Letters to the Editor
morphred62
Published Letters: 46
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it was nearly 30 years ago ...
[Read the article: Why is "Sgt. Pepper" so overhyped?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]When I was 15, in early 1978, that I purchased an album for the first time -- Sgt. Pepper's. Yep, I became a Beatlemaniac several years after they broke up. To be honest, I didn't even become aware of them until circa 1972 when I saw Yellow Submarine on tv. My parents were of the same age range as the Beatles -- my dad was born in 1940, same year as John & Ringo, and mom was born on June 18, 1943, exactly a year after Paul and just a few months after George. But my dad was into country music and my mom mostly listened to very easy listening, hit songs as performed by anyone but the artists who made them famous. They actually had several Jim Nabors albums. I only really started to listen to rock music in the my early teens, listening to Top-40 stations that played a mix of all sorts of stuff, old and new, and I heard and loved a lot of Beatles' songs I heard on the radio even before I realized they were Beatles songs. I also got to love the old songs I heard by the Stones, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane, CCR, the Kinks and on and on, more than most of what was new on the radio in the late 1970s -- I loved Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, but the Bee Gees didn't do much for me. Personally, I would agree that Rubber Soul, Revolver and the White Album are in many ways better than Sgt. Pepper, but I still love it, maybe for personal nastolgiac reasons that have nothing to do with 1967 (I was a Navy brat living in Japan that year). There were many great albums released during that era, including many unjustly overlooked ones, such as the Kinks' wonderful Face to Face, from 1966. It was an era when artists were learning from and influencing one another in numerous ways, lyrically and musically in ways that would have seemed outrageous just a few years before. Sgt. Pepper was just the most high profile exemplar of the new, more mature sensibility of rock, a signal that what had formerly been dismissed as just a "passing fad" could produce lasting art, and in fact had been doing so all along. None of us alive now can know for certain what will still be highly regarded 100 or, heck, 1000 years from now, assuming human civilization hasn't wiped itself out by then. At the least, however, the fact that so many of those albums from over 4 decades ago, even ones that didn't sell so well at the time (like those Kinks' or Velvet Underground lps) are still available and are still purchased by old and new fans alike proves they have had lasting value.
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Lennon & Hitler
[Read the article: Why is "Sgt. Pepper" so overhyped?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yep, I've read about Lennon suggesting putting Hitler among the background crowd on Sgt. Pepper cover, but it certainly wasn't because he admired him in any way. Obviously I can't know what really prompted him to make that suggestion, apparently seriously, but given his temperament, it seems very likely it was a cynical response to the whole shebang, adding a touch of darkness and a reminder that Hitler too was once an idol. Yeah, it would have been in really bad taste, maybe even worse than the original cover of Yesterday & Today. John had long before become sick of the Beatles' "nice guys" image and seemed intent on destroying it. On that note, if Mick Jagger had said the Rolling Stones were bigger than Christ, it wouldn't have caused much of a commotion because the worst was already expected of that "bad boys" band. Of course, in Britain itself and the rest of the civilized world Lennon's "bigger than Christ" remark didn't arouse much indignation at all and some priests even agreed with his assessment (as taken in the context of what Lennon really meant). Only in the American South and South Africa was such a huge stink raised about it. Funny, most of the people burning Beatles' records over the remark couldn't be bothered to get worked up about the Ku Klux Klan bombing churches and killing children during the same era.
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Reading for the braindamaged
[Read the article: "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]<<The fact that grown men can't read any better than high school burn-outs, and thus turn to these glorified picture books is a tragedy.>>
Naw, the tragedy is that millions of grown men and women read abominable crap like the various versions of the bible or the koran, the book of mormon or dianetics and are so braindamaged that they believe that any of them are absolute truth. Comics for some fans are just a mild diversion and some fans get carried away but none ever went and killed thousands of "heretics" or "pagans" who didn't believe that the tales of Superman and Spider-Man, et al, are absolute fact. The world might be a much better place if comics really were the worst thing anyone could read.
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the flying spaghetti monster is as likely as god
[Read the article: Opus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sure, the existence of god can't really be disproven, but neither can the existence of Thor or Zeus or Ra or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. There is no rational reason to believe in any of them, just a lot of ancient, irrational, emotional reasons to keep on believing in god, including just force of social habit built up over millenniums, for the most part enforced by threats of death on anyone who dared note that god had less substance than the breath of a leaf of grass. At least outside of the Muslim nations, admitting to being an atheist is no longer quite so dangerous even if it's still considered very rude by too many nuts. A billion people could believe that Earth is flat for a billion years but that would not make it so for even ons split second.
Anyhow, I found today's cartoon very amusing and topical. Burke Breathed remains one of my favorite cartoonists and I'm thrilled he returned to Opus and the gang and Salon added him to their roster.