire CD shelf dedicated to Yoko Ono’s musical career. Hell, I wonder if Ono even has the double-disc 1997 reissue of Fly (which features the nearly 23-minute, mind-melting title track full of vocal ululations, screeches, and demented bird calls) in her library next to the 1996 Rising remix EP and the sadly never-unwrapped copy of Feeling the Space, which opens with the almost pleasant pseudo-Dusty Springfield soul tune “Growing Pain.”
 
Gosh, I don’t know which one of the new “Peace” remixes I like best: “The Dave Aude Club Mix” —which sounds like an infinite loop of drum machine beats played on a kid’s keyboard bubbling under a creepy robot voice hissing the title phrase — or the “Johnny Vicious Warehouse Dub,” which is like a drill press to the temple applied by a Satanic-voiced gremlin. At least the “Mike Cruz Dub” features a chorus singing the signature hook, even if it doesn’t come in until almost five minutes of throbbing goodness. And, keep in mind, I actually really like club music.
 
It’s not the first time Ono has dabbled in dance tracks, though you might have just recently put 1985’s “Hell in Paradise,” which hit #16 on the dance charts, out of your head. In case you needed a reboot, the song was accompanied by this bananas video featuring little people wrestling with giants.

And that song was only her second-biggest dance hit of the ’80s, after another unexpected dance-floor sensation, “Walking on Thin Ice.”

 

 
Ono has said she released the “Peace” remixes because she feels the song’s message is more relevant and necessary today than it ever was. But you have to wonder just what that message is, buried in a sea of jeep beats, trance-inducing percussive assaults and a nearly total stripping back of the actual lyrics? Boogie while Rome burns? Shake it until the terrorists lay down their arms? Do the Soulja Boy to get Bush out of office?
 
 
Maybe Ono is trying to spread the word to a new generation who might find the original to be a bit, well, quaint and might have wondered just what John meant with lines about banisters, canisters, fishops, and pop eyes. But still, it was the emotionally, gripping chorus that made the concept of total human harmony seem like something we might reasonably achieve if we all just mellowed out and left our hang-ups at the door.
 
 
In the “Tommie Sunshine Vocal Mix” Ono (finally!) gets around to the new message, rap-talking “3 billion of us dreaming together/it’s time for action/action is peace/think peace, act peace, spread peace/shed light in darkness, imagine peace.” And there, among the trippy chorus, acres of house beats, and hallelujah synth twiddles is her point.

 

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