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46 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you're not a Yoko person, get a life., May 9, 2005
This review is from: Onobox (Audio CD)
I'm astonished at how many people come here to expound aimlessly as to their extremely qualified hatred of what they consider to be pretentious anti-music. Well we all know what people like you think. You are the majority, and you've made it quite clear througout the years that you are incapable of liking this material. If all you can do is sit around writing error-ridden reviews seething with all-caps rants of your hatred, I would tell you kindly to shove something....in a place that I'll leave you to guess, since that's the language of the people. Do you even realize that it really DOES take talent to squeal at such high levels which resemble eerily accurate guitar-feedback? Could you do that, please? Like, really? ...I somehow thought not. Of course you say "But that doesn't mean anyone wants to hear that!" Well you're right my friend! I'll give you that. But art is inherantly self-indulgent, and if you despise it, it's yours to despise...but obviously, someone like her, intelligent and observant in those lyrics that people like you couldn't hope to write...Why would she consistently come out with music clearly in a style that causes people to despise and mock her until they speak of her as though inhuman? Could it be that people really do have drastically different tastes? Trust me: people like us think your normal pop/country radio music sucks. In the words of....someone famous...."How you like me now?" This, my friends, is Yoko Ono's body of work. Like it or not, this is her passion, and what an unstoppable passion it is. No one does it quite like her. Thank you.
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Too much and too little, August 8, 2006
This review is from: Onobox (Audio CD)
This tastefully packaged and well-documented box set clocks in at a mammoth six CDs, which may seem somewhat self-indulgent for an artist at best on the fringes of the mainstream. However, its existence in the marketplace does not oblige anyone to purchase it. If they were to, though, I imagine they would consider it a one-stop purchase, meeting all their Yoko Ono needs, collecting all the albums and stray singles in one extensive package. All the most commercially important tracks such as Walking On Thin Ice, Woman Is The Nigger of The World and Open Your Box are here, along with a fair number of rarities such as Japanese singles and unreleased album sessions and out-takes. Yoko Ono has supervised remixes of a substantial number of the tracks, adding notes of explanation on each CD. Along with printed lyrics and essays, a thorough discography has also been supplied, and from this it can be seen that the tracks representing each album have been extensively revised, with running times sometimes extended, as with O'Wind (Body Is The Scar Of Your Mind) or Woman Power, sometimes severely shortened. Paper Shoes and Midsummer New York both lose several minutes, for example, and Mind Train, over 16 minutes long on the album Fly, is here shorter even than the single edit, at under four minutes long. Some 27 album tracks have been dropped altogether, though her unreleased 1974 album A Story is included on the sixth disc. Plastic Ono Band B-sides Remember Love and Who Has Seen The Wind? that have yet to make a CD appearance are not included though others duplicated on albums are given space. Over the six CDs we see Yoko gradually shifting from the avant-garde wordlessness of the Plastic Ono Band period, to the more conventional song-based approach of 1980s albums that all employed session musicians. The Plastic Ono Band served her extremely well instrumentally and on a proto-funk piece like Open Your Box predated the work of innovators like Betty Davis by several years. The box set opens with a two-minute No Bed For Beatle John, extracted from Unfinished Music No. 2 - Life With The Lions, recorded in November 1968 and the only piece on the entire box set to predate the Plastic Ono Band. Even the free-form 1968 avant-garde piece AOS included on the album Plastic Ono Band has been dropped, as if she did not exist musically before meeting up with Beatle John. The fact that she did is acknowledged by Sonic Youth, one of many outfits to admit to her influence, who recorded Yoko's Voice Piece For Soprano from 1961 on their album Goodbye Twentieth Century, and also Scream Piece on Sonic Youth 4. Other artists who bear testimony to her pioneering feminist individuality include Bjork, the Pizzicato Five, Kate Bush, Yo La Tengo and the B 52s. This box begins to explain why, despite being maddeningly incomplete in some respects and perhaps too fulsome in others.
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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a voice for me when I couldn't scream, December 18, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: Onobox (Audio CD)
This box set is wonderful. I wonder if any of the one star reviews here were written by people who actually listened to the entire box set. Today marks 21 years that I have been a Yoko fan. I started listening to her shortly after my 12th birthday. I was drawn to her because of my own childhood and she helped me through some very horrible times. I had a horrible life at home growing up. I had no voice to speak my truth, but I could turn on Yoko's music and she would speak my truth for me. The truth can hurt, be painful, and upsetting. She was the voice that could speak my pain until I was old enough to speak it aloud for myself. The textures in Yoko's work are the textures of life. There are soft, gentle love songs that calm and soothe. There are rock tunes of pure bliss with John rocking out to accompany her. There are songs of pain, but there are also songs of hope. Anyone who wants to experience life in all its facets, should experience Yoko's songs through this box set. As John sang, "Gimme some truth."
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