Letters to the Editor
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Pepper over-hyped?
I tend to agree that there are better individual song on other Beatles works: Rubber Soul, Revolver, White Album and Abbey Road deliver more hits, better individual songs. But I think you're missing the art part. Pepper is just as ambitious as Pet Sounds but it delivers more possibilities to other artists and thinkers of all sorts. If only Pet Sounds had been made and not Pepper, I don't think so many pop-artists would have been inspired to stretch beyond their presumed capacities. I listen to Pet Sounds and I say 'Wow, that Brian Wilson certainly is a unique talent.' But when I listen to Pepper, I feel inspired to create my own version of me beyond the me that everyone expects of me. I think that's why Cobain judged his work against Pepper. He didn't want his work to sound like Pepper, he wanted his work to keep moving forward as ambitiously as Pepper. As for the emotionally detached thing: I'm not buying. For every 'she's leaving home' there's a 'what did we do that was wrong?' Paul may say 'It's getting better all the time,' but John just said 'I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved.' If emotional connection is judged on an honesty scale, then I think Pepper succeeds just as brilliantly as any other Beatle work. I know that I don't dip into Pepper for a quick Beatles hit the way I do that with Rubber Soul, Revolver, White Album, Abbey Road or even Beatles for Sale, but when I want to listen to an entire Beatle album in a sitting, I listen to Pepper. And this is harder to have the attention span for in a many monitors all opened to so many channels world. I would say our brains are now less wired to sit for the entire sermon found on one album.
Also: I think much of the anti-Pepper revisionist thinking has much to do with the determination that Paul was more shallow than John and since Pepper is more Paul than John, then the stuff must not be as genuine. That's very easy to say now. For one thing, I think there's plenty of John in there - even if he himself has said there isn't as much of him there as in the early rocker days. And I grant that John is the more important cultural figure. No arguments there. But he's also had 27 years to be burnished by Yoko and fond memory. Paul has had to take hits from so many more media outlets. From the other Beatles too.
Some criticisms are valid: asking Yoko to make some of the catalogue credited to McCartney and Lennon is such the petty side of Paul. But even in John's Bed-in for peace days, there were far fewer critics critiqueing from far fewer outlets. John's lost weekend years weren't so pretty either.
One last thought - a sound fidelity issue which I hope doesn't sound like a vinyl looks so great in the rear view opinion: Pepper anticipated studio work beyond 8 tracks. But they only had the 8 tracks. Fewer tracks to sweeten, fewer tracks to add depth and depth often translates to warmth. Oddly enough, I think digital technology exposes the limitations of Pepper's 1967 technology. Sure you get to hear little tweaks and giggles you couldn't detect on vinyl. But you also hear some cold air that couldn't be filled. I think Pepper sounds better on Vinyl - not colder than post-Pepper Beatles work, even with Pepper's more ambitious sonic agenda.
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"righteous indignation"
Dear Salon, music can be written about with credibility. Please find someone who can.
It's interesting what's missing from their perspective.
Missing an appreciation for the art of melody, and particularly SP's blowing those doors open "once and for all." The genie was truly out of the bottle.
Missing an appreciation that Beatles were a British band, and proud of it, long before modern era where the Atlantic has become almost imperceptible, musically.
Missing an appreciation for the art of psychedelia, that few artists to date have managed to pioneer further. (Perhaps only Kate Bush on The Dreaming? But something else may have slipped by me.)
Missing an ability to hear in context, how much modern music had its doors opened by SP specifically (besides by the Beatles generally). Genres distinctions were suddenly revealed to be completely arbitrary, and all paths could inform one another ever after.
Missing an ability to hear the deliberate act of creation that wove such a record from whole cloth, when people surely wondered how on earth anyone could follow up Revolver?
But most of all, I'm struck rather obviously that neither of the reviewers listened to Sgt. Pepper turned up LOUD.
No music should be critiqued without a best attempt at total immersion into it.
And Sgt. Pepper is a wonderland, if one is prepared to enter it.
It's true that few of the individual songs stand so strongly out of context, but context was the point, a kaleidoscope ever turning into a new permutation, usually before we've adapted to the last one. Truly literally breathtaking.
I'll never forget the first time that I heard Good Morning Good Morning as long as I live, as if a twentysomething had suddenly been shown that sex could get even better than I could ever have guessed on my own. Glorious.
So yes, if these people find "getting to the primal moment of listening" to be "very difficult," then I'd suggest it's a volume issue. And quit monkeying around on the computer, and close your damn eyes!
No, it's not my most-played Beatles album. That would be Beatles for Sale, actually, the unassuming sound of them stretching their wings toward Help! and the cascade of their future.
But to deny the majesty and ambition of Sgt. Pepper is ludicrous, even if you don't personally like it a jot. Anyway who can't hear that it has, in fact, become underrated, doesn't have any business writing about music.
Even in subjective criticism, there are objective truths.
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