Gina Arnold wants it both ways: according to her, the Stones emerge winners vs. the Beatles, but asks why are Mick and Keith still alive? This is not lucid, but instead childish.

No mention of the obvious either: the Beatles never made a bad album. The Stones have made plenty.

The comparison between the two bands was historically invented and perpetuated by hack journalists, and ultimately was meaningless. They played in largely different styles througout.

That was the argument we had in the seventh grade. Glad to see that "rock critics" ... as necessary to the discourse as the appendix is to our bodies ... haven't stopped talking to themselves.

Between stating that the Rolling Stones are better than the Beatles but that the Stones should probably be dead by now.

Seems fairly simple, even obvious, to me.

Stones suck.

How's that for criticism?

Stupid? Yeah. Just like this "review."

It was, quite literally, ground-breaking. Within a year, everybody else had gone psychedelic, they were trying to make complete stories out of their albums, and they were setting their A&R guys free in the studio. Lots of great music.

The Stones are great, too. Just not quite as smart as the Beatles, and besides, they were heroin addicts and crazy. And their idea of a good time led to Altamont.

So Gina really thinks the Stones are a more influential band than the Beatles? I'll have whatever she's been smoking.

The reason Sgt. Pepper was so impressive had nothing to do with what came later; it had everything to do with what had come before. It was the first "theme-album" (the Beach Boys later stated that Sgt. Pepper influenced Pet Sounds). The music and lyrics all hit themes that had not been done successfully before. It introduced new instrumentation and different scores for rock. It took technology to the limit of what was (then) possible.

Most importantly, it freed a bunch of other musicians to break loose from boundaries and go in new directions. Kurt Cobain probably was referring to this.

It is not constructive to only determine the impact of a work by comparing it to what came after. It must first be compared to what came before.

llk

There's a reason the Beatles occupy so many spots in those "best albums of all time" list, however pointless those lists may be. They couldn't write a bad song. The weakest tracks on albums like Sgt Pepper would be standouts on most of the albums that were created since. It's cliche but it's not an exaggeration if you ask me. There's no other artist, ever, that has created as many timeless classics as the Beatles. Songs that can be enjoyed by people from so many different backgrounds and levels of music elitism!

Rolling Stones "won" because of record sales and the fact that they still exist, huh? Polyphonic Spree marginalized? Well that's not surprising considering how quickly some dismiss the contributions of the Beatles!

Sure the production might sound tame by todays standards, but the Beatles were a revolution in songwriting more than anything. They wove together brilliant idea after brilliant idea, and unlike a lot of modern music, you don't wade through a pointless verse to get to the payoff chorus that becomes a $4 ringtone.

If it keeps going this way iTunes will start selling us the chorus of the one song on the latest hit album thats any good for 45 cents. Can't wait.

At the time of its release, Sgt Peppers was the pinnacle of sound engineering and everyone was tantalized and fascinated by the richness of over-dubbing, orchestrations, sound effects, electronic filtering, etc, etc, etc. It foreshadowed the decline in interest for raw, unengineered rock music that was to be the 70s. I view sgt peppers as a negative influence in the history of rock music.

This column is getting quite poor.

The most disturbing thing about this story is that Marchese and Arnold are able to make a living writing this crap. And, what does it say about us for reading it :(

I love the line "... there've been a lot of books written about 1968 and 1969 -- those are really the seminal '60s years"

That is a good trick for the eighth and ninth years of a decade to its "seminal" years.

Yeah, I'm not sure that it's going to have the effect now that it had then. That doesn't mean it's overhyped, fellas. Just means that it's been so influential you're not hearing anything new. Boy, though, back then, it was new. It was so sophisticated and crazy. I remember When I'm 64 and With a Little Help from My Friends, and they were so wild, because they were old beerhall songs but rock-- You say there's no emotion, Gina, but it's there-- Paul's love for his dad, who sang in a music hall band, and the music of that lost-in-the-war era. And John's sense of alienation and loss. Sure, we're anthropomorphizing songs, but those guys were real to us in a way no other singers ever were.

I suspect it doesn't come through just in the music. But would we think of Keats the same way if we didn't know he died at 26 and those poems were all he left? We can look back now and shrug, big deal, odes about nature that are really about life and death, and hell, he didn't do anything Verlaine didn't do, and you're just romanticizing because he was cute and he died young-- but Keats IS important. So are the Beatles. You don't have to "hear" the music to know. You just have to imagine 1823 (or 1967). We should be so lucky to have music that challenges as that did.

I think Sgt. Pepper is seminal, ground-breaking, inventive, insane, because of the context not just of the times, but of the people involved, this crazy group that had stopped touring because all they could hear was screams and never themselves-- only in the studio could they find themselves. And as always, they led. Yes, looking back, the Kinks were doing really contemporary (I mean 21st C) stuff, and the Velvet U was starting up, and over there on the other land the psychedelics were getting started... but the Beatles still led.

It's funny you fall back on that old comparison with the Stones. I love the Stones, esp of that era, but they were always behind the Beatles (check out the cover of Let It Bleed, a total Sgt P ripoff). The real non-Beatle music was happening in San Francisco. The Stones, good as they were on so many levels, were derivative. They loved the blues and they loved Chuck Berry and they loved the Beatles too... and they took on the coloration of whatever they loved that year. They sounded original because Mick's voice was unique. But they were good mimics too. The Beatles really broke free of everyone else, and we all went with them.

Not to say Sgt. P is even the best Beatle album (I admit, I am most fond of the early stuff, and I too love Abbey Rd). But it is the most important (after the first). You can't see how it changed everything-- you only see the changes. That in itself is evidence of how important it was. After that, for a while, musicians made their own music. They could point to the success of Sgt. Pepper and bamboozle the record companies. Wish we could get back to that.