21 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
Maybe not the best album ever, but certainly the best cover!, December 27, 2000
The bottom line is that Sgt. Pepper is, musically, quite uneven. I'm giving it 5 stars anyway because of its colossal importance in rock music, and the presence of the 4 classics. And the album cover is unquestionably the best one that ever was, ever will be, ever could be.
Let's not go too far in bashing the musical content of Sgt. Pepper, though. There seems to be a fashionable anti-Pepper sentiment among Beatles fans these days (perhaps it was always there?). A number of people like to say that "Revolver" or "Rubber Soul" is far better than Pepper, which they dismiss as a bloated, over-produced vanity project that uses now-dated "avant garde" mixing and recording techniques to inflate middling songs beyond their merits.
There is some validity to this criticism. But let's not go nuts. The fact that there is an anti-Pepper backlash indicates the album must have had a considerable impact in the first place. But what is that impact? What distinguished this from the other efforts? If you want to look at it in a positive sense, you can say that this album showed a new self-awareness by the Beatles, a determination to step up to the pantheon of artists and be judged not as a clever little pop band, but as musicians and composers of the first rank. Along for the ride came producing techniques that, far from being dated, perfectly crystallized and immortalized the "psychedelic" sound that we associate with the '60s, and introduced an element of antic imagination and structural ambition to a musical form in danger of being entombed in four-bar-blues progressions and verse/chorus/bridge repetitions.
From a more cynical standpoint, you could argue that Sgt. Pepper was not, musically, one jot more advanced or interesting than "Rubber Soul" or "Revolver" or even "A Hard Day's Night." That the Beatles did not learn self-confidence here, but merely self-promotion. That this was the ominous moment where style overtook substance as the most important element in pop music.
I'm struck by some comments John Lennon made, recorded in the Beatles bio by Hunter Davies. "We're a con as well. We know we're conning them, because we know people want to be conned. They've given us the freedom to con them. Let's stick that in there, we say, that'll start them puzzling. I'm sure all artists do, when they realize it's a con... People think the Beatles know what's going on. We don't. We're just doing it. People want to know what the inner meaning of 'Mr. Kite' was. There wasn't any. I just did it. I shoved a lot of words together then shoved some noise on. I just did it. I didn't dig that song when I wrote it. I didn't believe in it when I was doing it. But nobody will believe it. They don't want to. They want it to be important."
There it is, straight from the horse's mouth, the great debunker Lennon himself debunking the so-called greatest album of all time. (Contrarian that he was, I imagine he'd have said something different if the album had been critically reviled.)
But 33 years later, the music is still there and we are still listening to it, for whatever reason. "Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees, and marmalade skies..." Love it or hate is, Sgt. Pepper is definitely too big to ignore.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
Best Beatles' album ever?, August 30, 2000
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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
(not)The best album in rock history?, October 21, 2003
Jeez what is up with u other reviewers, October 20, 2003
AWESOME!!, October 15, 2003
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
GREAT MUSIC, October 15, 2003
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