Letters to the Editor
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you two don't know what the . . .
**** you are talking about...
Some things are beyond hype, SPLHCB is one of those.
The rest are like these two 'reviewers' . . . lame, lost, ignorant.
And 'Some Girls' was the best Stones album ever... period.
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Making a rep?
Back in the day every time The Beatles or Stones issued a new album there was always some little weasel critic trying to make their bones by panning the latest release from the bands by announcing they were out of material. Now we have this guy kicking dirt on SP's grave. At 19 my daughter used her own money to by a SP CD to burn to her iPod. That's love.
Was it the best album of all time? Who knows? It is damn good though.
There's no accounting for tastelessness.
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These reviewers' attitude...
...reminds me of the ascetic poet Bunthorne's solo in Gilbert and Sullivan's "Patience":
And ev'ryone will say,
As you walk your mystic way,
"If that's not good enough for him
Which is good enough for me,
Why, what a very cultivated kind of youth
This kind of youth must be!"
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Why listening to Pepper doesn't add up
Once Pepper's newness faded there was never a question that it's value lie as a cultural event and not in it's musical value, George Martin's producing achievement aside.
As a sonic artifact it's value is indisputable but it's role as a bellwether in an ascendant youth culture is what has earned it the rep it enjoys.
It's old news that everything the Beatles were or became is present in Revolver, it's vitality contrasting starkly with Pepper's decadence of only a few months later, another symptom of the acceleration of space age pop culture.
Pepper doesn't explain it's era, it's of it. To look for answers in the grooves is an error. We had a great need for relief from the tensions of Viet Nam and civil rights. The entertainment world was changing along with everything else and in no small part by the Beatles contribution and we treasured them for bringing Fun from Merry Olde.
But the sixties was a period like any other, with one foot in the past on it's way forward. Because of our esteem, we gave them a pass on Pepper's excesses and music hall barminess when we weren't tripping over each other over-analysing everything about it.
But events soon overshadowed it and the hippies made the Beatles begin to appear passe. And the white album was confusing and...
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Are you kidding?
Oh boy. How old are you guys? No, really.
Real musicians almost invariably regard the Beatles' work and Sgt. Pepper especially as genius for the simple reason that it is. Taken as a whole, musically it is possibly the most inventive and compositionally sophisticated work of pop music in a century defined by popular music. It's not even rock. It's its own universe. And aside from being compositionally brilliant it's only emotionally cold to tragi-comic emo navel gazers who can't see outside their own heads.
Just in case the structure of the thing escaped you, it's a kaleidoscope of colorful slice-of-life vignettes. A dream ("Lucy"), spirituality ("Within You"), joyfully impetuous infatuation ("Rita"), musing on a long life together ("64"), the daily grind ("Fixing a Hole"), leaving the nest ("She's Leaving Home"), growing up and getting perspective ("Getting Better"), and so on.
The bright, colorful slices of life are bracketed as a concert in the park and the whole is counter-pointed by the dystopian "A Day in the Life." Get it? Even the concert in the park is part of the imagery: a neighborhood gathering, like life itself. "What would you do if I sang out of tune?" -- where do I fit into this life? (That line is sung by Ringo specifically because he doesn't sing very well but gives it his sincere best.)
I realize these are the sort of thoughts that don't occur to the black t-shirt anti-everything crowd who've crawled up their own asses and died. It may be a little difficult for a strung-out brat who thinks his needle marks are proof of something deep and who plays (head hanging, drooling on himself) three-note riffs that make most nursery rhymes look intricate. But for a grownup the themes have a permanence and resonance that lasts a lot longer than wallowing in memories of hating everyone and everything from the ages of thirteen to seventeen. It's often unapologetically joyous, which is why, above all, it must be dismissed by the emo crowd.
And once again there's the music itself. It's like saying Mozart sucks because he never chain-sawed a Les Paul, ate glass or spat blood on the audience. Real musicians understand this. Cliquy fashion-victim music writers... maybe not.
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Sgt. Pepper and the Citizen Kane effect
Sgt. Pepper has always sounded rather dated to my ears. this isn't to say I can't appreciate the technical and artistic
achievement the album made. For me, it's the same with Citizen Kane. Kane, like Sgt Pepper, is a grand artistic statement. I re-watched Kane recently with my wife. She enjoyed it, but didn't understand why it rates so high. I attempted to explain, "look at Welles use of deep focus, that single shot in his parents house where he's outside, but in the center of the conversation is masterful" "look, Welles filmed ceilings, that had never been done before." I realized that, aside from being a nerd, Kane doesn't speak with the same power that it did in '41. Just about every film that followed normalized the innovations forged by Welles. Sure Citizen Kane is one of the most important films ever made, but I'd rather watch Touch of Evil.
Same thing with Sgt. Pepper. Ohh look 16 tracks! A conceptualized and thematic construction of tin pan alley type songs. How utterly artistic! Again, like Kane, its influence was so vast, it sounds hardly distinguishable from what was to follow. Sgt. Pepper stands as arguably the first great cohesive "artistic" statement made by a rock band. It is certainly admirable, and deserves to be celebrated, but I'd rather listen to Revolver.
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News Flash: Music critic claims the key to Rock and Roll is...
... music criticism.
Shocker, that. It's the sort of self-indulgent self-important claptrap that has rendered music criticism irrelevant since... well, come to think of it, ever.