There is no question more charged, more human, or more unanswerable than “Why?” We are surrounded and acted upon by forces we often can’t understand, and we’d all like more answers than are readily available. Even the unexpectedly good is unsettling: What’s the catch, you wonder. When will the other shoe drop? But ask “Why?” enough times and it stops being productive. You lose the ability to be present with whatever is happening in front of you. You spin out. “Why ask why?” a Budweiser commercial from the ’90s wanted to know. Good question.

Like a curious toddler who has just discovered cause and effect, like a philosopher at her wits’ end, like a widow at a grave, Yoko Ono asks “Why.” She does it over and over, in as many ways as her voice can shape it, on the first song on the first album she released under her own name, 1970’s Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band. She shrieks, she scratches. She stretches the word out, trying to determine whether it will break before her voice. At one point, she seems to gargle, as if the act of drawing it up from her stomach sends her body into tremors. Far from dissociating into wonder, she lets the question pin her to the ground like an exorcist demanding submission from a demon. She is possessed by uncertainty.

As a performance artist and musician, Ono has always tried to expose the depth contained within the apparently obvious. Her work is moving, awe-inspiring, calming. The pieces in her 1964 book Grapefruit read more like koans than the Fluxus scores to which they’re formally similar; the gallery piece titled Wish Tree, whose leaves are notes attached by the audience, might confront you with the preciousness of every human life. In 1966, for Ceiling Painting, she put a ladder in the middle of a gallery. You climb the ladder, pick up a magnifying glass, and see, in tiny type, the word “yes” on the ceiling. It’s magical precisely because of its simplicity: What would it feel like to go to all that trouble without knowing why you’re doing it, then find yourself affirmed? “Why” is conceptually similar, but its emotional violence, the sheer noisiness, is a distillation of unbearable suffering.

The preview of Ceiling Painting was, famously, Ono and John Lennon’s meet-cute, and for the four years that followed, they said yes to many things. But by 1970, the world was beginning to say no in return. Ono had become an overnight celebrity, and she became a villain almost as quickly. She had been blamed for breaking up the greatest band of all time; her art was pretentious and nonsensical; her music was unlistenable. Her private life, too, was beginning to crumble. In 1968, she and Lennon were arrested for possession. In November of that year, she suffered a miscarriage. The couple appeared nude on the cover of Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, an album they made in Lennon’s attic one hot night in May 1968; Lester Bangs summed up the critical sentiment of that album: “Dilettante garbage, simply.”

By the time Ono and Lennon began work on their twinned Plastic Ono Band records in late 1970, there were many reasons to ask why. There was much to scream about. The Unfinished Music records were plenty noisy, but it all felt conceptual, curious—both albums sound like the work of two people who are very high and very happy to be spending time together. The sound they pursued with the Plastic Ono Band was different. By this time, both Ono and Lennon had found a form of relief in primal scream therapy, the psychological methodology that purports to relieve repressed pain through its intense expression. The impact on their artmaking was obvious. Ono had always drawn from kabuki singing techniques, but on “Why,” which was recorded in the weeks following their completion of the therapy, she becomes unloosed, allowing the ravenous spirit of the song to demolish the controlled vibrato she demonstrates in Life With the Lions’ “Cambridge 1969.”

Lennon, too, plays his guitar with a ferocity and meanness he’d never before attempted. Nor had many others—the Velvet Underground on live versions of “Sister Ray,” the raunchier bits of Dylan’s first electric band doing “Maggie’s Farm,” maybe. But in the same way the Miles Davis Quintet wrangled free jazz’s intensity into something like a conventional structure with post-bop, Lennon never quite loses form or abandons his pop instincts; screaming had helped to create the myth of the Beatles, but apparently it wasn’t enough to destroy the Beatle in his head. His playing shoots rights past punk—which would take another half-decade to manifest—and predicts the abrasive post-punk of Swell Maps and the Birthday Party, the scraping noise of Einstürzende Neubauten, the velvet speedway Pixies’ Joey Santiago lays down on “Vamos.” Imagine Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon hearing “Why?” as impressionable teenagers and watch an entire world begin to assemble itself in their heads. Ringo Starr, who drums on the session, creates a tight pocket with session bassist Klaus Voormann, and the two never waver despite everything flying past their heads. It’s the kind of thing Can would start doing a year or two later.

With Ono leading, she and Lennon dance their way around misery without naming it, unable to articulate the source of their suffering. You can hear the two of them locked in together, Lennon following the dips and turns in her vocals, sustaining her screeches with his guitar. There are moments when the two seem to merge, cackled voice and crackling guitar: At all times, bonded in love and stress and pressure, they speak as one, asking a single question with no expectation of an answer.