a stark warning from a lady who first-handedly witnessed the Tokyo firebombings during the Second World War and has managed to observe the global regression in 2018 and beyond.

her voice will be in vain should people not realise the very sounds they're hearing - a frail, elderly woman's wailing and mutterings of her worry and what we can do.

an assauntingly intense track, made all the more poignant given Lennon's death and that they were recording this song on the night of his murder.

a highlight of the new wave scene and a showcase of her avant-garde disposition's adaptability - should anyone dub her "the Dragon Lady", Ono has the right to perform this dangerously.

such an essential compilation of hits that remains enduringly indelible and identifiable, the likes of which will never be replicated again - a feat not even similarly reached by mammoth peers like Michael Jackson or Prince.

Madonna so fittingly captures a merely eight-year-old career's essence with such a waist-tight retrospective embodying escapism, endearment, and endorsement, and yet transcends beyond that contemporary context into the global stratosphere for generations to come.

a lively back-and-forth between Lennon's mellow soft rock and Ono's cold new wave - the husband-wife duo are very à la mode for 1980 and cover the topics of domesticity and commitment with maturity and buoyancy.

with their careers' revive, their five-year-old son's company, and each other, "Double Fantasy" is Lennon and Ono's hark of the reality together that would be the 1980s - would've been.

transitioning from the prescient rock and avant-garde-ness that was "Plastic Ono Band", Ono employs her abstract ability to the contemporary jam rock scene, this time infecting listeners with antics that evoke groove in body and mind. she even dedicates an entire disc to museum-grade experimentations, educating listeners to her conceptual disposition.

on "Fly", Ono simply whets her ability to make you spasm in movement and thought.

Lennon, for his first solo album, sheds his Beatles association for a stripped-down instrumentation that encompasses mourning, gut-wrenching, and promise. with "Plastic Ono Band", Lennon managed to reach the rare high ground in rock n' roll of universal message and humanity

in its sombre and realistic delivery, a cornerstone in the singer-songwriter scene prevalent of the '60s and '70s.
in its inexcusable horror and life, a marker in the history of popular music.

though serving better as a musical document of this important festival, this release will fail to disappoint for music listeners disposed to vehement guitar playing and bloody vocals - in actuality, a wholly listenable album comprised of lennon's hard-rock-felt renditions and ono's crazed avant-garde antics.

Ono summons a set of timeless songs of existential fury and tumult, even anticipating the scorching New York "No Wave" scene by nearly a decade and emulating contemporary scenes such as proto-punk and krautrock, all in her first "traditional" album.

Ono's "Plastic Ono Band" is the centerpiece of her avant-garde sensibility whose sound trickles into infinity - ground zero influence for multitudes of artists towards the post-genre present day.

this is a clear progression from "The Nightfly", an album with quizzical look-backs on the Cold War aesthete and spry, fresh-sounding audio production -

eleven years on, Fagen, with "Kamakiriad", suggests the ideas of a future that are, unfortunately, ideal to his suburban Boomer disposition - tepid and irrelevant visions to a stagnant audio production, of which are, ultimately, unsurprising.

much to the suave atmosphere that was "Gaucho", Fagen and Katz escape from that asphyxiating bar and let loose their snaps and crackles for "The Nightfly" - leaving behind his dubious anecdotes, Fagen steps out into the evening and bemoans to himself his mid-century ideals and observations of the night with rhapsodic footsteps.

it is true that "Gaucho" requires time to mellow. past my original feeling of those restrained instruments as clinical, it instead suggests the most airy of refrained groove in the hips, for better or worse - i hope you can feel it.

progressing past "Aja", it is also Fagen's restrained diction serving the band's lethargic transformation - fleeing El Lay's vapidity, this New York stranger lets you in on some moralistic anecdotes for the new, detached decade.

not much is introduced beyond echo-ey and breathy asides and dull sounds of 2000s lounge R&B.
a flat album that has neither highs or lows. a musician without any significant personality other than being Prince's latest protege.

an insipid artifact of mid-1990s prince - a release meriting little significance in his discography, and one i wouldn't bother listening to again with its needless remixes and dated hip-hop excerpts muddied with cringey sample usages.

"rootie kazootie" is the only vaguely interesting and un-tiring song, and it's a tame instrumental.

a weird mish-mash of a Prince medley featuring re-recordings tamer than the originals.
it retains no significance in his discography and presents little enjoyment.

a lustful post-script of an EP to his "batman" score whose experimental length and raucous theme, unfortunately, had me feeling lethargic instead of livid.

ironically, perhaps this dragged-out statement of lust serves as some foresight for his dated themes of womanising tiredly echoed through his 1990s hip-hop-inflected albums.

the Japanese mini-album edition serves a more interesting musical artifact than standard versions of the EP, with rare remixes of "partyman".

the clash of identities adopted by his "camille" persona that would be abandoned for "sign o-" is felt with this eclectic back-and-forth between the more bombastic songs (a la "the black album") and introspective scores (a mood fittingly emanated in "sign o-").

though serving as a document into what prince was planning during the mid- to late-1980s, this would have been a great funk album of the late 1980s decked with formidable songs.

only worthy of collecting for attaining "and on and on" and "70s love groove" - two sublime rarities that were released, respectively, with the single for "any time, any place" and the limited edition copy of "janet." for the Australian leg of her 1993 world tour.

excepting these two songs, the rest are insignificant remixes that merit little significance.

a potential cornerpiece in pop culture to seal her 40 years in the music industry, this compilation uses unremarkable remixes for a majority of the songs, even ignoring the chronology of her number 1 dance hits by omtting 1987's "Causing a Commotion".

save for the mixes starting from "Holiday" until the early 1990s ("Fever" or "Bedtime Story"), the rest lose their timelessness by being diluted down simply into duds as commonplace remixes.

a CD single worthy of collecting for its mixes - a great addition when collecting any artifact from her "Erotica" period.

"Rain" receives a lush remix, reminiscent of a glorious rainstorm; edits 1 and 2 of "Fever" reach another scintillating height, harking back to deep house nightclubs of the Clinton years; "Up Down Suite" hypnotises you - do you have the stamina to dance for 12 minutes to true house?

the mix for "Waiting" is also worthy of ... read more

a dirtier and angrier mix of the leading single to her then-upcoming album - if there's any madonna song that demands fucking, it is this one.

this version remains to be officially released anywhere besides its original addition to "S.E.X." as a CD single. the book has not been re-printed widely since its original, controversial 1992 run - these facts only compliment the foulness of this truly hidden gem in her discography.