Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band just released a music video for a cheery and silly song called “Bad Dancer.” It begins with Ono mugging in a chair, practically drowning in an oversize top hat, and spouting an adorable, fake truism: “When your heart is dancing/Your mind is bouncing.” Then comes a Destiny’s Child–style repetition of bounce-bounce-bounce-bounce, ad nauseum, as a robot hops and she paints on an huge canvas. The whole thing has a catchy simplicity and oddness that, if she wasn’t already famous, would probably rocket her to Internet stardom.
But she is famous, and thus the music video is filled with a variety of celebrities and musicians and personalities. Just as Paul McCartney gathered a cadre of his bold-name friends to appear and disappear around a piano in “Queenie Eye,” Yoko Ono recruited two Beastie Boys, Ira Glass (!), Questlove, Roberta Flack, and others to prance about, limbs akimbo, and dance as if they were bad dancers. But it’s not all show-off-your-famous-fellows for Ono. The song has a solidly cool attitude about life. In this world, you can leap and wiggle and giggle and dance, all the while singing, “I’m a bad dancer, with no regrets!”