The odd thing about John and Yoko's simultaneously released, identically designed solo albums entitled Plastic Ono Band is that hers is more suited to repeated listening, but his is better as conceptual art. The first Plastic Ono Band single, 'Give Peace a Chance', was the soundtrack to a clever bit of political branding 'Cold Turkey' was written and recorded very shortly after he kicked heroin, in late summer 1969 'Instant Karma!' was in record stores 10 days after it was written. The two of them also started releasing singles credited to the Plastic Ono Band- a John song on the A-side, a Yoko song on the B-side. In 19, he made three albums with Yoko Ono, in her idiom (conceptual art) but his medium (LPs), none of them in the current batch of reissues. Lennon had gotten a head start on his solo career: In the final couple of years of the Beatles, he'd started batting out records as reports from the front, whether or not his bandmates were available or interested. That's partly because Lennon spent his solo years painfully aware of how important he was, alternately trying to see how he could use his fame to act in the world and how he could rebel against his fame's trappings.

The current round of reissues and repackages includes the third and fourth posthumous boxed sets of his work, and the fifth-or-so stab at a greatest-hits compilation they're still not nearly as satisfying as you'd expect from one of the most important figures in the history of rock. It's 70 years after John Lennon's birth, and 30 after his death, and his solo career is still a knotty, vexing mess.

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