SGT. PEPPERS might be my least favorite Beatle's album but it's still fanatastic, definitely influencial. It also has the best album cover of all time. Another thing I like about SP's is that it generally inspires a good discussion, this one is a notable exception. At least the comments section totally rocks. every single one of them is more worthy of my eyeball time. Like the Kennedy assassination, I can still remember the first time I read Gina Arnold's annoying, sef-obssessed prose in the EAST BAY EXPRESS.

Sgt. Pepper was a very big cultural phenomenon back in 1967. It symbolized the interesting things that were happening at that moment. And, having become associated with that moment, it will continue to get more attention than it deserves from an aesthetic perspective. It is not a "concept" album, but a collection of very cool tracks, extremely well made, advanced yet accessible. With terrific packaging. So here we are 40 years later, with the news media calling attention to it one more time. That's show business.

The more interesting story from a musical perspective is the competition that was going on in the mid-sixties. In particular, the wonderful battle between Brian Wilson and the Beatles to outdo each other in the studio. The Beatles/Beach Boys chronology went like this: Rubber Soul 12/05, Pet Sounds 5/66, Revolver 8/66, Good Vibrations 10/66, Sgt. Pepper 6/67, Heroes & Villains 7/67 and Smile aborted (to be reborn in 2004). The Beatles and the Beach Boys appreciated each other. I think we can do the same.

By the way, the release of Sgt. Pepper didn't cause Brian Wilson's breakdown. It was surely a factor, but he had plenty of other problems to deal with.

OK, enough of that. I'm gonna go watch a movie.

This article could be replaced by a fart.

I rarely dive in to the Beatles fray and was amazed by the screamers of my day, but this artless piece is laughable.

It's probably the most aimless mess I've ever encountered at Salon. I thought I was reading a transcript of Entertainment Tonight.

I was particularly amused by the speculation about who should be dead; can't have a music review without that.

It wasn't easy to find two people with NOTHING to of import, accuracy, or value on the subject, but Salon pulled it off. They're pretty tasteless bores on top of it.

Though written off early on as big on style but rather hollow, "Sgt. Pepper" is none the less a very strong album, even the sometime-cited-as-the-clincker "Mr. Kite" strikes me as a lot of fun. As for the Stones, their copy "Satanic Majastys" is a lot heavier on filler. Some don't like George's Indian stuff, but "Within Without You" is still stone beautiful.

So it's not the best Beatle album, but hardly the weak link in the chain (that would be, "Let it Be" in any incantation). Why the hype? As any armchair rock fan knows, it was the album that was supposed to take Rock beyond itself, into the relm of "ART." Thankfully, such pretentiousness was always undercut by humor where the Beatles were concerned.

Really. Pls shut up.

Sgt Pepper was generation defining not because it expressed the social and political turbulance of the sixties, but because everyone who heard it was changed by it. It certainly changed rock music but for many it changed something more in the way they saw life, very hard to describe, but if you were alive then, you know what I mean. From a muscial critical standpoint perhaps it was not the best, but if you were young in 1967 you'd know why it is go great.

Gina Arnold is a nitwit hypothesizer who's idea of evaluating the worth of a band or its albums is by how often they slammed dope, how many band members died stupidly, and what were the cut of designer rags they wore when either playing in concert/discovered by a maid, dead in the bathroom, wrapped around the toiler, a needle or an empty vial shattered or spilled on the tile. "Sgt.Pepper" doesn't rate because it lacked all topical references and wasn't huggable enough, blistering enough, "real" enough. These are vague particulars, and Arnold, who writes as airily about music as Greil Marcus minus Marcus's elegance or occasional genius for making the far flung connections across historical periods and art movements, has little to say about those remarks should matter to us. She seems unable to talk about the music, the performances, the quality of the songwriting, elements that any music discussion comes down to, regardless of one's variety of nonconformist opinionating. For me and most I know, the album is good if over rated, about half good to great, the rest arch and pretentious; some of the songs and lyrics are among the best in the Beatles body of work while the rest is as pretentious as anything the Vanilla Fudge or Moody Blues would contrive. One could go along this line, taking songs apart and putting back together through any number of filters, and much would , I wager, be worth reading. It depends on who is doing the talking. Arnold doesn't like the Sixties, she doesn't like rockers in their Sixties, she doesn't like to discuss music. But the obituaries. She's all over that with a ghoulish. Really, Gina Arnold's opinions on the Beatles are useless, as is the bulk of her rock and roll writing. Shame on Salon for defering to her opinion for anything.

The JFK assassination was so overrated!

Exactly! Totally! That was just what I was thinking.

All these old people going on about how they can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news and stuff, and all I'm thinking is geez, get a life!

True that! They're all like "No one could believe it; we were all just stunned." It sure seems like people were easily stunned back then.

Absolutely! If you're stunned by that, then what does that leave you for when a real assassination comes along?

Exactly.

Martin Luther King, now there's an assassination for you. Hell, even Bobby Kennedy, might have more of an emotional punch. I can see getting all upset and stuff about those, but JFK? It's just such a non-event. I can't believe we're even talking about it.

I know! I'd put Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison all croaking ahead of JFK getting shot any day.

Right! But even that's not a good example because there was this band in Cincinnati called The Whirligigs that was better than all three of them combined, except that nobody knows about them because they only put out one album, and by that I mean only ONE album; one single pressing, one copy. And I met a guy, who knows a guy who actually listened to it once, and that guy said it kicked the shit out of anything The Beatles ever recorded or could even think of recording. And yet no one says they can remember where they were or what they were doing when The Whirligigs broke up. It's ridiculous. Society has everything upside-down.

As a society, we are so hosed. So completely messed up.

It's like, you know, if Syd Barrett had never gone crazy, we wouldn't have to have suffered through the sonic null-zone of "Darkside of the Moon."

Exactly! Roger Waters as the anti-christ! I'm loving it! Will you have sex with me?