John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band by John Lennon
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band is the debut solo album by English rock musician John Lennon. It was released in 1970, after Lennon had issued three experimental albums with Yoko Ono and Live Peace in Toronto 1969, a live performance in Toronto credited to the Plastic Ono Band. The album was recorded simultaneously with Ono's debut avant garde solo album, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, at Ascot Sound Studios and Abbey Road Studios using the same musicians and production team, and featured nearly identical cover artwork. John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band is generally considered one of Lennon's finest solo albums, documenting with honesty and artistic integrity his emotional and mental state at that point in his career. In 1987, as part of its 20th anniversary, Rolling Stone magazine ranked it fourth on "The 100 Best Albums of the Last Twenty Years". In 2012, the magazine ranked it number 23 on its list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
John Lennon's solo debut contains some of the most nakedly emotional songs ever recorded. Demolishing '60s mythology with almost pathological zeal, he castigates hippie hypocrisy on "I Found Out" and includes his former band among the idols he forsakes on the iconoclastic, deceptively mellow-sounding piano ballad "God". Psychedelic arrangements and imagery are replaced by ultra-minimalist production and raw passion, whether John’s mourning his mother's death with a feral howl over skeletal piano, bass and drums, or embracing the underdog on the acoustic "Working Class Hero".
