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As an academic counterpoint to that myth, Massachusetts singer-songwriter Dar Williams offered up I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono, a pleasant folk-based track off her latest effort, The Green Room, in defence of Ono's merits as a groundbreaking avant-garde artist who faced a wrath of public outcry after her union with John Lennon.
"She's a very influential person within a subculture, but her subculture met the blinding rays of the mainstream," says Williams, who plays a sold-out National Library auditorium show Saturday night (with Moxy Fruvous singer-percussionist Jian Ghomeshi). "She was vilified and made fun of, yet her art grew as a result of that."
When pointed out the Barenaked Ladies' perspective, Williams, 33, laughs: "When I was writing my song, I thought, 'Didn't someone write a song called Be My Yoko Ono?' Oh well, it was probably done by some little band.
"Then I found out it was the Barenaked Ladies. And I went, 'Ohhhhh, s---t!' Now I know that's going to haunt me."
Williams relates to the song because she too believes in staying true to her art, even if most of the world might not relate to her lyrical journeys.
"Because American culture is so obsessed with the cult of personality, somebody like (Yoko) was determined to say, 'I'll show you what a cult it is.' "
Following her graduation from Connecticut's Wesleyan College, where she majored in theatre and religion, Williams launched a music career in the Boston-Cambridge coffeehouse folk circuit in the early 1990s.
She endured her fair share of 'no one's listening' -- she dubbed a trek along the northeastern U.S. folk circuit an "empty bar" tour. In '93, she recorded a debut, The Honesty Room, before folk/roots label Razor & Tie picked up on it and signed her by 1995.
Along with 1996's Mortal City and '97's End of the Summer, Williams takes the listener through the inner journeys of growing up as a woman in modern America.
A loyal fan following began to emerge, helped by appearances such as the 1998 Lilith Fair tour and teaming up with Lucy Kaplansky and Richard Shindell a year later to form the supergroup Cry Cry Cry.
Williams says the central theme of The Green World, released last fall, is accepting the world as it is.
"I like the sense of evolution," she says. "On the one hand, I feel I have to risk putting out a big 'nothing' which gets scary every time I do that.
"But there's a trust I'm given from my audiences, and there's no denying the comfort of knowing I'm allowed to go out on these journeys I have. Sometimes I come back with dirt, sometimes I come back with gold."