Letters to the Editor
kafkaesquedream
Published Letters: 1
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Overhyped? Or perhaps just a bit too dated, overproduced, and insular...
[Read the article: Why is "Sgt. Pepper" so overhyped?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Since the album is older than I am, it's hard for me to listen to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with fresh ears and hear it as anything but a somewhat quaint and dated period piece -- which is not to say that it is altogether bad, or even second-rate, really. It is hard not to take the Beatles just a little bit for granted (ditto, the Stones) since their music has been with us so long. I, like many people now have literally not known a world without the Beatles and the Stones. They have both long since achieved their deserved status as unimpeachable standard-bearers of great popular music.
I agree in a sense that Sgt. Pepper (save for "A Day in the Life") does not quite have the epoch-making emotional resonance as many another album of the late ’60s, including a number of other works by the Beatles. For me, the problem with Sgt. Pepper is that it sounds a bit too clever and pleased with itself by half. The arrangements seem overly fussy, with too much emphasis on technique and studio gimmickry at the expense of emotional directness.
Also, the fact that Paul McCartney wrote eight of the thirteen tracks (one being a reprise of the title tune) seems to throw things a bit off-balance, since the Beatles, like all of the best bands, were a successful collaboration -- one greater than the sum of its individual parts. It figures that Paul should have Ringo, with his amiable baritone, sing two of his compositions for the sake of variety, if nothing else. For all the vaunted poignancy of "She's Leaving Home", the lyric seems overwhelmed by its gooey, baroque harp-and-strings arrangement.
The four John Lennon songs also tend to stick out like a sore thumb -- the hurdy-gurdy psychedelic carnival confections of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "Being for Benefit of Mr. Kite" have really not worn all that well. Even the obligatory George Harrison composition, "Within You, Without You", is rather monotonous. It doesn't have the tension of "Don't Bother Me", the incisive wit of "Taxman", the excitement of "Love You To", the aching emotionalism of "Long, Long, Long", or even the tenderness of "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun".
Yes, the epic finale of "A Day in the Life" still sends shivers up one's spine, but in the context of the rest of the album, it sounds like an anomaly -- like something tacked on at the end as a kind of (albeit inspired) addendum, but not integral to the whole. Lennon's urgency on that song anticipated the air of unease and disillusionment that characterizes "The White Album" as well as the almost palpable sense of finality heard on Abbey Road. Certainly, the well-observed -- and genuinely poetic – lyric on combined with Lennon's emotional vocal delivery ranks “A Day in the Life” as among the Beatles' finest and most powerful recordings; but it is not characteristic of anything else on Sgt. Pepper. If anything, that one last track is the exception that proves the rule about the rest of the album, which seems relatively tame by comparison -- and perhaps, dare I say it, even a bit trivial. It seems a fatal instance of Lennon upstaging McCartney at the end of a primarily McCartney-conceived album.
I have always gone back to Rubber Soul and "The White Album" as my two favorite Beatles' albums. The former seemed to epitomize the band at their most confident and cohesive, with not a single recorded note or syllable wasted on any extraneous, trifling self-indulgence. The production on Rubber Soul was slick and glossy, but not too much so (like on the later Abbey Road).
“The White Album” seemed just the opposite: the Beatles' most sprawling, pessimistic -- and yes -- self-indulgent, work. Yet, it was also their most daring and adventurous, richest and most stylistically varied album (nearly three times the length of every other Beatles album!). It was rough around the edges and disjointed, but still not too rough and underdeveloped (like much of Let It Be). Even all of the fragments and disparate styles crystallized into a musical mosaic that perfectly captured the darkening spirit of the late ’60s as well as anything else that I have ever heard, seen or read about the period.
As for the songs, "Revolution 1" commented on, albeit with a hint of cautionary irony, the violent upheavals that had seized Paris during May '68 as well as Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. "Yer Blues" and "Helter Skelter", the two most loudest, noisiest tracks the Beatles ever laid down, effectively anticipated the hard rock-heavy metal of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, et al., as well as the later neo-revolutionary punk and grunge hysteria of the Sex Pistols and Nirvana. Other songs like “Blackbird” and "Mother Nature's Son", with their gentle pastoralism, and "Dear Prudence" and "Cry Baby Cry", with their wistful, child-like romanticism, possess more emotional depth than anything on Sgt. Pepper in my opinion(save for the aforementioned “A Day in the Life”). Even Richard Hamilton’s blank “non-art” for “The White Album” is preferable to the garish clutter of Peter Blake’s photomontage design for Sgt. Pepper.
Since "The White Album" was written and recorded mostly after May '68, the RFK/MLK assassinations, the Tet offensive, and the Beatles' disastrous trip to India, the jaded, almost despondent, atmosphere of songs like "I'm So Tired" and "Sexy Sadie", feel more real and contemporary today than do "With a Little Help From My Friends" and "Getting Better". Also, listening to "The White Album" now (particularly, the more disturbed, grotesque songs like “Piggies” and “Helter Skelter”), it is hard not to sense the ghoulish pall of dread that the Manson killings retroactively cast over it less than a year after its original release in December 1968. Indeed, "The White Album" may represent, in a manner of speaking, the "Vietnamization" of the Beatles.