Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band

NPR ranked the record as the #136 greatest album made by a female artist, saying:

Has there ever been a female artist so overshadowed by her proximity to male greatness than Yoko Ono? A truly cutting-edge figure across multiple disciplines, Ono is nonetheless more often spited for daring to influence her collaborator-turned-husband John Lennon than lauded for her pioneering works of music and performance art. 1970’s twin releases from Ono and Lennon, with their newly-formed Plastic Ono Band, epitomize this. Whereas John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band was critically acclaimed as an intimate, honest rock and roll album, few audiences knew what to do with Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band. Jarring, experimental and stunning, Ono’s album sounds like a head-on collision between her avant-garde art and Lennon’s rock and roll (with touches of free jazz by way of an Ornette Coleman quartet on “AOS”). Yoko’s voice is a powerful instrument, and it’s honed to near perfection on this album; it ricochets with pre-punk raw aggression and incorporates hetai, a vocal style from Japanese kabuki theater. At the time of its release, critical reception to Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band was paternalistic at best and outright disdainful at worst; however, bands like The B-52’s, Sonic Youth, Public Image Ltd, The Slits and many others bear strong signs of Ono’s influence. Wide swaths of avant-garde rock, post-punk, sound art and experimental electronic music simply wouldn’t exist without the fearless curiosity of Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band.