All this effort just to trash Sgt. Pepper? Geez...

I got this album for my 13th birthday back in the late NINETIES. I had never heard anything like it. I must have listened to it 15 times over and over just that day. It literally changed my life, prompting me to learn more about the Beatles, then the 60's and radical politics to the point where I eventually broke free of the staunchly conservative ideals I was raised to hold. The course of my life could have been totally different if I hadn't heard Sgt. Pepper.

For people who aren't jaded music critics, Sgt. Pepper is still earth-shaking. It is a psychedelic album in the drug sense and in the sense of mental liberation through new sounds, images and ideas. Look at the the cover--the Beatles pose as military men in dayglo epaulets, leading a squadron of geniuses and freaks. You don't think that's iconic of the Summer of Love/Vietnam War era?

We are talking about the Fab Four. I've never met a fan of the Beatles who wasn't a FANatic. One could argue (I won't) that they are the most influential band in pop culture history. I have friends who don't like the Beatles' music who still admit watching archival footage of them making women faint in concert- its kind'ave mind blowing. I grew up with the music in my house years after the music stopped because it was my parents. I take it for granted. However in my opinion, more so than religion or politics, if you wish to cause an emotional reaction in a human being- insult their music. Thanks for listening

They like the music where the lyrics are whispered, and oh, so alienated.

But one thing I won't go for: that the "pure" rock sound was ruined by the Beatles, and returned by punk. Bull. Punk was an ideological reaction, quite unlistenable, to the sop of the '70s, just before the idiots and coke fiends took over with disco. There's nothing wrong with overdubbing.

Really good music is a fragile thing, and it doesn't do formulas. The definitive moment in pop music? Bob Dylan getting booed for going electric, because some idiots wanted him to stay in one place and be a predictable product.

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?

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.