On Sgt. Pepper and the splintering of rock
This year marks 50 years of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It’s an album that has been analyzed to death. The current popular…
This year marks 50 years of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It’s an album that has been analyzed to death. The current popular opinion seems to be that Revolver is the best Beatles album and Sgt. Pepper is the most important.
It’s viewed as the most important because it represents the point where rock music begins to splinter. A glib way to put it is rock music became something for the mind or for the body.
Salon’s Amanda Marcotte released a scorching hot take about Sgt. Pepper this week.
Marcotte’s analysis is ahistorical and just plain bad.
“Sgt. Pepper’s,” you see, is the album that marked the shift in rock music away from the grubby fingers of the teenybopper crowd and into the hushed halls of Great Art. It was the transition album that turned rock from a debased music for ponytailed fans twisting the night away to music for grown men whose tastes are far too refined to worry about whether a pop song has a beat you can dance to.
Leonard Bernstein broke down pop music on an April 1967 special.
He showed the musicological merit of works by The Beatles and many of their contemporaries.
And it was not just the more avant-garde Beatles tunes, but the early, mop-top tune as well.
Bernstein features Janis Ian performing “Society’s Child” on his program as well, because it wasn’t just art produced by men that had merit.
If pop music is viewed dismissively, it says more about the crop of critics than about the listeners.
It’s no surprise, then, that the Beatles’ shift toward a more respectable and artistic branding meant shedding their sex appeal. The “Sgt. Pepper” album cover features the Fab Four dressed in goofy-looking uniforms that couldn’t be better suited to repel the female gaze. Beyond the title track and “Lucy in the Sky with the Diamonds,” there’s very little on the record that makes a lady want to shake her hips on the dance floor.
This conveniently ignores the cover of Revolver, which featured an illustration of the band by Klaus Voorman. Not something designed for sex appeal. One could even make that argument for the cover of Rubber Soul.
Now, Marcotte does make a fair and good point about disco music. There was definitely an undercurrent of misogyny and homophobia in the distaste for it.
It’s a process that’s been cycled through at other times. Grunge was seen by many, including music critics, as a redemptive music in the 1990s because it bounced girly pop songs from the likes of Madonna, Duran Duran and Michael Jackson off the charts. New Jack Swing gave way to the masculine posturing and open misogyny of gangsta rap around the same time as well, which led to hip-hop’s dominance of the pop charts that continues to this day.
This is just incorrect, the stance most people take is that grunge killed hair metal. Which isn’t the whole story. And grunge wasn’t a completely male genre, there’s L7, Babes In Toyland, Courtney Love and countless other bands.
And stylistically, New Jack Swing originated on Janet Jackson’s album, Control. New Jack Swing was important because it blended elements of hip-hop and R&B. It’s unclear if Marcotte is arguing that it led to the ugly aspects of gangsta rap or that it was pushed to the wayside by it.
If there’s misogyny present in gangsta rap, it says more about society than the genre itself. It’s not as if popular music is devoid of misogyny anyway. It’s not a great look to single out a predominantly black genre of music for that.
One of the reasons I’m such a fan of early American punk bands like the Ramones and Blondie is that they explicitly tried to recapture the girlishness of 1960s rock and pop before the self-importance of albums like “Sgt. Pepper’s” took over. Joey Ramone in particular worshipped the girl groups of the ’60s, like the Ronettes, who used to share billings with the Beatles. But even punk eventually succumbed to that same logic that manliness equals credibility and requires “hard” or “difficult” pop music, and drifted away from the early ’60s-style sunniness of the Ramones to the brutish sounds of hardcore.
The Beatles were very effusive in their admiration of The Ronettes and other groups that performed tunes written in or near the Brill Building.
There’s certainly an element of that in punk, but again, Marcotte erases women and other marginalized groups from punk. It’s also kind of gender essentialist to attribute feminine qualities to melodic, non-abrasive forms of music.
The good news is that girl music won in the end. The same kind of music snobs who mocked girls for loving Duran Duran in the ’80s now put Rio on hip best-of-the-’80s lists, such as the one at Pitchfork. Disco isn’t a shameful taste anymore and the most girlish post-disco form of EDM, house music, is making a comeback. Phil Spector’s early ’60s girl-group music is as distinguished as the Beatles are now. The soundtracks to both “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies, made up of pop classics by artists like Fleetwood Mac and the Jackson 5, are darlings not just of audiences but critics as well. Calling someone a “rockist,” i.e., someone who believes that manly rock music is inherently superior to bubblegum, is now an insult. Contemporary pop artists who might once have been shrugged off as disposable crap, like Taylor Swift or Beyoncé, now get treated with respect by the music press.
Spector has been revered for years for his production work. Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys is his most notable acolyte and their best known work, Pet Sounds. Displays a real sense of vulnerability.
Jonathan Richman defended such vulnerability.
Part of music criticism is revaluation, challenging the notions of what’s good, what’s canon and worth listening to.
So now, 50 years on, it’s easier to evaluate “Sgt. Pepper’s” on its own, free of decades of weight assigned it for supposedly saving rock music from its female fan base. And it’s … fine. It’s not the best Beatles album. (The similarly pretentious “Revolver” is much better.) It has some moments of true transcendence, especially with the closing track, “A Day in the Life.” Some of it, like “She’s Leaving Home,” is forgettable. It’s a B-plus record. It’s no “Dare” by Human League, that’s for sure.
But part of me will always begrudge the record its reputation, because it helped lead to a world where certain kinds of pop music were treated as inferior, for decades, just because its fan base was mostly people who looked like me.
It’s really ahistorical to conclude that one of the most beloved bands of all time was trying to shed its female fanbase. If anything, The Beatles wanted to take their fans along for the ride as they explored new territories and textures.
It’s ridiculous to point the finger at Sgt. Pepper for the ills of the music criticism rather than the forces that shape and influence it.
This is a super, bad, ill-informed take. But what do I know, I just studied musicology in grad school with a focus on 20th century popular music and wrote my thesis on SMiLE.