Critic Gene Santoro once wisely noted that Ono didn't ruin Lennon's career, but rather he ruined hers. It's difficult to gauge what Ono's reputation might be today had she not been hanging out with rock stars in the '70s. But her work did grow less interesting as she went from event artist to sound artist to songstress (and while some of her recordings are atrocious, most people are wrong about which ones those are). "Walking on Thin Ice" was the first sound to come out of the Dakota after Lennon was shot in front of the building where they lived, and the song's brittle cynicism made it a poignant statement, even while being an unconvincing attempt to harness the ideas coming out of the nascent new wave movement. She was mourning, and we could only but forgive her invocation of the triumvirate cliche in the song's chorus ("Walking on thin ice/I'm paying the price/for throwing the dice/in the air").

Soon after, another single from another New York weirdo got some underground acclaim. Laurie Anderson had, like Ono, incorporated musical ideas into her gallery work before embracing music as an end in itself. She had presented a car horn symphony and various spins on the idea of a violin recital before actually committing to wax something for mass consumption. "O Superman" was a much bolder creation than Ono's song, and while the tenor of the times forced Anderson into the new wave camp as well, she had created something quite her own. The repeated staccato vocal of the rhythm track was cold and odd at a time when sampling technologies hadn't yet made cold and odd de rigeur. The song wasn't quite robotic, but it was still of some less-than-human future and the lyrics were a sarcastically reassuring voice for the Cold War years ("Here come the planes/they're American planes/made in America").

Two new discs reexamine those singles with a series of remixes. The discs are geared at different audiences and meet different levels of success in finding something new in the old. Anderson gets the glitch treatment while the Ono album producers go for the dance floor. (Indeed the new record went #1 on the dance charts, realizing Lennon's prophecy that the song would be Ono's first hit single.)

The original "Walking On Thin Ice" isn't a bad song, but it was one of Ono's worst up to that point. While fans were certainly divided about her primal scream vocals in the early '70s (most falling into the anti camp), there is something compelling about those records. It was an attempt at avant pop, and Ono was neither the singer nor the lyricist to pull it off. Ono and producer Rob Stevens gathered a cast of moderately interesting djs to work with the equally interesting material. By and large, they go for rote regurgitation of the song, sometimes stealing motifs -- Danny Tenaglia borrows from Kraftwerk and Pet Shop Boys from themselves -- to broaden the palette.

The problem, quite simply, is that nobody thinks of anything to do with the vocal track, so each mix is anchored to the original. Rui da Silva comes close, but loses confidence and starts to lean too heavily on the song's bass line halfway through. To his credit, though, his is one of the few tracks that maintains the less-than-dancefloor-friendly vocal wretching from the original, masking it with enough reverb and delay to only be sort of sickening. Peter Rauhoffer sidesteps the problem by focusing on the spoken part of the song, but still fails to deliver something interesting. Orange Factory's track might be the most successful, if only because it's the most unabashedly dancehall, with fast synth lines that spin and fly all over the place.

What separates Ice from the O Superman mixes, and makes the latter a much better record, is the willingness of the performers to reinterpret. Rather than presenting a weary hour of slight modifications, the Anderson mixers make the song their own; sometimes minutes can pass without immediately recognizable Superman sources, making it not just possible but enjoyable to listen to the disc all the way through (I defy anyone, even at a dance club, to listen to Ice from beginning to end).

O Superman Remix opens with the familiar vocal backing line and an electronic drone, immediately both familiar and new. Anderson says "Hi" (sampled from later in the song) and then Com.a's thin, fast beats kick in. From there on, the song is filtered through a number of convolutions. Team Doyobi make a bit of pornography and Massimo creates a fearsome, dynamic racket. Overall, the disc moves well. As on Ice, the mixes tend to be beat oriented, but the disc works like a collage; individual tracks don't stand out, although some are further ranging and more inventive.

There's something quaintly nostaligic about revisiting these two singles, and if Anderson and Ono weren't entirely prescient, they knew where to look for inspiration: not just Kraftwerk, but M Factor, DEVO and others were already playing with the idea of pop music made by machines. By now, with the sorts of artists featured on these discs, the model has more or less been perfected (in Britain, the term "post-human music" was even used to describe dance electronica). But in the '80s it was fresh and a little scary, and ladies your momma's age were in on the freak fest.