Idolator
Ed. note: Every two weeks, it seems, some magazine, TV network or blog releases its "Top 100 So-and-so music things of all time" list. Often, these rankings simply recycle the same set-in-stone music-geek beliefs that were established years ago—Pet Sounds rules, as does London Calling, etc.—but because there are often shifts in the critical canon, we've asked alarmingly frequent Idolator commenter (and occasional guest editor) Chris "dennisobell" Molanphy to start keeping track of them for a new column we're calling "Canon Fodder." In this debut column, he reacts to this weekend's interminable glut of "It was 40 years ago today..." navel-gazing, and it's the last thing you'll ever want to read about Sgt. Pepper.
In 1977 and again in 1987, British radio and TV personality Paul Gambaccini surveyed an array of U.S. and European broadcasters and rock critics to determine the "Top Rock 'n' Roll Albums of All Time." To no one's surprise, the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band topped both polls handily—in '87*, by what Gambaccini called "a bigger margin than ever."
You'd think that, just by polling people exactly 10 and 20 years after Sgt. Pepper, Gambaccini was tipping off the panel to honor the Class of '67's most revered album. But actually, few of Gambaccini's pollees placed Pepper at No. 1—Pepper's win was the result of its ubiquitous, obligatory placement somewhere in most of the media personalities' top tens. In his 1987 book presenting the latest poll results, Gambaccini was openly disappointed that his own No. 1 album, the Beatles' 1966 masterwork Revolver, didn't even come close to the top tier:
This poll is obviously not fixed: the favourite album of the author of this volume has dropped a few places [since 1977 —from #4 to #17]. May he point out just a few highlights of this awe-inspiring long-player? ... [W]hat platter contains on a single side a work of sublime art that will live for centuries, "Eleanor Rigby," a good-time singalong like "Yellow Submarine," a standard such as "Here There and Everywhere," and bitter social commentary in the vein of "Taxman"? ... Anyone for a recount?
It's too bad Gambaccini didn't conduct a third poll in 1997, because he might've turned up results he'd like better.
In 1998, the publishing arm of Richard Branson's Virgin empire released the results of what it called "the most comprehensive sampling of musical tastes ever conducted." With some 200,000 U.S. and U.K. voters participating, Revolver trumped Pepper for No. 1, for the first time in any major music poll. That may have looked like a fluke, but an update to the Virgin poll after the turn of the millennium showed no challenge to Revolver at the top despite lots of change on the list's lower rungs. Then, in 2001, VH-1 polled hundreds of musicians, executives and journalists for a TV special, 100 Greatest Albums, and it produced a similar result: Revolver at No. 1, Pepper way down at No. 10.
One year after that, Rolling Stone polled its readers—for once, talking to the college kids it covets in addition to the Boomers it worships—and Revolver eked out a win over the No. 3-ranked Pepper (and No. 2-ranked Nevermind). These days, only Rolling Stone's critics and industry pals are propping up Pepper—it topped the magazine's much-hyped 2003 "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list. But otherwise, in any poll of people not directly influenced by Jann Wenner, Revolver beats Pepper regularly. Even Rolling Stone is starting to quietly acknowledge this—its latest Album Guide (2005) features a Beatles essay by Rob Sheffield that confesses, "Revolver has steadily climbed in public estimation. These days, Revolver has earned its reputation as the best album the Beatles ever made, which means the best album by anybody."
This should be massive news among rock geeks and keepers of the Boomer canon. So why isn't it? In movie circles, there's been some low-boil debate recently over whether the more populist The Godfather will someday surpass the critic-worshipped Citizen Kane as filmdom's undisputed Greatest Movie; it hasn't happened yet, but if Godfather ever tops a major poll, you can bet there'll be headlines trumpeting it. But what's happening in the rock canon is like Orson Welles's Kane getting beaten by Welles's own Magnificent Ambersons; no one's making much of the changing of the guard, because the Fab Four are defeating themselves.
The fact is, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band at 40 is, as a piece of art, none the worse for wear. It hasn't changed. We have.
For starters, Americans have only had 20 of the last 40 years to properly judge Revolver. EMI's 1987 release of the Beatles catalog on compact disc standardized the group's pre-Pepper albums in favor of their British versions, rectifying Capitol USA's egregious mid-'60s chop-shop editions of the group's first seven LPs. The last album to suffer at Capitol's hand was Revolver, which lost three tracks in its original 1966 U.S. release - all songs by John Lennon ("I'm Only Sleeping," "Doctor Robert," "And Your Bird Can Sing"). As Sheffield points out in the Album Guide, the restoration of the Lennon songs was fundamentally important in Revolver's appraisal by the general public.
However, I'd argue that making Revolver 100% whole was helpful but not really essential. Ask a fan of Revolver to tell you what they love about it, and they won't gas on, Pepper-style, about thematic unity and the spirit of the times, man. They'll talk about the songs. Take another look at the Gambaccini quote above, in which he runs down that killer tracklist. Or watch VH-1's segment on Revolver that closes its "Greatest Albums" special - it features the usual array of famous talking heads, and each of them has a favorite tune: Art Garfunkel extols "Here There and Everywhere"; Chuck D hypes "Got to Get You Into My Life." Revolver earns props from its fans not as an album qua album, but as a supremely fortuitous collection of songs. In terms of breadth of songs, Revolver is almost as wide-ranging as The White Album, but on a single disc, in under 35 minutes.
In short, it's the Beatles' greatest mixtape. Which makes Revolver perfect for the mixtape era. And that other record, not so much.
Lost in all the hype you're hearing this month about how Pepper made the album important is the business impact of that pop happening. Sgt. Pepper was, for the '60s music biz, the killer app. It wasn't the first album to read like an album (thank you, Frank Sinatra and Brian Wilson), it was just the most successful—just like Apple's iPod wasn't the first MP3 player, it was just the one that captured the public's fancy.
Pepper made the album, not the single, the standard unit of measure for popular music. Once the industry saw, in 1967, that long-playing albums with no singles could sell as well as or better than 45s, the whole emphasis changed. Music was meant to be heard, enjoyed, judged and, most important, purchased at length. Labels built their economic foundation around people's willingness to buy bundles of songs more often than they paid for individual ones.
That's a pretty dubious legacy. The big fight between the music industry and its customers over the last decade—starting with the elimination of the single and exploding with the rise of Napster and file-sharing—can be laid at the feet of Sgt. Pepper, the album that made greedy label bosses think they could sell song bundles forever.
Pepper, as art, doesn't really deserve this legacy: it has its strengths—a great sense of mood, if not coherence; the cover art; Ringo's best-ever vocal performance; "A Day in the Life" —and it's easy for post-Boomer critics to beat it up too much.
Still, the rise of the once-underrated Revolver is an understandable reaction to decades of Pepper-is-God propaganda; one day, Gen-Z kids might get sick enough of Nevermind hype to adopt another Nirvana album (it's already starting with In Utero). More to the point, it's understandable that modern rock fans, especially young ones, would feel closer to the Beatles album that feels less like an ornate arts-and-crafts project and more like a chopped-n-screwed iPod playlist.
Final note: Your guest Idolator still prefers Pepper to Revolver. What can I say? It was the first non-Sesame Street album I adopted as my own.
* The '87 Gambaccini poll is an amusing '80s time capsule. Among the poll's anointed 100 discs were Huey Lewis & the News's Sports, Don Henley's Building the Perfect Beast, and one of U2's most flaccid albums, The Unforgettable Fire. And all five original MTV VJ's are on the panel; J.J. Jackson's favorite record is Roxy Music's Avalon—that old smoothie!
Comments
Nice rundown. Someone should start a dead pool-style betting scheme in which you try and guess which year a non-Beatles album will top more than 3 "best albums ever" polls, i.e. "when will the boomers finally admit they're old."
I say it's another 6 to 8 years before OK Computer routinely starts bumping Pepper's and Pet Sounds out of the top slots on these countdowns.
Meta-question: if the increased popularity of Revolver is due primarily to the demise of the album as pop music's measuring stick, then what's the point of ranking albums anyway?
And congrats on the feature! Looking forward to more...
Ugh. Nevermind. Just, ugh.
And another 14-20 before Kid A or Hail To The Thief start bumping OK Computer as the best Radiohead album.
Of course, by then, we'll all be post-album and post-boomer so the response to the poll will be a unanimous "Huh? Whazz-at? Have you heard the new ringtone by Timbaland?"
My perverse revisionistic tendencies lead me to think that the first killer app album was in fact West Side Story movie soundtrack. Or maybe South Pacific or My Fair Lady. Any singles off them babies?
Zzzzzzzz...
Man, old people are exhausting and long-winded. No wonder we put you in homes.
Sports was a great album. But Henley? Seriously?
Also, if I remember correctly, the inclusion of MTV's VJs in the '87 Gambaccini poll is a key reason why The White Album finished so well: didn't they all (or almost all) vote for it?
@dickdogfood: Soundtracks aren't "albums"....
before i'm dead, i'd like to see "in the aeroplane over the sea" top one of these lists.
man, kids are so industrious and energetic. no wonder we have you delivering our pizzas!
.....@dickdogfood: Absolutely not, to "My Fair Lady!" It was WAY overplayed around my parents' house growing up! I could go the rest of my life and not hear "Wouldn't it be Loverly" again! Or the nauseating "Rain in Spain" (is mainly a a pain...).
.....I've really enjoyed all the arguing over which Beatles record is the best! Reminds me of high school back in the 1970s. Consensus back then? Beatles, who listens to them? The Who, Stones and Zep, man. That's the cool stuff! I agreed, too. Now, I have to admit that Beatle songwriting has held up better in a lot of cases. Still, great bands, all.
Yes, all the MTV-ites voted for the White Album. I think Martha Quinn's entire Top 3 consisted of Beatles albums. there are a couple interesting individual lists in the back of that book, now that I think of it, though for the most part it's pretty tedious stuff.
Great column, by the way; looking forward to more of it.
OK starting the "Revolver" backlash...
"Taxman"= possibly earliest known example of rich rock star whining, plus a lame ripoff of the "Batman" theme, of all things...
And don't get me started on that cut'n'paste/Magic Marker cover-
@RepentTokyo:
When Molanphy says:
"Pepper made the album, not the single, the standard unit of measure for popular music. Once the industry saw, in 1967, that long-playing albums with no singles could sell as well as or better than 45s, the whole emphasis changed. Music was meant to be heard, enjoyed, judged and, most important, purchased at length. Labels built their economic foundation around people's willingness to buy bundles of songs more often than they paid for individual ones."
...it seems to me he's using the term "album" in a way that is applicable to both soundtracks from musicals and albums-qua-albums like Sgt. Pepper alike. Actually, I think it's self-evident that many soundtracks from musicals are in fact more album-y than most "concept albums" like Sgt. Pepper: like, they tell an actual story 'n' shit.
"But otherwise, in any poll of people not directly influenced by Jann Wenner"
I think you meant to type: "Employed"
Great work.
The Unforgettable Fire is rad.
Hard to believe we've gone a lengthy column and multiple comments and no one's mentioned Revolver's arguably most influential track : "Tomorrow Never Knows". Not only the uber-psychedelic song of the psychedelic era, its big beat and tape looping trance is still being rewritten today.
I'm so glad I no longer care what's cool, so I can actually enjoy the music I like.
in addition to not even being the best rock record of 1967 much less ever, shit isn't even the best beatles record of 1967. that honor (excuse me, honour) goes to magical mystery tour (though i guess you could argue that it's not really an album, but an ep + singles).
Oh, oh, this is very interesting, specially the generational point of view.
@MC:
I wouldn't agree that it is the most influential track for popular music. It might have inspired one or two songs here and there. From the more psychedelic elements early 70's proto-metal, 80's garage rock, the mid 90's brit pop revival, etc. However, the big beat, tape looping stuff is more underground stuff like the Chemical Brothers-- certainly not Pop music-- which these lists are trying establish.
Trouble actually covered this song for Plastic green Head. Eric Wagner's voice is a little overbearing, but it's pretty faithful and does try to have a little fun with the song.
The real Beatles upset comes when people start ranking Paul over John. Soon.
@Lucas Jensen ["The Unforgettable Fire is rad."]: +1
@dickdogfood: to me, the fact that a musical tells a story through it's music in the most direct way possible sbnstantially differentiates it from the concept of a pop album which typically arranges thematically similar or at least thematically linked individual tracks. I wouldn't consider a recording of a movie's dialogue to be an album either.
@rinjonjori: Chemical brothers is 100 percent pop music.
Chris,
The book of that '87 poll was the first ever music-based book I received. I was eight years old. Cool that you're referencing it here. It's still fascinating to read through.
@RepentTokyo:
then where would you place something like Floyd's "The Wall" - a concept album that actually became the soundtrack to a movie, albeit after the fact?
fwiw, i agree that the soundtracks mentioned (West Side Story, My Fair Lady, etc.) don't really fall in line in the "pop album" milieu, and don't really make sense being compared against albums like Pepper's, but like everything else...there are certain exceptions to this rule (wherein the "album" is designed to stand as a work on its own) that make it complicated to enforce as you've described.
Given that the concept for the Wall was birthed before they decided to adapt it for the screen, I would consider it an album like any other. But when it comes to something like the Who's Tommy, I find the line gets blurrier.
I'd say in a Revolver/Sgt. Pepper match-up, I like Sgt. Pepper better, but I'm going to put this out there: The best Beatles album is actually Abbey Road. Really. It is the most cohesive, beautiful work by the Beatles. "Come Together" is a much better opener than "Taxman" or "Sgt. Pepper" any day of the week. Also on the album: "Something" "Oh! Darling" "Octopus's Garden" "Here Comes the Sun" and then the whole Mean Mr. Mustard/Polythene Pam/Bathroom Window mishmash. Anyway, even Rubber Soul I like better than Revolver.
If Radiohead or Nirvana are our generation's Beatles, by the way, I am incredibly depressed.
@RepentTokyo
So how are a bunch of songs that, taken together, tell a story [i]not[/i] "thematically similar" or "thematically linked"? Presumably each song has some bearing to the overall work's theme, and as such, linked to that theme in some way or another.
So, what have we learned here? Best Album Ever lists will always be topped by overrated things - it's a fact of life.
Now, if you excuse me, I'm going to go listen to The Village Green Preservation Society.
@dickdogfood: don't know how to put it any plainer than i already have...
Molanphy is right. Part of the reason Sgt. Pepper's was so epochal were technological reasons. And the reason why Sgt. Pepper's lost its top spot between 87 and 97 is also down to technology. The switchover from LPs to CDs. Sgt. Pepper's is the ultimate vinyl object. First of all, the transition from Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite to Within You Without You is Jar Jar jarring. Second of all, not having the much larger artwork makes it less engaging. You can stare endlessly at the almost quiz-like front cover, wondering about the dozens of meaning-laden details. On a CD cover it's just a small messy jumble. And finally, there's the run-out groove, which on the LP can go on until the Heat Death of the Universe. The album doesn't end until the listener makes it end. Which is a lot more thrilling than it has any right to be. Oh, and finally, though this applies to all the Beatles albums, the CD transfer is godawful. It's a travesty that it's taken as long as it has to have the tapes remastered. But that doesn't have anything to do with the rankings. Though, come to think of it, I believe that Sgt. Pepper's was the first to be put out on CD. Though, I might point out that last year (or maybe the year before that) Sgt. Pepper's topped a BBC poll of Britain's favorite album
For the record, my favorite is The White Album. A glorious, glorious mess. When people ask me what postmodernism is (admittedly not that common of an occurrence) my reply is "The White Album."
Now can we have an explanation as to why Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew are considered Miles Davis' best albums?
Dan DeLuca from the Philadelphia Inquirer picked "London Calling" as his favorite rock album of all time. Hardly any coverage of its 30th anniversary this past April.
http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/music/7793246.h...
.....@Kattullus: Those were some brilliant observations! Great comment! However, as to my "ultimate vinyl object," I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. "The Wall," followed by (close second) "Out of the Blue." Anytime I'm depressed, ELO's "Concerto for a Rainy Day" is the ticket.
.....Pink Floyd's masterpiece made the transition to CD a lot better, sonically, than did ELO. I'm hoping the 30th Anniversary "Out of the Blue" is more free of weird digital artifacts, and that the plastic-ey highs are cleaned up. I could not find it anywhere, locally, (Odd, for a guy who lives in Birmingham, eh?) so I put it in my birthday list.
.....I do agree about "The Beatles." Creative Nirvana! "Abbey Road" is my number two. I still have a working 8-track of that album, but it's very faded-sounding. The label has bubbled up, too...
what's intersting to me (as a "young person") is how the flex and flow of access to contemporary music amounts to a kind of "build your own canon," so for me Abbey Road is my favorite Beatles album, but Happiness is a Warm Gun is my favorite and "the best" Beatles track.
And you get resurgences of counter-canons wildly out of step with accepted taste. For example: I like the Beatles, hate the Stones, love the Turtles, Mamas and the Papas, and especially the Kinks, and am indifferent toward the Beach Boys.
So this is just a Pitchfork way of saying I agree with folks who've said that the idea of the canon is less and less relevant (though I'm looking forward to this feature).
As a 21 one year old I think people would be interested to know that not only does my generation have a Sgt. Pepper backlash but there's really a huge backlash against the Beatles in general. I'm not saying every one hates them (I personally love "Cries For No One" off of Revolver) but I'd say one out of 3 of people I talk to will tell you they either dislike the Beatles or consider them over rated.
Someone mentioned that Martha Quinn's top three albums were all by the Beatles. I think they're a great band, but that kind of knee-jerk voting makes me wonder if people think about why The Beatles obliterate all other bands for them. True, it's mostly boomers who subscribe to this way of thinking, much of which has to do with how old they were and what was going on in their lives when all these Beatles albums were coming out. But are they really people's favorite band?
I'm surprised that so many younger critics and cultural commenters continue to toe the 'Beatles are the only band that ever mattered' line. I think they're great, but to me they were like a gateway drug. They were important to me as a nascent music fan, but aren't and will never be my favorite band.
Even if these list-compilers are loath to leave the 60s behind, there are a few albums from that era that I love but never see represented on lists - Something Else by The Kinks comes to mind, a neglected album that's on par with Revolver.
well keep in mind that the Martha Quinn list was written 20 years ago. I wouldn't necessarily hold her to that opinion now. (who knows, though.)
@callingupmarie: That's interesting, because I'm 23 and it's rather the contrary for me. When "Love" came out, there were a lot of special Beatles programs on the radio and every time, I would go to classes the next day and tell my friends of around my age that I had forgotten how good the Beatles were.
They all seemed to agree that for them it's usually a band that is "just there", a band we've inherited as "the greatest", but that when we took the time to actually consider them besides all that, we realized how true that was.
Still, it's not the first time I've been surprised by what a difference two years make in our generation.
Revolver and Pepper are both dear to me in their own ways, but like eatsshootsleaves, my heart will always belong to Rubber Soul, for inexplicable reasons. Maybe because it retains a certain early shallow pop sensibility and therefore seems charmingly unpresumptuous. It's the Beatles in transition, and there's a sense of expectation of things to come which makes it exciting to me. There, did I explic it?
While the Beatles were in fact, as katieee observes, my "gateway drug" into my other very deep musical obsessions (the Airplane, Phair, Donovan...), I would be hard-pressed not to list them as a favorite.
And speaking as a Gen-Xer, the Beatles backlash is not as widespread as certain Hater-ade drinkers would loudly have us believe. Only time can bear out whether the Beatles will have more staying power than Radiohead... I'm not so delusional as to think I can predict that. I will say this: I spend a lot of time with Gen-Y, and I can't think of ONE of them who's not at least a casual Beatles fan.
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