Letters to the Editor
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There's no accounting for taste....
I recommend Gina Arnold go meet up with Aidin Vaziri in a dark place and contemplate Nirvana and discuss how superior and wise they are than the rest of us hillbillies.
I introduced my 12-year old to Sgt Pepper about 4 months ago and she has been playing it non-stop on her iPod ever since. I can't think of better proof of how well it has aged....
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Sgt Pepper
Yes, Revolver is better, but Sgt. Pepper was new and innovative and blew everything and everyone away at the time. Shortly thereafter the made the White Album which went back to straight-ahead rock and roll. Sgt Pepper was and still is brilliant, but it is dated in a way that Revolver and the White Album and Abbey Road and even A Hard Day's Night are not.
As for The Stones vs The Beatles...this is one of those pvotal rock and roll questions that will only be answered by each individuals taste. As for me, I'll take The Beatles. Smarter, more innovative, more listenable song writers. The would have been a Beatles without the Stones but would not have been a Stones without the Beatles.
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Appalling
This was the most mind-numbingly stupid "conversation" about pop music that I've ever had the misfortune to hear or read. Seriously.
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Meet the new boss
The most tragic irony of the review is that, as Gina and David throw Sgt. Pepper off its pedestal, they uncritically replace it with modern critical fave Pet Sounds.
Pet Sounds blows goats. I have listened to it on several separate occasions and have found it insipid every time. Sure it's an emotional album -- if you enjoy entering the emotional world of a paranoid schizophrenic with a mental age of fifteen. Also, Brian Wilson's "genius" arrangements become monotonous about halfway through, while Sgt. Pepper's Lennon/McCartney/Harrison alternation works wonderfully.
Sgt. Pepper is the slyest of the Beatles' albums. If you listen to it expecting emo lyrics, you're going to miss the point. Many of its most poignant moments are apparent throwaways: "I used to be cruel to my woman...", "Meeting a man from the motor trade.", "Then you decide to take a walk by the old school. Nothing has changed it's still the same" -- not to mention all of the seemingly mundane bits of "Day in the Life".
Also, as others have noted, it was primarily the Beatles' studio technique that was radical. There's a very good argument that in order to make that technique acceptable to listeners, they had to rely on extremely traditional song forms (yes, even Paul's maudlin music-hall styles). Even though they were the Beatles, if they had gone straight from Revolver to the White Album, it would have been seen as a colossal misfire.
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p.s.
David really phoned the column in this week.
When you have an apparently good idea which works out this badly in practice, scrap it and write another.
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Why are David and Gina so Glib?
Listen, anyone could write this sort of "X--it's not so great" dialogue posing as an insightful review. It's hackneyed and lazy.
I was a teen when the album came out and it was astonishing. I studied the cover endlessly and couldn't stop playing the album, the first one I ever really craved to own, as opposed to listening to my brother's extensive collection. The music was fresh, exciting, mysterious, funny, sexy, deep and just plain beautiful. Nobody had ever written anything like it. It was innovative.
Is that so hard to understand?
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I agree this column is a sinking ship.
If Sgt. Pepper is so overhyped and not very good, as I understand our columnists to think, why are they wasting our time asking us to read about it. Stop the cycle yourselves. Review Aftermath or Between the Buttons or Pet Sounds. Or better yet, Parable of the Arable or White Light/White Heat.
To dismiss and obviously seminal album just conveys this columnists' stupidity. The Beatles aren't my favorite band by a long shot, but they deserve their place at the top of any mainstream list.
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If Gina Arnold can't figure out...
...why Sgt. Peppers was more important to so many people in 1967 than Mario Savio and Huey Newton, she doesn't understand 1967. It is possible that she could rectify that fact, but, as someone else two years before Sgt. Peppers put it, "its like tryin to tell a stranger 'bout Rock 'n' Roll." She's missed a lot of threads, so she doesn't understand the feeling, and probably never will. Write about something else, Gina.
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David and Gina are SO cool!
Calling the Beatles overrated was a cliche thirty years ago.
What a pointless, self-satisfied, smug article. (No surprise, really. Just about all the music Marchese recommends is pointless, self-satisfied, and smug.) Final straw, this. No more Audiofile for me.
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What album did Gina listen to?
Consider "She's Leaving Home." The album's most underrated song, it expresses a sense of melancholy comparable to "Eleanor Rigby," and belies her claim that the album is SO not "emotional." It also belies her assertion that the album is completely missing the generational strife of the time.
"... there've been a lot of books written about 1968 and 1969 -- those are really the seminal '60s years." Years of semen ;^)
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You take yourselves too seriously
Nothing exists outside of politics to your boring generation. An album like this is not what you were taught to appreciate in college.
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Music critics
I can't trust any music critic who claims he or she can't hear the influence the Beatles had on Kurt Cobain. Under the grungy guitars, pounding drums and ragged bluesman vocals that populate Nirvana's catalog, you'll find plenty of pop melodies.
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A Word from Generation Y...
To my 27 year old ears that were trained on Led Zeppelin and Queen, Sgt. Pepper is quite simply a bore, a relic, and decidely tame. I went through a brief Beatles stage about ten years ago, but quickly got bored. Every now and then I pull them out and expect to be wowed, but the music only produces a litany of yawns. I understand this statement might be blasphemous to many, but the psychedelic sounds produced by the late-Nash era Hollies (e.g. the Butterfly album) in 1967, the same year Sgt. Pepper was released, are much more interesting to my ear.
I cannot deny the historical importance of the Beatles throughout society, culture, and all music that followed, but I can deny the sacredness and brilliance of this particular album. Frankly, I've heard better.
Perhaps I just needed to be there, but isn't it said that if you remember the 60s you weren't really there?