6. John & Yoko and the Plastic Ono Band with the Harlem Community Choir, "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" (1972)

(listen)

Is there any music more willfully isolated and sequestered as what swamps us every December? By the math, on a rational basis and objectively speaking, a handful or better of titles on a list like this, or approximately 8.3%, should be Christmas music. But does that ever happen? No—not least probably by dint of the resentments raised in so many of us bludgeoned by it in public spaces and via media every year. I share this problem but I also have a secret to tell you. There's a lot of Christmas music I like a lot, from Brenda Lee's "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" to the Phil Spector holiday album to classics by all the usual suspects, Nat King Cole and Burl Ives and even Andy Williams. I even love many of the hymns, in their time and place. For many years after the murder of John Lennon, starting in fact that very year of 1980 when I made a point of acquiring this single, this was how I greeted the Christmas morning: "So this is Christmas and what have you done, / Another year over, a new one just begun." I wanted very much for it to become a holiday standard (as much as, later, when I discovered it, I wanted it again for Big Star's "Jesus Christ," an even more hopeless cause). Perhaps it has finally become one across these long decades, though I haven't noticed it on any radio station I listen to any more than "Fairytale of New York" (#37 on this list, which means I actually made a 2% Christmas nut, which I bet you $10,000 is better than anyone else offering up a list of 100 favorite songs). Now "Happy Xmas" sounds to me more diminished, sad and echoing with faraway memories of a distantly remembered past. But if that's not one perfectly apt description of the best Christmas music, I don't know what is.

48. Yoko Ono, "I Don't Know Why" (1981)

(listen)

This is a dramatically charged song, of course. It comes from the album Season of Glass, recorded and released in the six months following the murder of John Lennon (evidently assembled in part from the same sessions that produced Double Fantasy, as Lennon is credited here for guitars and keyboards). The cover of the album famously features the eyeglasses Lennon was wearing at the time of his death, broken and bloodstained by the gunshots that killed him. To say that the material is intended as an exercise in catharsis would be an understatement. Its intentions are plain. I was actually afraid to even listen to it for more than a year, as I've written about before. The surprise is that Yoko Ono had somehow suddenly so absorbed his sensibility as to make it sound approximately like the collaborations I think Lennon always wanted with her. Most of this song is a pretty good example of that, rolling in like a fully loaded tank, thrumming with malevolence. The carefully enunciated lyrics are vaguely biting but mostly just expressions of her confusion about the source of all the hatred directed toward them. And so it proceeds, its details sad, almost unbearably so in moments ("my body's so empty without you"). Then, in the last 30 seconds, as it positions itself for the fade-out, her rage suddenly makes its appearance. It cuts through like a knife. There's a certain unflattering sense of privilege to it that makes me think it almost had to be improvised right on the spot, if not at this point than at whatever moment it was recorded and later inserted here as is. It feels like a blow to the body, stunning—the pain is vividly there to witness and to feel, and then just like that the song is over.

Rising (1995)

This is fully equipped with the usual caterwauling and yelping, particularly on the lengthy title track, though infinitely mellowed and sharpened as the times had finally caught up to her sound, her instincts and vision. Furthermore, it comes with a working band, IMA (Japanese for "now"), which includes son Sean playing guitar. And a fine band it is too, as you can hear. I was fortunate enough to be able to see them play a small club in Seattle in 1996 in support of this, and in many ways the whole thing was a perfect comedy of mutual admiration, soft and warm as a holiday with loved ones, the love flowing freely and from all sides. First there were the members of the audience marveling simply at being there, in the immediate vicinity of and actually standing in the wash of sound as it occurred, pouring from this tiny middle-aged Japanese woman who stepped to the microphone in all the din and chaos and let it rip. And Sean, of course—why, he looks like both of them! We were like ridiculous doting relatives. But the supremely comical moment was when Soundgarden's Kim Thayil was invited onstage to stand in for a couple of numbers. And there was Sean—what? 21 at the time?—gaping at a hero the way we had been gaping at him and his mother. Soundgarden! Seattle! Yoko Ono! Those sounds! That thundering rhythm section! Heavy chords! Screech! On and on it went. What a lovely night.

Season of Glass (1981)

"I Don't Know Why" All right, let's talk about Yoko Ono. Like most Beatles fan I thought her an unwelcome intrusion in the messy conclusion of the band, though I never hated her the way some did and certainly didn't blame anything on her. I've never had much use for such projects as Unfinished Music, No. 1: Two Virgins, her collaboration with John Lennon better known for its cover of the couple in full-frontal nudity—it's still painfully unlistenable to me. Her '70s solo projects came with isolated moments (I knew enough of her champions to get fairly steady exposure), although their proportion to the noisy dross was ultimately way too low to be cost-effective for me. But I thought, and still think, that "The Ballad of John and Yoko" was one of the best late Beatles hits, and anyway, John Lennon by then was my favorite Beatle. Who was I to begrudge him his personal choices? (Who was anyone?) In 1980, I thought her half of Double Fantasy was almost embarrassingly subpar to Lennon's, and wished they'd each taken a side rather than alternating tracks; it was too much work to listen to the thing, either lifting and replacing the needle constantly, or sitting through the untoward interruptions to Lennon's amazing return. And then came the catastrophe, and a few months later this. I was afraid to listen to it for more than a year. When I finally did, I found that suddenly the rough edges and harsh textures and raw thrust of her sound had found focus and purpose—expressing an entirely appropriate rage, working through grief, dealing with the shock and pain of an unimaginable event. She did so as an artist, with dignity and courage. Entirely unexpectedly, she also appeared to have absorbed enough of Lennon's sensibility to make it feel like the collaboration that never really occurred. It stands as a startling and genuine fusion of artists, fleeting but real, the very thing I think Lennon sought all his life, and as such it's almost as unbearably sad as it is heartening. It also provides catharsis for anyone who cared. From that point on I believed in her at every level, and I still do.