With the Beatles newly digitized, the time is right to revisit the avant-garde icon still best known as John Lennon's widow. Ono's latest remakes the band she and Lennon led in the Seventies, this time with experimental jazz musicians, synth scientists and her son, Sean Lennon, for a survey of the outlying territories Ono has bushwacked for decades. Noise grooves and electro sit alongside Ono's fragile peace prayers and poignant poetic freestyles ("I'm Alive"). At 76, her music remains truly vital: unsettling, touching, funny, undeniable.

“1999”

“I don’t consider myself a great poet,” Prince told Rolling Stone. “I just know I’m here to say what’s on my mind.” In the case of the apocalyptic party anthem “1999,” he was worried about then-president Ronald Reagan’s foreign policies. The song’s melody is based on a riff borrowed from the Mamas and Papas’ “Monday, Monday,” and Prince originally envisioned the first verse with three-part harmony but later split the vocals between himself and members of the Revolution. Because Warner Bros., with whom Prince was locked in a contractual battle, owned the original’s masters, Prince rerecorded the song and appropriately released that version in 1999.