Sgt. Pepper was a cultural watershed in the Summer of 1967. Marchese and Arnold clearly have no knowledge of the period or its music. I'm giving their sixth grade project on the topic an F.

BTW, Brian Wilson had a nervous breakdown following the release of Sgt. Pepper because he recognized that he could never equal it.

"A Day in the Life" is a phenomenal song, but there's not much else about the album that really stands out to me. In other words, it's the music, stupid. Themes and concepts are great, but they only provide a framework that has to be filled in with the actual material. Sgt. Pepper isn't a bad album at all, but it's not really very revolutionary on a musical level. (Hello, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Pink Floyd...) It has no edge to it. It's a safe album that doesn't really challenge the listener. (With the exception of "A Day in the Life," of course.) This album, Magical Mystery Tour, and Yellow Submarine just sound like the Beatles were fucking around in the studio and had lost sight of the craft of songwriting.

Thank goodness for the White Album.

Do you authors know much about music, or just the scenes you're into? Nothing sounded like the Beatles post-66 work before them. Kids like you have the luxury of taking them for granted, but you've no clue how much music you love today that owes their lineage to what the Beatles did.

And the fact that you list "she's leaving home" as an example of no emotion suggests to me that you are not only clueless about music history, you aren't even good listeners.

As for sounding dated - everything sounds dated eventually. John Coletrane from the 50s is now a soundtrack for the 50s. But like Coletrane, it took decades before the Beatles had been fully integrated into pop culture, it was so new. Metallica (for whom I've some respect) was dated, adopted, and passed by just 10 years after they broke ground. Madonna was dated a year after she came out and survived only by changing with the times every couple years (but none of it stood for more than a year or so).

It's so easy to look back and call something groundbreaking dated, because you can see how it will evolve simply by virtue of your date of birth. Dixieland jazz is so unstructured. Marx didn't have all the answers. Apes are dumb. Sure. But what matters is who turned the corners along the way, and to argue the Beatles (and Sgt. Pepper) didn't is to be a poor historian.

It was entitled "The Bee-Gees Vs. The Beatles - Who's the Best?!" We elementary school kids who opened the cover of National Scholastic's insipid answer to Rolling Stone found that the answer was, of course, "The Bee-Gees!!"

And we all know how that went, don't we?

The Stones? Are you fucking kidding me?? Yeah, they've "endured" - and why not? They're a corporation now, not a musical band. They've got product to sell and inventory to move (hence the endless tours, whereupon who-knows-how-many people place bets as to who will be the first to drop dead on stage during a live performance). I was dancing to their last genuinely good song at my Junior Prom in 1982. As someone upthread pointed out, The Stones have put out some good albums...and a whole lot of shit.

But The Beatles were something else. They were like Kubrick was to cinema, Tolstoy was to the novel, Dickinson was to poetry, Picasso was to painting. We shall not see their like again for a very, very long time. Not only did The Beatles never release a bad album - they never released a mediocre one, or even a good one. Every album was great in its own way. And if you were a contemporary, you could hear them grow artistically and sonically, from "Meet the Beatles" to "Rubber Soul" to "Revolver" to "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and beyond. In fact they grew so much they flew apart at the seams. That kind of brilliant creativity can't be contained.

But as to the album in question. I was born just under the demographic wire to be a Baby Boomer, but I'm really more of a Gen. X guy (though I hate these labels). I'm a fan of all kinds of pop music and rock. But there is not a single band in the history of either that produced anything CLOSE to SPLHCB. Not even my beloved Doors, with their amazing debut in 1966. Everybody has at least one clunker on their album. Not The Beatles, not on any album. Melodically complex, lyrically brilliant, SPLHCB may not have spoken directly to the politics of the time, but it was so unimaginably good that it performed perhaps the greatest miracle of all: It took peoples' minds off "the turbulent 1960s", if only for an hour. Name me another album of the time that did that, and then endured.

Pet Sounds, according to numerous interviews with Paul, was the inspiration for Sgt. Pepper. It came out a year before Pepper.

Many were knocked out by Brian Wilson's Pet Sounds at the time, itself a conceptual break through album of emotional content.

As to Sgt. Pepper, and this general topic of overhype, I can't disagree more. Far from overhyped, it is still a pleasure to listen to. Deals with a lot of interior content, even of the fictional characters. That's not cold, that's human. Plus early psychedelic spirituals like "Within You Without You".

A breakthrough production, prehistoric technical wizardry, it was a new way for rock and classical.

AN' I like it, like it, yes, I do!

The two are totally different things. Something can be groundbreaking yet still be dated. The two aren't mutually exclusive. Furthermore, it stands to reason that something that was groundbreaking in 1967 WOULD sound dated to today's young adults. Don't be so insulted by the passage of time. If you love it, great. If it meant something to you in 1967 and still retains that meaning, great. But do not expect people born many years after you to understand it and feel the same about it as you do. They just aren't going to. There's no reason to tear people down for it.