User:JG66/sandbox White Album reception

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Critical reception[edit]

Contemporary reviews[edit]

On release, The Beatles gained highly favourable reviews from the majority of music critics.[1][2] Others bemoaned its length or found that the music lacked the adventurous quality that had distinguished Sgt. Pepper.[1] According to the author Ian Inglis: "Whether positive or negative, all assessments of The Beatles drew attention to its fragmentary style. However, while some complained about the lack of a coherent style, others recognized this as the album's raison d'être."[3]

In The Observer, Tony Palmer wrote that "if there is still any doubt that Lennon and McCartney are the greatest songwriters since Schubert", the album "should surely see the last vestiges of cultural snobbery and bourgeois prejudice swept away in a deluge of joyful music making".[4] Richard Goldstein of The New York Times considered the double album to be "a major success" and "far more imaginative" than Sgt. Pepper or Magical Mystery Tour,[1] due to the band's improved songwriting and their relying less on the studio tricks of those earlier works.[5] In The Sunday Times, Derek Jewell hailed it as "the best thing in pop since Sgt. Pepper" and concluded: "Musically, there is beauty, horror, surprise, chaos, order. And that is the world; and that is what The Beatles are on about. Created by, creating for, their age."[6] Although he dismissed "Revolution 9" as a "pretentious" example of "idiot immaturity", the NME's Alan Smith declared "God Bless You, Beatles!" to the majority of the album.[7] Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone called it "the history and synthesis of Western music",[8] and the group's best album yet.[9] Wenner contended that they were allowed to appropriate other styles and traditions into rock music because their ability and identity were "so strong that they make it uniquely theirs, and uniquely the Beatles. They are so good that they not only expand the idiom, but they are also able to penetrate it and take it further."[9]

Among the less favourable critiques, Time magazine's reviewer wrote that The Beatles showcased the "best abilities and worst tendencies" of the Beatles, as it is skilfully performed and sophisticated, but lacks a "sense of taste and purpose".[10] William Mann of The Times opined that, in their over-reliance on pastiche and "private jokes", Lennon and McCartney had ceased to progress as songwriters, yet he deemed the release to be "The most important musical event of the year" and acknowledged: "these 30 tracks contain plenty to be studied, enjoyed and gradually appreciated more fully in the coming months."[6] In his review for The New York Times, Nik Cohn considered the album "boring beyond belief" and said that over half of its songs were "profound mediocrities".[11] In a 1971 column, Robert Christgau of The Village Voice described the album as both "their most consistent and probably their worst", and referred to its songs as a "pastiche of musical exercises".[12] Nonetheless, he ranked it as the tenth best album of 1968 in his ballot for Jazz & Pop magazine's annual critics poll.[13]

Retrospective assessments[edit]

Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusic[14]
The A.V. ClubA+[15]
The Daily Telegraph[16]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music[17]
MusicHound4/5[18]
Pitchfork Media10/10[19]
PopMatters[20]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide[21]
Slant Magazine[22]

In a 2003 appraisal of the album, for Mojo magazine, Ian MacDonald wrote that The Beatles regularly appears among the top ten in critics' "best albums of all time" lists, yet it was a work that he deemed "eccentric, highly diverse, and very variable [in] quality".[23] Rob Sheffield, writing in The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), commented that its songs ranged from the Beatles' "sturdiest tunes since Revolver" to "self-indulgent filler", and while he derided tracks such as "Revolution 9" and "Helter Skelter", he acknowledged that picking personal highlights was "part of the fun" for listeners.[24] Writing for MusicHound in 1999, Guitar World editor Christopher Scapelliti described the album as "self-indulgent and at times unlistenable" but identified "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" and "Helter Skelter" as "fascinating standouts" that made it a worthwhile purchase.[18]

According to Slant Magazine's Eric Henderson, The Beatles is a rarity among the band's recorded works, in that it "resists reflexive canonisation, which, along with society's continued fragmentation, keeps the album fresh and surprising".[22] In his review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine said that because of its wide variety of musical styles, the album can be "a frustratingly scattershot record or a singularly gripping musical experience, depending on your view". He concludes: "None of it sounds like it was meant to share album space together, but somehow The Beatles creates its own style and sound through its mess."[14]

Among reviews of the 2009 remastered album, Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph found that even its worst songs work within the context of such an eclectic and unconventional collection, which he rated "one of the greatest albums ever made".[16] Writing for Paste, Mark Kemp refuted the White Album's reputation as "three solo works in one (plus a Ringo song)"; instead, he said, it "benefits from each member's wildly different ideas" and demonstrates Lennon and McCartney's considerable versatility as composers, in addition to offering "two of Harrison's finest moments".[25] In his review for The A.V. Club, Chuck Klosterman wrote that the album found the band at their best and rated it "almost beyond an A+".[15]

In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked The Beatles at number 10 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.[26] On the 40th anniversary of the album's release, Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano wrote that it "remains a type of magical musical anthology: 30 songs you can go through and listen to at will, certain of finding some pearls that even today remain unparalleled".[27] In 2011, Kerrang! placed the album at number 49 on a list of "The 50 Heaviest Albums Of All Time". The magazine praised the guitar work in "Helter Skelter".[28]

Cultural responses[edit]

According to MacDonald, the counterculture of the 1960s analysed The Beatles above and beyond all of the band's previous releases.[29] The album's lyrics progressed from being vague to open-ended and prone to misinterpretation, such as "Glass Onion" (e.g., "the walrus was Paul")[30] and "Piggies" ("what they need's a damn good whacking").[31] The release also coincided with public condemnation of Lennon's treatment of Cynthia, and of his and Ono's joint projects, particularly Two Virgins.[32][33] The British authorities similarly displayed a less tolerant attitude towards the Beatles,[34] when London Drug Squad officers arrested Lennon and Ono in October 1968 for marijuana possession, a charge that he claimed was false.[35] In the case of "Back in the U.S.S.R.", the words were interpreted by Christian evangelist David Noebel as further proof of the Beatles' compliance in a Communist plot to brainwash American youth.[36]

Lennon's lyrics on "Revolution 1" were misinterpreted with messages he did not intend. In the album version, he advises those who "talk about destruction" to "count me out". Lennon then follows the sung word "out" with the spoken word "in". At the time of the album's release – which followed, chronologically, the up-tempo single version of the song, "Revolution" – that single word "in" was taken by the radical political left as Lennon's endorsement of politically motivated violence, which followed the May 1968 Paris riots.[37] However, the album version was recorded first.[a]

Further to the betrayal they had felt at Lennon's non-activist stance in "Revolution", New Left commentators condemned The Beatles for its failure to offer a political agenda.[40] The Beatles themselves were accused of using eclecticism and pastiche as a means of avoiding important issues in the turbulent political and social climate.[40] Jon Landau, writing for the Liberation News Service, argued that, particularly in "Piggies" and "Rocky Racoon", the band had adopted parody because they were "afraid of confronting reality" and "the urgencies of the moment".[41] Like Landau, many writers among the New Left considered the album outdated and irrelevant; instead, they heralded the Rolling Stones' concurrent release, Beggars Banquet, as what Lennon biographer Jon Wiener terms "the 'strong solution,' a musical turning outward, toward the political and social battles of the day".[42]

Charles Manson first heard the album not long after it was released. He had already claimed to find hidden meanings in songs from earlier Beatles albums,[43] but in The Beatles he interpreted prophetic significance in several of the songs, including "Blackbird", "Piggies" (particularly the line "what they need's a damn good whacking"), "Helter Skelter", "Revolution 1" and "Revolution 9",[44] and interpreted the lyrics as a sign of imminent violence or war.[24] He played the album repeatedly to his followers, the Manson family, and convinced them that it was an apocalyptic message predicting an uprising of oppressed races,[45] drawing parallels with chapter 9 of the Book of Revelation.[46]

Sociologists Michael Katovich and Wesley Longhofer write that the album's release "engendered a collective appreciation of it as a 'state-of-the-art' rendition of the current pop, rock, and folk-rock sounds".[47] According to Inglis, the White Album was "popular music's first postmodern album" and a work in which the Beatles incorporated bricolage, fragmentation, pastiche, parody, reflexivity, plurality, irony, exaggeration, anti-representation and "meta-art".[48] While acknowledging that these devices were not necessarily unprecedented in the group's work, Inglis adds: "The Beatles employed all these elements … to fashion a contemporary text whose music(s) described the present, recalled the past, and anticipated the future."[49] Scapelliti cites it as the source of "the freeform nihilism echoed … in the punk and alternative music genres".[18]

In early 2013, the Recess Gallery in New York City's SoHo neighbourhood presented We Buy White Albums, an installation by artist Rutherford Chang. The piece was in the form of a record store in which nothing but original pressings of the LP was on display.[50] Chang created a recording in which the sounds of one hundred copies of side one of the LP were overlaid.[51]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ Recording on "Revolution 1" began on 30 May,[38] "Revolution" on 9 July.[39]

References[edit]

Citations
  1. ^ a b c Schaffner 1978, p. 111.
  2. ^ Woffinden 1981, p. 7.
  3. ^ Inglis 2009, p. 120.
  4. ^ Norman 1996, p. 346.
  5. ^ Goldstein, Richard (8 December 1968). "The Beatles". The New York Times. pp. 33, 37.
  6. ^ a b MacDonald, Ian (2003). "White Riot". Mojo: The Beatles' Final Years Special Edition. London: Emap. p. 56.
  7. ^ Smith, Alan (9 November 1968). "The Brilliant, the Bad, and the Ugly". NME. UK.
  8. ^ Schaffner 1978, p. 113.
  9. ^ a b Wenner, Jann (21 December 1968). "The Beatles". Rolling Stone. New York: 10.
  10. ^ "The Mannerist Phase". Time. New York: 53. 6 December 1968.
  11. ^ Cohn, Nik (15 December 1968). "A Briton Blasts The Beatles". The New York Times.
  12. ^ Christgau, Robert (September 1971). "Living Without the Beatles". The Village Voice. New York. Retrieved 1 February 2013.
  13. ^ Christgau, Robert (1969). "Robert Christgau's 1969 Jazz & Pop Ballot". Jazz & Pop. Retrieved 17 April 2014.
  14. ^ a b Erlewine, Stephen Thomas. "Review of The Beatles [White Album]". AllMusic. Retrieved 22 November 2015.
  15. ^ a b Klosterman, Chuck (8 September 2009). "Chuck Klosterman Repeats The Beatles". The A.V. Club. Chicago. Archived from the original on 26 May 2013. Retrieved 23 November 2015.
  16. ^ a b McCormick, Neil (8 September 2009). "The Beatles – The Beatles, review". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 7 November 2011.
  17. ^ Larkin 2006, p. 489.
  18. ^ a b c Graff & Durchholz 1999, p. 88.
  19. ^ Richardson, Mark (10 September 2009). "Album Review: The Beatles: The Beatles". Pitchfork Media. Retrieved 19 May 2010.
  20. ^ Zupko, Sarah. "The Beatles: White Album". PopMatters. Retrieved 19 May 2010.
  21. ^ Sheffield 2004, p. 51.
  22. ^ a b Henderson, Eric (2 August 2004). "The Beatles: The Beatles (The White Album)". Slant Magazine. Retrieved 7 November 2011.
  23. ^ MacDonald, Ian (2003). "White Riot". Mojo: The Beatles' Final Years Special Edition. London: Emap. p. 55.
  24. ^ a b Sheffield 2004, p. 54.
  25. ^ Kemp, Mark (8 September 2009). "The Beatles: The Long and Winding Repertoire". Paste. Retrieved 22 November 2015.
  26. ^ "500 Greatest Albums of All Time: The Beatles, 'The White Album'". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 17 January 2013.
  27. ^ "Beatles' music better than today's pop songs". Vatican newspaper. Catholic News Service. 24 November 2008.
  28. ^ "The 50 Heaviest Albums Ever". Kerrang. 7 August 2014. Retrieved 8 August 2014.
  29. ^ MacDonald 1997, p. 273.
  30. ^ MacDonald 1997, p. 275.
  31. ^ MacDonald 1997, p. 278.
  32. ^ Schaffner 1978, pp. 106–07.
  33. ^ Doggett 2011, pp. 52, 55.
  34. ^ Schaffner 1978, p. 107.
  35. ^ Doggett 2011, p. 55.
  36. ^ Schaffner, pp. 53, 113.
  37. ^ MacDonald 1997, pp. 248–49.
  38. ^ MacDonald 1997, p. 245.
  39. ^ MacDonald 1997, p. 259.
  40. ^ a b Roessner 2006, p. 149.
  41. ^ Wiener 1991, p. 65.
  42. ^ Wiener 1991, pp. 65–66.
  43. ^ Nielsen 2005, p. 90.
  44. ^ Guinn 2013, p. 194.
  45. ^ Guinn 2013, p. 196.
  46. ^ Nielsen 2005, p. 92.
  47. ^ Katovich & Longhofer 2009, p. 401.
  48. ^ Inglis 2009, pp. 120–21.
  49. ^ Inglis 2009, p. 121.
  50. ^ Kozinn, Allan (22 February 2013). "A Plain White Square, and Yet So Fascinating". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
  51. ^ "What It Sounds Like If You Play 100 Vinyl Copies of 'The White Album' at Once". Slate. 21 November 2013. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
Sources
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