An Unlikely Dance Queen

By Josh Tyrangiel

Yoko Ono once thought she had a hit. The song was called Walking on Thin Ice, and it was such an eerie and intense piece of avant-pop that her husband John Lennon was sure it would finally transform the public perception of Yoko from a shrieking fraud who broke up the Beatles to an important musician on the fringe of the mainstream. Ono and Lennon had just finished mixing Walking on Thin Ice and were entering their apartment building on Dec. 8, 1980, when Mark David Chapman pulled a .38 from his pocket.

Ono released Walking on Thin Ice in February 1981 with the dedication "For John," but it failed to crack the Top 40. "I was so in shock at John's passing," says Ono, "that I forgot about the song and pretty much everything else. I certainly wasn't going to any clubs." Thus she had no idea that influential Paradise Garage DJ Larry Levan remixed Walking on Thin Ice into a dance-club anthem in the summer of '81. Levan died in 1992, and since then his many disciples in the DJ world have occasionally paid dual tribute to Levan and Ono with their own Ice mixes. Now an album-length collection of 10 of those tributes has deposed Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott and risen to the No. 1 spot on Billboard's club play chart, giving Yoko Ono, at age 70, her long-awaited hit. "Isn't that weird?" she asks giddily.

Yes and no. Ono's songbook is a museum basement of scattered treasures (she is trained in classical Japanese vocal techniques) and trash (she is also the world's most infamous banshee). Ono has long needed a curator, and in 2001 she gave a New Jersey duo called Orange Factory approval to go through her material and remix the 1970 innuendo-filled Open Your Box. "I'm a very difficult person," says Ono, "but when I heard it, I just thought it was beautiful. I cried."

The Orange Factory remix led to the Walking on Thin Ice remixes, which have the advantage of using Ono's best source material. Unlike recent Cher and Madonna dance tracks, which play up the robotic inauthenticity of the vocals for camp value, the Ice DJs seem to have genuine affection for Ono's dramatic howls. The Danny Tenaglia Walked Across the Lake Mix cleverly elongates her abstract vocal--"I gave you my knife, you gave me my life/Like a gush of wind in my hair"--until Ono sounds every bit like the grieving widow she is. The Pet Shop Boys' Radio Mix builds tension around a pop rhythm so magnificently that there's nothing--save the perversity of corporate radio--to keep it from becoming a crossover hit.

The popularity of the Ice remixes has made Ono a performer in demand again. She's done a few club shows--usually singing from the DJ booth over an instrumental track--and doesn't attempt to hide her pleasure at her unexpected relevance. "I think it's a message," she says. "When I first came out there was a lot of xenophobia and suspicion because I was an Oriental woman standing with John. It scared people, and I understood that in some way. Now I'm 70, and people could say 'She's old' and be intolerant, but they haven't. This club world has been so embracing. It's nice not to feel like an outsider. It's opened my life up." --By Josh Tyrangiel