It isn't overhyped. It was the most important pop album up to that point in history, and is still more than interesting today.

Paul McCartney tells a wonderful story of attending a party with some of the Stones on the Friday night the Beatles' received their acetates of the album. Paul put it on the stereo, and the party went sort of silent as everyone, in particular Jaggers and Richards, were just in awe of how interesting it was.

The Stones "won" the non-existent contest between the two? That's ludicrous. How many Jagger/Richards' tunes did the Beatles cover? Which band made an unlistenable imitation of Sgt. Pepper? For goodness sake, Jimi Hendrix opened his next show in London the day after the album was released with the title track. Yes, the Stones, have been around longer, though for all intents and purposes touring as an oldies act for the last twenty years. But they were never as innovative and produced few solid albums. They were essentially a singles band.

Lots of aurally interesting albums have followed Sgt. Pepper (notably the Geoff Emerick produced Dark Side of the Moon), and I agree with lots of folks that either Revolver or Rubber Soul are more interesting today than Sgt. Pepper. Personally, I rank Sgt. Pepper with Rubber Soul for the third best album after Revolver and Abbey Road.

Also, one must remember that Sgt. Pepper sounded so remarkable to Americans in part because the idiots at Capital Records were still fucking around with the completed albums received from EMI until 1967. Lacking all their tracks, notably "Doctor Robert" and "Your Bird Can Sing", the legacies of Rubber Soul and Revolver suffered by comparison in the U.S. for about 20 years unless you had purchased imported copies of the albums.

Only someone who stopped listening to pop music after 1967 would think that Sgt. Pepper was the greatest album of all time. But only an idiot would think that it didn't deserve the hype then or the respect today.

It isn't overhyped. It was the most important pop album up to that point in history, and is still more than interesting today.

Paul McCartney tells a wonderful story of attending a party with some of the Stones on the Friday night the Beatles' received their acetates of the album. Paul put it on the stereo, and the party went sort of silent as everyone, in particular Jaggers and Richards, were just in awe of how interesting it was.

The Stones "won" the non-existent contest between the two? That's ludicrous. How many Jagger/Richards' tunes did the Beatles cover? Which band made an unlistenable imitation of Sgt. Pepper? For goodness sake, Jimi Hendrix opened his next show in London the day after the album was released with the title track. Yes, the Stones, have been around longer, though for all intents and purposes touring as an oldies act for the last twenty years. But they were never as innovative and produced few solid albums. They were essentially a singles band.

Lots of aurally interesting albums have followed Sgt. Pepper (notably the Geoff Emerick produced Dark Side of the Moon), and I agree with lots of folks that either Revolver or Rubber Soul are more interesting today than Sgt. Pepper. Personally, I rank Sgt. Pepper with Rubber Soul for the third best album after Revolver and Abbey Road.

Also, one must remember that Sgt. Pepper sounded so remarkable to Americans in part because the idiots at Capital Records were still fucking around with the completed albums received from EMI until 1967. Lacking all their tracks, notably "Doctor Robert" and "Your Bird Can Sing", the legacies of Rubber Soul and Revolver suffered by comparison in the U.S. for about 20 years unless you had purchased imported copies of the albums.

Only someone who stopped listening to pop music after 1967 would think that Sgt. Pepper was the greatest album of all time. But only an idiot would think that it didn't deserve the hype then or the respect today.

A simple Googling of 'gourmand' will reveal plenty of "food-related' links. If nothing else, it proves that the modern, popular use of the term is indeed accurately used in the article.

-- emanneercs

Am I to take from your inability to understand the proper use of the word gourmand, which for a couple of centuries has been used as "nice" way to say glutton, that you use healthy when you mean healthful and use impact as a verb?

Assholes.

Yes.

Two of my local grocery stores, neither a Whole Foods, always have two to three brands of organic chocolate for sale and have had so for more than a couple of years now.

Does this mean most Americans will come to appreciate real chocolate produced in an environmentally responsible manner? Of course not. But companies like Grenada will have a market and actually make more money because they aren't really competing with Nestle or Hershey.

. . . stacks up with the Strummer profiled in Johnny Green's A Riot of Our Own and Passion Is A Fashion: The Real Story of The Clash by Pat Gilbert.

No.

Next dumb headline question.