Released in November 1968, The Beatles (popularized as The White Album) remains the most complex, most beguiling of the Fab Four’s masterworks. Where Revolver is pop music’s reigning tour-de-force and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is its multicolored, phantasmagoric cousin, The White Album exists as a strange admixture of beauty and terror, a work of portraiture […]
Everything Fab Four: To Remix or Not to Remix?—That Is the Question
In May 2017, Apple released a remixed version of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to mostly critical acclaim. While a slew of audiophiles adored the expanded soundscape, die-hards took issue with any suggestion that twenty-first-century hands might trifle with the Beatles’ masterpieces. After all, you can’t improve on the Mona Lisa, right? Well, it turns […]
Everything Fab Four: “Good Vibrations” and the Beatles
The Beatles’ final American tour in the summer of 1966 was a harrowing experience, to say the least. Having begun under the cloud of John Lennon’s widely-criticized remark about the band’s popularity relative to Jesus Christ, things had gone from bad to worse, culminating in a spate of staged Beatles record burnings and, later, their […]
Everything Fab Four: Teaching the Beatles
In rock ‘n’ roll’s nascent years—when Bill Haley was giddily rocking around the clock and later, as the Who’s Roger Daltrey screamed “hope I die before I get old!”—the notion that popular music had any lasting cultural value was almost uniformly dismissed. Fast forward seven decades, and college courses on Popular Music have become the […]
Everything Fab Four: Taking a Sad Song and Making It Better
As the Beatles whiled away the summer of 1968 recording The White Album, they briefly interrupted the proceedings to record their landmark single “Hey Jude” b/w “Revolution.” When it was released in August, the single was a watershed moment in many respects. In addition to being the first 45-RPM release by Apple Records—with its familiar […]