My high school friend's attic bedroom. Circa 1989. He put on the CD and skipped right to the end, to the part where the lady says "never to see any other way" over and over. I commented that it was a little freaky and requested that he turn it off. Then he played "A little help from my friends" and I commented that it was the same song at the beginning of the then-popular show, "The Wonder Years", which featured the adventures of young Kevin Arnold. Then, we played some guitar and went downstairs. Later, I went home and did my homework. Probably algebra, since that Mr. Kershner always gave us a ton of take-home problems to do.

I didn't have time to read all the letters, and probably no one will have the chance to read mine, but I want to echo the previous comments by saying that this article (or blog entry?) was a worthless piece of crap, and also add a few of my own cents.

To begin with, I'd like to paraphrase Dmitri Shostakovich, talking about his breakfast: "Consider these eggs I am eating that our cook made for us. Now imagine someone who does not make them or eat them, but talks about them. This is the musicologist." It may be that this is also the music critic.

We have to consider what we mean when we debate a work of art's "greatness." There have been a great many people here who defended Sgt Pepper with historical arguments—if you understood the sixties, you would know why we love it so much, it's been very influential, etc. Granted, if these "critics" can't hear the influence Pepper has had on every album that has come since, they don't have ears to speak of, but what they are arguing is not that the album was unimportant at the time, but that is not immortal—that it has not stood the test of time, and, unlike an immortal work, which should become more powerful over time, it speaks to us with a lesser voice than it did in the sixties.

I am 25 years old, and so I cannot attest to the power this music had in the sixties, but I can say that I have a deep emotional connection to it and have ever since I "discovered" it ten years ago. It is a part of me and part of the constant soundtrack that runs through my head. Every one of its songs looks for new ways of breaking down the old order, through the stories it tells or the sounds it combines. The play on amateur bands ("what would you do if I sang out of tune?"), the presence of an audience in a studio album (think of the laughter and cheers in the title song) the young breaking free of the old—this is literal in "she's leaving home" but is a constant motif, in fixing a hole, a day in the life, within you without, good morning— it's all about about not wanting to live the life your parents have, trying to break out and find new ways of being in the world. And then, ta-da, they throw in a whole lot of great tunes.

I identified with all these things as a teenager, hearing it as a personal and generational call to arms, and as I grow a little older and my concerns change, I can still adapt it and make it part of the story I tell about myself. Sgt. Pepper is not my favorite Beatles album, but it is one of their (in my estimation) seven immortal albums (the single with Strawberry Field/Penny Lane could almost count as an eighth, but alas, one has to exclude it on technical grounds). It may not be the pop culture phenomenon it was in the sixties, but it will always be listened to, like Mozart and Beethoven, long after I am gone, and long after the world has forgotten the Shins or the White Stripes, or, yes, the Rolling Stones.

Wow, guys this was the most masturbatory self-congratulating conversation about a subject I have read since Rush Limbaugh interviewed Dick Cheney last month.

Seriously, there should be no debate wether or not this album legitimately had an influence over popular music that was enormous, nor whether or not it still has massive appeal today. I guarantee you, if you ask ten people on the street who wrote "Out of our heads" or "aftermath" that a fraction of them are going to know, but say "Sgt. Peppers" and they'll know.

Having a different opinion of the quality of an album fine, but finding someone who agrees with you and waxing about how right you are makes you look like you are desperately trying to defend a position that is wrong.

...Is like asking why Picasso's so great if he can't even get the eyes in the right place on someone's head.

Oh, and by the way, the Beach Boys are emotional because they write about themselves (or at least Brian Wilson does), but the Beatles aren't because they write about other people? Sure, and autobiography is always a far superior read than fiction, 'cause, you know, it's like real and stuff.

You can't make this stuff up, right?

I think you would be hard-pressed to find a music scholar, or even an old-school music fan, who places Sgt. Pepper at the top of the list for Beatles albums, based on music alone. The styles, while ground-breaking for various reasons at the time, sound archaic and even trite now ("A Day in the Life" excepted, for obvious reasons). But the music of "Sgt. Pepper" is not what places it at the top of these "Top 100 Albums in Rock" lists. What the album did, as a cultural force, is what makes it so important and still so relevant.

When the Beatles released "Sgt. Pepper" on June 8, 1967 (*NOT* June 1, as everyone seems to remember; the album was only released to radio stations for play on June 1, exactly one week before it would be in stores), they shook the very foundations of American youth culture. Let's break it down:

1. Recording techniques. EMI in England, in 1967, had not yet switched over to the 8-track mixing boards which Tom Dowd had invented for Atlantic Records, and was still using 4-track boards. "Sgt. Pepper" is a 16 track album. To do that, Geoff Emerick and George Martin recorded four tracks, merged them into one track on a re-recordable master, then repeated the process three more times. The three re-recordable masters were then compressed into one final master. It had never been done before, and hasn't been done since -- Tom Dowd, after meeting Martin shortly after "Pepper"'s release, traveled to England to install his 8-track boards for EMI.

2. The event. Greil Marcus wrote, back in the 1970s: "It was only in the context of the Beatles event that their music was perceived for what it was. The event was a pop explosion; the second, and thus far the last, rock 'n roll has produced. A pop explosion is an irresistable cultural explosions that cuts across lines of class and race...and, most crucially, divides society itself by age. The surface of daily life...is affected with such force that deep and substansive chages in the way large numbers of people think and act take place." When the Beatles released "Sgt. Pepper," Brian Epstein told radio stations that they would be allowed to play the album a full week before it could be bought (following several leaks of unfinished tracks), he tacked on a brilliant caveat: it would be released at midnight, and any station playing it even one second beore midnight would lose the right to play it at all.

Recalls Marcus: "The fact that many stations habitually went off the air at Sunday midnight in order to service their transmitters was of no consequence...At any rate, the stations stayed on. They played the record all night and all the next day, vying to see which station could play it the longest, putting in calls to John and Paul in London that never went through, tracking every last second of the endless final chord of "A Day in the Life"...generating an unprecedented sense of public euphoria, excitement, satisfaction and joy... Sgt. Pepper, as the most brilliantly orchestrated manipulation of a cultural audience in pop history, was no less than a small pop explosion in and of itself."

On June 1, 1967, America quite literally stopped in its tracks for this album. THAT is why Sgt. Pepper is important, THAT is why it tops those lists. It may have become musically more and more distant, but the fact remains that America before Sgt. Pepper was a different American than what came after it. And there is no other band, and no other album, that can even remotely touch that.