Hall of Shame: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

It’s a mishmash of rubbish

Keith Richards

If Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the perfect soundtrack of the 60’s as Beatles fans and demented rock critiques all around the world would make us want to believe, then this decade must have been really horrible. It is the most horrible, worst, and most overrated record of all times. It is the Mona Lisa of music, made for people who don’t like music.

At no cost will I listen to this album again to destroy it song-by-song, I can’t. I rather risk being completely uncredible in this matter than exposing myself to this album again- an album that for me is a radioactive element with a half-life of several thousand years. I’ve already managed to not listen for 15 years, and I can’t start all over again. No, I have to keep my purity and sanity here.

So what do I remember from this shit sounds ‘Pet Sounds‘? First there is the famous clownesque cover, that the righteous and boring Beatles Fan (hereafter referred to as IT) will describe as wild and brave. IT will try to convince you of the ‘magnificent’ fact that the Fab Four freed themselves from expectations here and slipped into the role of another group to take musical risks. Why they slipped into the roles of an old-fashioned, sentimental Salvation Army Brass Band – ensemble that would perform in your Granny’s garden pavilion remains their secret, and why this is a brave move nobody could explain to me yet.

Fans and critiques claim that Sgt. Pepper is the first concept album of all times, and at least therefore so, so revolutionary. I don’t know. What is the damned concept here despite a cacophony of trumpets, vaudeville, music-hall, and mid-tempo ballads? There is no concept in this album. Not only that, but this album actually does only work in excerpts, the single pieces of it like ‘A Day In The Life‘ sounding better singled out than in their overall messy context. And excuse me- first concept album ever? Again, I’m not sure. Thinking of the old Sinatra albums that were recorded a decade earlier…

Ok. I remember that the album starts with a classic rock song introduction and then slips to the Ringo Starr – number ‘With a Little Help From My Friends‘. It is one of the more bearable songs on this album, but it also shows the entire hidden cruelty and perversion of The Beatles that I always sensed. Think about it- it is an absolute humiliation. Here we have that guy singing out of tune who is still being granted one song per album again- dance monkey, dance. While children’s songs like ‘Yellow Submarine‘ granted Ringo a certain charm, ‘With a Little Help From My Friends‘ is like a fist in his face. It implies that he will certainly not make it alone- not with his looks and talent, so he does need the help of his way cooler friends to achieve anything.

He sounds pitiful in his role as the everyday-man who just needs some love, with his patronising band mates bragging in the background vocals. It is an arrogant little song mocking the fool on the hill along to a banal melody and groove, and it is a perfect example for the smallness and smugness of the Beatles. The entire album is. It is so fucking embarrassing to see a working class band trying to be all arty and eccentric when in reality they can’t hide their smallness.

All of this is perfectly personified in the annoying persona of McCartney, and it is no different on this album. Mr. Optimism declares that he is absolutely happy in his life- he must have been the only one in the 1960s. This absolute rebel sings about how school bothered him, but now he’s ‘in luv’ and everything is just ‘Gettin’ Better’. In a forced in-your-face-twist (because there is no natural or subtle poetry on this album, although they must have thought so when printing all the lyrics out), Lennon opposes this in the background vocals: ‘It can’t get no worse’ . Wow wow wow. What an eye-opener and how subtlely we got there. I’ll grant the Beatles that the truth they’re hinting at with a hammer is that Mc Cartney is basically a type like Travis Bickle, a bomb waiting to go off at the next opportunity. I always knew it, but this isn’t even dangerous. Fuck.

What the hell is exciting about this mediocre album that made no myths compared to albums like The Velvet Underground and Nico, The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, Are You Experienced?, Forever Changes, and many more?

Oh, I had to be there in order to understand it.
Oh, fuck off.

by Saliha Enzenauer