Beatles Revisionism

Jody Rosen on the real significance of the most written about album in pop history:

On both sides of the Sgt. Pepper's divide—hyperbolically pro and knee-jerk con—there is a tendency to treat the album as an icon stripped of historical peculiarity, floating outside of time and place. Yet Sgt. Pepper's is the definitive Beatles record not necessarily because it contains their best music, but because it captures them at their zeitgeist-commandeering peak: It is the Beatles album of, and about, history's Beatles Moment. It's worth reflecting further on the Beatles' particularity. Today, the band belongs to the world. But they were an English group, and no album was more local and particular, more steeped in the life and lore of Old Blighty, than Sgt. Pepper's.
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If Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band doesn't have a concept, it does have a theme. It's a record about England in the midst of whirling change, a humorous, sympathetic chronicle of an old culture convulsed by the shock of the new—by new music and new mores, by rising hemlines and lengthening hair and crumbling caste systems. In short, it's a record about the transformations that the Beatles themselves, more than anyone else, were galvanizing. Playing Sgt. Pepper's for the umpteenth time, you marvel at what generous-spirited revolutionaries the Beatles were. Compare the "Don't trust anyone over 30" rhetoric of the Beatles' 1960s fellow travelers to "When I'm 64," the sweetest song about old age ever created by a rock group. Then there's "She's Leaving Home," which hitches one of McCartney's prettiest melodies to a lyric that sympathizes on both sides of the generation gap—with the runaway girl who is "meeting a man from the motor trade," and with her grief-stricken parents: "We gave her most of our lives/ Sacrificed most of our lives/ We gave her everything money could buy." It's a remarkable feat of the artistic imagination, but it may as well have been reportage: Many British parents were saying such things back in the spring before the Summer of Love. Forty years later, if you listen closely, you can hear what Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band sounded like that morning at Mama Cass' flat in England in 1967. It sounds like England, in 1967.

As Rosen notes, many fans and critics now claim Revolver as a superior album. From a purely musical standpoint, I think this is almost certainly correct. Even recognizing that Help, Rubber Soul, and Revolver represent the most astonishing period of accelerated artistic growth in the history of pop music, the increase in compositional, lyrical, and productional sophistication from Rubber Soul to Revolver is flat-out amazing. While there's obviously no denying that Sgt. Pepper's is, by any measure, a great pop record, it essentially consolidated the artistic gains made on the previous album.

As to the critical disrespect for McCartney that Rosen mentions, I don't know of any serious critics who still cling to the nonsense about McCartney being the shallow tunesmith/Lennon the tortured, thoughtful artist. In any case, upgrading Revolver certainly does not serve that argument, as Paul's contributions to the record are stellar.

If I have one nit to pick with Rosen's article, it is that while he recognizes Sgt. Pepper's as a nostalgic look back on Old England, he does not go the next step of recognizing the figure in the studio with the Beatles who represented, to some extent, a connection to that England, and who became the midwife, so to speak, of the musical and cultural revolution which the Beatles brought forth: George Martin. Fifteen years older than the Four, the picture of buttoned-down, proper Englishness, Martin was of the generation from whose hands the Beatles and their cohort would wrench the torch. Ironically, perhaps, Martin would help them do it. It was Martin who, after they had been rejected by other London labels, decided to take a chance on the group, recognizing in them the charm and humor that would make them not just musical but cultural icons. It was Martin who, unable to decide which of the four should be featured as the group's leader, made the seminal decision they were best presented as a group. Most importantly, it was Martin whose traditional musical education, and own playful experimentalism, enabled him to realize on tape the sounds that the Beatles heard in their heads. If there's any revisionism which needs to take place here, it's that Martin should be better recognized as a key component to the Beatles' music and moment.