Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono’s avant-garde impulses pushed pop (and John Lennon) into uncharted territory, but she seems to think that anything that comes to mind is worth sharing with the world. While her best songs explode with an embarrassing emotional intensity, much of her music is uninteresting and/or unlistenable. Like the recent Yes, I’m A Witch, Open Your Box, which features Ono tunes remixed by club deejays—including tracks already considered club classics, which dilutes the set’s immediacy. Ono’s vocals are mostly smothered in the mix, buried under layers of electronic rhythm, but the tunes all work fine as club tracks. Which makes you wonder why Ono waited so long to embrace the mainstream. If she’d attempted this kind of collaboration years ago, she might have had an even greater impact on pop music.