Yoko Ono

Four CDs of Patsy nod me out, four of Aretha make me wonder, but six of Onobox get me going. Often not great and sometimes awful, they brim with previously unheard or unnoticed highs. This 19-cut condensation skips the educational stuff and ought to convert anybody with better taste than Albert Goldman--namely, you. As a student of Western composition, an adept of Japanese vocal technique, and an avant-gardist sworn to throw convention to the wind, Yoko was unready to rock three different ways. Yet on the four early songs the transparent simplicity she strives for sounds truer than the dumb authenticity of Elephant's Memory, and by the '80s she's mastered a studio-rock art-pop whose unremarkable timbres and textures are subtly transformed by her inappropriate training. A transparently simple, transcendently self-conscious triumph of the will--and of the "Woman Power" she was corny and prophetic enough to crow about back when she was the weirdo who broke up the Beatles. (Grade: A)