And that’s a strange way to remember a group this Styles is a young classic rocker on his dad-baiting solo debut
By trying to do a little bit of everything, though, the Beatles for the first (and last) time sacrificed doing a lot of anything. Pepper” is easy to admire - it collects more textures and attitudes than most bands ever touch.
Sure, the synthesis the Beatles struck on “Sgt. “Getting Better” feels like a less intense version of “Got to Get You into My Life” “Good Morning Good Morning” could be a dry run for “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.” Pepper,” they took up more convincingly elsewhere, be it the scuzzy title track (“Yer Blues” rocks harder) or the dreamy balladry of “She’s Leaving Home” (“For No One” is prettier). Other styles the Beatles took up on “Sgt. Pepper” can seem remarkably sluggish with the likes of “Fixing a Hole” and “Lovely Rita.” And given the truly radical stuff to come on 1968’s White Album, “A Day in the Life” sounds almost quaint now - a criticism only insofar as the song is regularly identified as an unparalleled head trip. Some of that is down to taste of course: You either find “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” painfully twee or you don’t “Within You Without You” either feels three minutes too long or it doesn’t.īut for an album released only three years after the exhilarating “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Sgt. Pepper” simply doesn’t grab me the way the Beatles’ other records do, even (or especially) after hundreds of listens over dozens of years. What we’re left to reckon with a half-century later is the music itself - what it has to offer listeners shaped by the album’s advances as well as by all those that followed.Īnd this is where I tell you that “Sgt.
Pepper” did in reflecting its time and broadening rock’s scope has already been done (and roundly commended, to say the least). With its adventurous studio trickery and its half-baked concept about the fictional Lonely Hearts Club Band, the album captures that shift - and there’s nothing history remembers more vividly than it does a pivot.īut those achievements belong to the past the valuable work “Sgt. Pepper” came too at a crucial point for the Beatles, just after they’d retired from the road and as they began to redefine the group as a uniquely ambitious recording project. The album also marked important moments in the evolution of psychedelic art and of progressive rock indeed, it helped cement the very idea of the LP as music’s primary canvas. Pepper” embodied the hippie idealism of the Summer of Love, an era still regarded above all others by many of those in charge of establishing the Western cultural canon. Why? The answer has as much to do with context as with content. 1 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
It’s the group’s only record in the National Recording Registry overseen by the Library of Congress, and Rolling Stone put it at No. Pepper,” released 50 years ago next month and due for a lavish reissue on May 26, that’s consistently singled out as the Beatles’ crowning achievement. I’m not saying it’s a bad record I’m merely pointing out that the most impactful rock band in history made better ones - some catchier, some weirder, some more energetic, all filled with songs I’d rather listen to today. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” is the Beatles’ worst album.īut let me save you the outrage you may think I’m looking to foment.