|
Yoko Ono [extended]
- Live Peace in Toronto 1969 [Apple, 1969]
C
- Some Time in New York City [Apple, 1972]
C
- Double Fantasy [Capitol, 1980]
A
- Season of Glass [Geffen, 1981]
A-
- It's Alright [Polydor, 1982]
B-
- Milk and Honey [Polydor, 1984]
A
- Starpeace [Polydor, 1985]
B-
- Walking on Thin Ice [Rykodisc, 1992]
A
- Rising [Capitol, 1995]
A-
- New York Rock [Capitol, 1995]
D+
- Blueprint for a Surprise [Capitol, 2001]
*
- Between My Head and the Sky [Chimera, 2009]
***
- Take Me to the Land of Hell [Chimera Music, 2013]
A-
See Also:
Consumer Guide Reviews:
The Plastic Ono Band: Live Peace in Toronto 1969 [Apple, 1969]
This is the famous Lennon/Clapton/Ono/Voorman/White (Voorman?/White?) concert. I happened to be there and it wasn't so hot live. It is worse recorded. The anti-Yoko reaction has long since passed beyond boorishness, but that doesn't mean I want to hear her keen for 20 minutes, and the rock side is raw and badly recorded, with Clapton's masterful lead obscured by Lennon's rhythm. Of value primarily as a document. C
John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band: Some Time in New York City [Apple, 1972]
Half caterwauling live weirdness with the Mothers of Invention, half tuneless topical rock songs with Elephant's Memory, this is where Lennon risks his charisma instead of investing it. I like its rawness and its basic good-heartedness, though J&Y's politics are frequently condescending. But if agitprop is one thing and wrong-headed agitprop another, agitprop that doesn't reach its intended audience is hardly a thing at all. C
John Lennon/Yoko Ono: Double Fantasy [Capitol, 1980]
In a special message for all the ignorami who think he never should have married the pretentious bitch, John turns the professional rock he hacked his way through when they were separated to the specifics of his life (and genius) as it's now constituted. In a special message for all the ignorami who think pretentious bipeds should stay out of recording studios, Yoko keeps up with him. This is an unfashionable piece of music--only Poly Styrene, of all people, has gotten away with anything remotely similar all year. But you don't have to be married to hear its commitment and command. I hope. A
Season of Glass [Geffen, 1981]
The little voice "chokes" and "crackles" (her words), the production relies on the usual sessioneers (Newmark, McCracken, yawn), and the composition is elementary (not primal). Yet damn near every song is affecting, and the segue from "Extension 33"'s retrospective irony to "No, No, No"'s cut-off vulnerability positively gut-wrenching. After all, we've never heard a forty-eight-year-old learn to rock (not rock and roll) before. Or a widow's concept album, either. A-
It's Alright [Polydor, 1982]
Supposedly a big shrewdie, Yoko is transcendently simplistic at the core, which in many ways worked better when she was an avant-gardist than it does in her belated pop phase. This somewhat presumptuous message of hope to the world is cunningly devised around the edges--she exploits the studio with fifty years' and countless dollars' worth of childlike delight. but back at the core, the singing and the songs are more one-dimensional than good pop ever is. B-
John Lennon/Yoko Ono: Milk and Honey [Polydor, 1984]
Those too numbed by tragedy or hope to connect with Double Fantasy aren't likely to hear this one either--it's definitely more of the same, in John's case outtakes. But these were clearly rejected on conceptual rather than musical grounds, as just too quirky to suit the careful househusband image John wanted for his return to the arena. Which is why I like them better, especially spiced with asides he would have erased before final release. Yoko's songs are more recent and that's another plus, because her pop only began to jell with Double Fantasy; the horny querulousness of "Sleepless Night" and the cricket synthesizers on "You're the One" are confident personal elaborations of a tradition she comes to secondhand. Only the two middle cuts on the B get soupy. What a farewell. A
Starpeace [Polydor, 1985]
Bill Laswell looked like the perfect choice to assist Yoko's rebound from It's Alright, especially given his commitment to non-Western music and his penchant for avant-gardists, mostly jazzmen but a few of Yoko's ilk. But despite unfailingly humorless lyrics and the skillful input of Laswell regulars from Aiyb Dieng to Anton Fier, the result is insistently, self-consciously, and rather clumsily light in the head. Often it tries to be cute, which is difficult for anyone and utterly impossibly for Laswell, who isn't exactly a froth specialist. Sure he helps with the hooks and beats, that's his job, but the overall effect is as joyless as the kind of record Toto might cut for a girlfriend of their manager's--the soulless studio-rock anti-intellectuals have always accused him of making. Great exception: "You and I," a silly love song for Sean. B-
Walking on Thin Ice [Rykodisc, 1992]
Four CDs of Patsy nod me out, four of Aretha make me wonder, but six of Onobox get me going. Often not great and sometimes awful, they brim with previously unheard or unnoticed highs. This 19-cut condensation skips the educational stuff and ought to convert anybody with better taste than Albert Goldman--namely, you. As a student of Western composition, an adept of Japanese vocal technique, and an avant-gardist sworn to throw convention to the wind, Yoko was unready to rock three different ways. Yet on the four early songs the transparent simplicity she strives for sounds truer than the dumb authenticity of Elephant's Memory, and by the '80s she's mastered a studio-rock art-pop whose unremarkable timbres and textures are subtly transformed by her inappropriate training. A transparently simple, transcendently self-conscious triumph of the will--and of the "Woman Power" she was corny and prophetic enough to crow about back when she was the weirdo who broke up the Beatles. A
Yoko Ono/IMA: Rising [Capitol, 1995]
Finally history leaves Yoko free to find the music her life has taught her to make. Neither primitivist/minimalist retro nor a final awkward attempt to improve on Season of Glass, this brims with the calm confidence of an semidetached bystander now hailed as a direct influence by all manner of rock bohemians, including some too snobbish to understand that, actually, her late husband was the stone genius in the partnership. Its precondition is the avant-garde's new pop panache. In the world before Nirvana, I doubt any major would have bankrolled the 14-minute title track's virtuoso vocalese, or the shrieks that fill a six-minute number of identical title and lyric: "I'm Dying." What '80s bizzer would have been down with her arch, lovely animal imitations, or the starkly literal "Turned the Corner," or the plainly simple "New York Woman," or the platitudinous "Revelations"? But these days Courtney could cover "Talking to the Universe" and no one would blink. A-
New York Rock [Capitol, 1995]
It's reassuring that she came back to cut the album of her life, because this doomed musical's utter absence of pop instinct had me assuming the worst--that she was past learning what it means to communicate with an audience, that she'd twisted her angel's arm, that she didn't respect her own songs. Not only did she lack the modesty to stick with the best, she betrayed the good ones. The arrangements are dreck, and the performances--oy. Eminences from Rosanne Cash to the B-52's have covered her with the love she deserves, but the canniest Broadway belter would wreck material so sensibility-specific, and these unknowns are the kind they call hopefuls because deludeds wouldn't have the right ring. D+
Blueprint for a Surprise [Capitol, 2001]
avant-minimalist and pop-simplistic, Japanese and English, old and new--all is one ("I'm Not Getting Enough," "Rise II") *
Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band: Between My Head and the Sky [Chimera, 2009]
Still sui generis and still not repeating herself, which means among other things a little too much piano etude ("The Sun Is Down!" "Between My Head and the Sky"). ***
Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band: Take Me to the Land of Hell [Chimera Music, 2013]
Recorded in the six months preceding Ono's 80th birthday and released seven months after it, this is a quantum livelier and more assured than Between My Head and the Sky, Ono's 2009 album with her and Sean's revival of her and John's band/concept. In fact, it outstrips 1981's Season of Glass and 1995's Rising, surely her two standouts from a pop perspective. In other words, this justly renowned avant-pop figurehead not only made a good album as she looked 80 in the face, she made her best album, separated from her previous peak by 18 years, which was separated in turn from its previous peak by 14 years. That's what I call a life. Crucially, failed frontman Sean mirrors the boss's artistic appetite and force of personality by overseeing a studio-rock that's as eclectic as it is unified. There are clubby beats and avant-noise and straight rock guitar; there's a song that starts with little bells and a song that anchors his mom's ululations to bassy avant-funk. Of course she preaches peace and bemoans her desolation and tells us to dream. But my two faves are both quite funny for an artist some stupidly pigeonhole as pretentious: "Bad Dancer" and "Leaving Tim." Both are about what they say they're about, and delighted as I am that a Fluxus grad who's been known to flirt with EDM should giggle about breaking a leg, I'm even more delighted to hear an old woman break off snippily and light-heartedly from her latest boyfriend. A-
Further Notes:
Subjects for Further Research [1970s]: She tried to go pop eventually, but only after a long layoff, on 1980's Double Fantasy, did she get it right. Before that came scads of avant-garde fiddle-faddle. Much of this--try "Fly"--is still unlistenable, some "interesting" in the wake of Eno-style ersatz ethnicity. But on parts of her Plastic Ono Band--"Why," featuring John and Ringo, more than "AOS," featuring Ornette--she anticipated punk jazz by a decade.
See Also
|