Yoko Ono, Age 80, Still Has Moves, Dances with The Beastie Boys, Ira Glass, Roberta Flack & Friends

Yoko Ono, a Bad Dancer?

Pshaw! As she’s very like­ly aware, there’s not a thing wrong with her danc­ing. If there were, I doubt she’d be sport­ing saucy hot pants in the above video for the first sin­gle off of the Plas­tic Ono Band’s Take Me to the Land of Hell.

Her 80-year-old stems are in fan­tas­tic shape. May­haps this youth­ful vibe is a reflec­tion of the com­pa­ny she keeps. A bunch of nifty pals from Gen­er­a­tions X and Y showed up to shake their tail feath­ers on camera—the sur­viv­ing Beast­ie Boys (who also pro­duced), Reg­gie Watts, Cibo Mat­to’s Yuka Hon­da and Miho Hatori, gen­der-bend­ing per­former Justin Vivian Bond, and pub­lic radio star Ira Glass, to name but a few.

Appar­ent­ly, she’s not quite as tight with all her dance part­ners as the video would imply. Glass describes his involve­ment thus­ly:

She’s gra­cious, has to be remind­ed by a han­dler who in the world I am. Then total­ly acts nice, says some­thing along the lines of “I appre­ci­ate the work you do” which either means she’s heard my work or she hasn’t…. The song is called “Bad Dancer” so I’m the per­fect par­tic­i­pant because—though I love to dance, I have no illu­sions. I’m a spaz. I stand in front of the cam­era and 20 han­dlers and hip­sters and pub­li­cists and crew and Yoko Ono and I think a reporter from Rolling Stone and I tell myself to pre­tend I can do this and I dance.

Per­haps declar­ing her­self a Bad Dancer is Ono’s way of encour­ag­ing self-con­scious wall hug­gers to drop their inhi­bi­tions and join in the fun. It’s an approach to life, and aging, that made a cult clas­sic of Harold and Maude.

Place your bets

Watch your step

I’m a bad dancer

With no regrets

 Relat­ed Con­tent:

Yoko Ono’s Make-Up Tips for Men

Watch John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Two Appear­ances on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971 and 72

Dis­cov­ered: Con­ver­sa­tion with John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Tim­o­thy Leary at Mon­tre­al Bed-In (1969)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day still gets a bang out of Yoko Ono’s FLY. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday-