Yoko Ono - Plastic Ono Band

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Free Music Notes for Plastic Ono Band

Free Music Review: Better than a 'masterpiece', a thing of true inspiration
Hit: 5 Stars

I've heard it said that Yoko bears responsibility for emasculating Lennon as a creative force by persuading him to abandon the brilliant, kaleidoscopic lyricism of his classic Beatles material in favour of the straightforward emotional indulgence of his solo output, which he stuck with until his untimely death (as though failing to credit him with an adult's ability to decide what he does somehow pays him a compliment). Blind hero worship and casual sexism aside, the approach of absolute creative directness, free from all lyrical obfuscation did far more favours for his wife. This is because she made the brilliant move of throwing the baby out with the bath water and ditching the lyrics almost in their entirety. Screams, gurgles, moans, wails, the whole album is spun from a tapestry of breathtaking, varispeed sounds, with backing tracks reduced to repetitious, cyclic grooves to allow Yoko's remarkable instrument to flex itself fully. What Hendrix was to the guitar, what Rick Wakeman was to the Minimoog, this woman is to unclassifiable vocal noise. She unfurls her voice like it was a great creature rising from the throat, so organic that it swamps the entire album in its presence and threatens to dissolve the music itself. Listen to Radiohead's 'Kid A' and marvel at their use of syntesizers and filters to dissolve Thom Yorke's voice and morph it into strange new forms... Yoko's voice DOES THIS TO ITSELF. It's far from 'pretty' in a Western, operatic sense, but it is magnificent.

The official reviewer of this album for the Amazon site deserves praise as one of a tiny few who has traced Yoko's musical work back to solid traditions of vocal training and performance, for this is a woman who has received far more classical training (in both Eastern and Western permutations of the voice) than Lennon himself ever did. It exasperates me to hear people sneeringly mock Yoko Ono as a talentless chancer who latched onto her husband's success and never jumped off the free ride. You cannot simply sidle up to a microphone, bleat incoherently and make the staggering range of sounds that this woman did, and the difficulty that Yoko faced in gaining acceptance of her music was very much matched by the art world's scorn for Lennon as he attempted to get his visual art exhibited (Yoko had been a sensation in that particular sphere since 1962, before the release of 'Please Please Me'). She also approached a musical career with great trepidation, careful not to affect the respect that the former Beatle had earned by the early Seventies. It was the at the encouragement of her husband that she began her recording career (and I for one am glad of it), but of course that will not appease those who, 35 years on, continue to view her as an ersatz nobody who besmirched the image of their beloved rock genius. I was born and raised in Liverpool, please, get over it!

If this album provided real impetus for the creation of the punk movement (which seems to in fact have been far too fragmented for a figurehead) it lies not in the music itself, which was more exploratory than anything before post-punkers like Pere Ubu and Throbbing Gristle. It doesn't even lie in the attitude, it's something more fundamental than that. It lies in its sheer expressive freedom. Even a word like 'individuality', with its liberal political connotations, is too constricting here. Every creative spirit out there can listen to this album as a catalyst, a signifier that true fulfillment is a matter of heart over mind, instinct over thought. And for that alone, this album will remain one of the most valuable, precious objects in the whole landscape of Rock. It can do more than just grow on you. It can absorb you.

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