Salon Trashes Sgt. Pepper

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' landmark album, Salon decide to trash it. It's all sort of sad and amateurish, two words that have described their Audiofile column ever since David Marchese took over. Luckily they caught lots of guff for it so I don't have to waste time complaining about the wrongheadedness of the entire exercise.

There are lots you can say about the Beatles and their influence and most of it has been said. Ink has been spilled, songs have been covered, the music has been released and re-released in every format and track list possible. Three words: Cirque. de. Soleil.

Some people prefer the young poppy Beatles, others prefer the mature spiritual Beatles. You can argue endlessly within their catalog and find something you'd previously overlooked or find something exciting in a song that you'd always overlooked before. In the last 10 to 15 years the hipness has gone away from the later records and now its pretty common to hear music critics voice their preference for Revolver and Rubber Soul. These sorts of reassessments are part of the natural cycle of a work of art.

But to me, this shows that there is something essential about the Beatles that makes them different from every other pop band in history. The critical preference for one album over another is like the rise and fall in popularity within Shakespeare's plays. Sometimes it's Midsummer Night's Dream and Hard Days Night. Other times it's King Lear and Sgt. Pepper. The point is that like Shakespeare, the Beatles are the linchpin of the pop music canon, and Sgt. Peppers is the linchpin of the Beatles' career. Without them and without this particular album pop music loses it's trajectory and its cohesiveness. There's story, no meaning to the last 50 years of recordings and the way they've worked on the public imagination.

If Harold Bloom was a music critic instead of literature professor, he would argue that the Beatles invented us. They synthesized the past and provided us with a new set of identities, person attitudes, and "modalities" (to borrow from George Will. Heh.) which are expressed through music and music fans to this very day.

Sgt. Peppers is essential to understanding the Beatles because it marks a turning point in their career. The album represents both a formal change in the way the wrote and constructed the songs, as well as a change in what they were singing about. It marked a turning away from youth and romantic love toward mature subjects about the larger world.

As Robert Cristgau wrote in 1972:

They were popular songwriters. Even though the staple of rock and roll in the fifties was teen schmaltz of wondrous innocence and vapidity, and even though the popularization of black music meant romanticizing the hard-assed realism of rhythm-and-blues, the sheer physicality of rock and roll, its sexual underpinnings, always implied a negation of such escapist rhapsodies. But the Beatles, unlike blues-influenced fellow geniuses Jagger and Dylan, never showed much interest in this negation. Instead of projecting sexuality, they evoked it and made fun of it simultaneously, just one more example of the insistent popness that always tempted the cynical to suspect they were the finks. After turning out enchanting variations on the permissible themes of union and parting for three or four years, their version of the myth gradually became more acerbic ("Girl," "If I Needed Someone," etc.), but their formal commitment to pop remained unchanged--those later songs are reminiscent of the down Smokey Robinson, especially on the all-important pop surface.

It was only during their mature period--including Sgt. Pepper, their best album, and The Beatles, their most consistent and probably their worst--that they abandoned the subject altogether.

And so the history of pop music has been about the cyclical taking up of youthful romantic themes and pop conventions and the abandoning of them in mid career in favor of mature themes and experimental song structures. Some bands like Radiohead accelerate toward the experimental side without looking back. Others like U2 try to move back and forth between the two extremes, as they zoom forward and fall back. Even Wilco went from straight forward alt-country knee slappers, to Beatle-esque songwriters, to experimental noise rockers before coming back full circle.

The point is that without the Beatles, pop music doesn't have a story to tell. It has no meaning and no purpose. There would be no reason to listen to music with any kind of seriousness beyond teenage consumption and American idol style voting. The Beatles invented us, the fan, the music snob, the record store junky, the collector, the 5,000 song iPod. And for that, we should grateful. Or at the very least, we should feel fine.