The Beatles — Sgt. Peppers — Side One
So this is the big one, the album that is in the public imagination as the one cementing the Beatles status as the greatest band of Rock and Roll ( by public imagination I of course mean a composite of the generations and people for which this is an established fact)
I am, for some reason, writing a series of articles trying to evaluate the Beatles quality fairly — starting with this one
which was mainly a preamble to the series, in the second article I quoted some people that did not like the Beatles to various degrees
and most of these articles are concerned with determining if these negative evaluations are correct or off base, and determining where, if ranking by quality and not influence the Beatles should rank.
In our previous articles on The Beatles albums
We went through each of the songs on the albums and discussed them in relation to lyrics, how modern they sound, who could do them justice in a modern cover, and trying to determine the aforementioned elusive matter of “quality”
One thing you will notice about the Beatles is how backwards looking they are. They are an extremely nostalgic band.
It’s funny because I don’t feel that the individual members by themselves are as nostalgic as the Beatles as a collective. Sure, lots of bands have some nostalgic component to them, after all nostalgia is an emotional response that most humans feel
The band I think of as most like the Beatles in the first British invasion — The Kinks — were also an extremely nostalgic band. We catch bits of nostalgia in The Who but much of the other bands of the 60s and 70s attractions to nostalgia got warped enough by drugs that you would probably identify it as something else, the Beatles with drugs input were still recognizably nostalgic.
Many bands under the influence of psychedelics became not nostalgic but rather fantastical, Cream with Ulysses and the like — not nostalgic for their youth but for the books they read when young and daydreamed about (perhaps that’s a stretch, but I do think there is something about Led Zeppelin’s cod-hobbitry that had a whiff of acid-altered nostalgia about it)
Note By IG Agent 86
People on the Internet do not like to read a lot in one sitting, they like to read a lot sure, but in small chunks. Originally because of this I told Agent 19 to deliver two articles, side 1 and side 2 — but guess what, side 1 is considered by Medium as taking18 minutes to read. Damn, that is too long.
So, I’m going to try something new here just to see how it works. I am going to split the Side 1 article in multiple articles each focusing on two or three songs from the album and rating them.
Here Are The articles for Side 1 of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
