John Lennon

Lennon's 1970 solo masterpiece is a direct, painfully honest set of autobiographical songs that deal with his general loss of faith in everything from his wretched (if sadly typical) upbringing, to the Beatles, to society at large. "Mother," "Isolation," "I Found Out" and "Love" are highlights, though the intensity and melodicism never lags.

Anyone performing avant-garde music is laying themselves open to a certain amount of
hostility and derision at the outset. And if that person also happens to be Yoko Ono, who
has not only displayed a gift for hyping herself with cloying "happenings" but also led poor
John astray and been credited by more than one Insider with "breaking up the Beatles,"
why, the barbs and jeers can only be expected to increase proportionately. No... More >

Of course the lyrics are often crude psychotherapeutic cliches. That's just the point, because they're also true, and John wants to make clear that right now truth is far more important than subtlety, taste, art, or anything else. At first the music sounds crude, too, stark and even perfunctory after the Beatles' free harmonies and double guitars. But the real music of the album inheres in the way John's greatest vocal performance, a complete tour of rock timbre from scream to whine, is modulated electronically--echoed, filtered, double-tracked, with two vocals sometimes emanating in a synthesis from between the speakers and sometimes dialectically separated. Which means that John is such a media artist that even when he's fervently shedding personas and eschewing metaphor he knows, perhaps instinctively, that he communicates most effectively through technological masks and prisms. (Grade - A)