Letters to the Editor
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Ask Shakespeare
A typical Rush Limbaugh tactic; throw up a non-existant, strawdog, then show your brilliance by knocking it down. "Why....overhyped?" A) didn't realize it was, Thanks for telling us, and B) does the largest selling album of all time give you a clue? I'll bet most of the millions who bought it, or just listened and enjoyed it, couldn't tell you "why," nor care "why." Sort of like pornography....they just liked it. I was in the wholesale record business during the decade of the 60's. I've listened to and loved thousands of tunes. But if you put a gun to my head, I couldn't match 10 singers or groups with their songs. And I wouldn't waste a second trying. I'm sure it was Shakespeare who said, "it's the tune, stupid!" And you can look that up.
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You can't hear the Beatles in Kurt Cobain's music????
Listen to Cobain's chord progressions, his punchy, economical compositions. If you aren't hearing the Beatles in his music, you aren't listening.
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I think you are missing the point ...
Most all progressive musicians were heavily influenced by this album, as it really opened up the doors to experimentation and influences outside the pop mainstream. It is a piece of pure music ...
And yes, it is not overtly political, which to me only makes it seem more timeless. It isn't tied to its era, other than being an icon of it, which is hardly its fault.
And darned if I understand the denial of Beatle's influence on Kurt Cobain. I hear it plainly, but in any case, if he says they were a major influence, and you disagree, you are wrong by definition, I think.
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The Beatles are like Hawaii
Overhyped, right? I mean, come on, who goes to friggin' HAWAII anymore?
But then you actually got to Hawaii. And you see how something can be overhyped and underrated at the same time. Mother Earth comes up and absorbs you into her bosom. The air smells like sugar cane and pineapple, there's powdery sand and blue water everywhere, and slightly chubby, gorgeous people go about their lives in those flowery shirts actually listening to actual Hawaiian music on the radio. With ukeleles and everything.
But you know, screw Hawaii. The weather sucks for my skinny black jeans.
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Gerbils
This is what happens when people reared on Pop culture try to sound like competent human beings. They come off sounding like six year olds with toilet training issues. Pathetic.
Go sing your sickening love songs to a gerbil...
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It's About Time
Finally, someone tells it like it is. This is a great album, no question about it. But it is not THE great album that everyone says it is. The authors have hit the nail sqaurely on the head by saying "...was its formal, rather than emotional, qualities -- how the songs are put together, the production values." Musically of course it is very good, but it really the proudction, how the album was constructed, that is the groundbreaking point here.
This statement sums it up perfectly "I don't buy it as a generation-defining album. I think that's been put on it in retrospect. "Sgt. Pepper" is completely missing the generational strife of the time; there are no political overtones." There are many other albums that clearly are more defnining of an era or period, but "Pepper is definitley not one of them. The passing of time and the fact that the majority of the critics who place this ats the best album of all time, actually grew up during this period. So it is only natural for them to wax nostalgic and harken back to the "old days" and view them through smoked filled, rose colored glasses.
I think if modern critics reviewed it, yes, it would still garner great reviews but it would NOT be ulled as the best of the best
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Sympathy for the Devil
I don't envy music critics. I like to listen to the music that I like, not everything that's out there, so I can imagine being exposed to all the crap that's produced every day would embitter a person. Maybe the search for the new and fresh causes one to forget about the qualities of the tried and true.
If you've ever talked to a player in a symphony orchestra, you'll know how much they hate the beloved standards of classical music. Every f****ing year, it's Beethoven's 5th, Stars and Stripes Forever, 1812 Overture, Rhaphsody in Blue. They love it when they get some weird avant garde piece that has them yodel into the bells of their french horns, anything to break the monotony.
But the beloved standards are still beautiful pieces of music, great even. It's too bad that familiarity has led to contempt, but nobody forced you to get a job playing music or even reviewing music. Everybody thinks it would be so cool to be a musician or get a job in the music industry, but musicians I have talked to, when I ask them what they listen to, they say "nothing." You really can get your fill.
About the Beatles, I'll say this: When I was a boy, in the 70's, I heard Beatles songs all the time and I learned to sing them in school but I did not know there was a band called the Beatles that wrote and recorded them. I was surprised to learn this fact, I just assumed that they were like folk songs, passed down from generation to generation.
I saw Paul McCartney in concert back in 94 or 95 in Colorado. He filled up the football stadium at the University in Boulder, I think there must have been 70,000 people there. After he was done with his solo stuff, about half an hours worth, he did an hour and a half of Beatles. Everyone in the audience, all 70,000, sang along with every song.
The Beatles vs. the Rolling Stones? I always compare the Beatles to George Gershwin and Antonio Carlos Jobim, timeless song writers.
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Not a UK perspective
Hello,
I read with interest this colloquy. I am not British nor am I old enough to know, but I suspect based on lots of reading and conversations with people who fit the bill that the emotional appeal -- or at least the photographic resonance -- that exists in Sgt. Pepper has to do with its portrayal of Britain rather than an international world game changer.
Sgt. Pepper may be delightful or dreadful to listeners, but I see its audience as being people from the UK at that time. It is a psychedelic painting by the Beatles of the middle classes of Britain at the time. That gives it an edge to people who recognize the skewed portraits of themselves, and leaves the rest of us with an album that, while good, lacks that extra spark.
It's like watching a Monty Python episode where the references to British talk show hosts and one-time candidates for the House of Commons from small districts. Funny yes, but maybe a bit overdone for the rest of us.