Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Harsh Critic

How I first met The Beatles.

One of the many (all right, few) ways that I browse the Robert Christgau site is to look up albums generally considered the Greatest Of All Time Ever. You might (or might not) be surprised that Robert Christgau doesn't always agree with the consensus.

I'm sure that if I asked 100 people (or, in a more realistic way that reflects the number of people who would actually indulge my request, six people) to guess an album that must be on the A+ list, more than half would pick Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a no-brainer masterpiece boasting the broad popular and critical cachet in the way that a movie like Citizen Kane does for serious film fans.

Never mind that some folks would argue that Revolver or The Beatles (aka The White Album) are better. We're talking about consensus, which is why if you want to win an Oscar pool you pick Dances With Wolves and not Goodfellas.

But Robert Christgau is not a consensus-follower, dammit, therefore...

Sorry, boys.

...Sgt. Pepper is not on the A+ list. (Nor is any other Beatles album, for that matter.) It did get an A, though, which makes the title of my post a bit misleading (until you read further), but that won't satisfy the haters of hip-hop who notice that it received a lower grade than albums by Ghostface Killa and Kanye West.

Right. So, considering the barrels of ink (and, uh, pixels?) spent discussing this album, what does Robert Christgau have to say?

A dozen good songs and true. Perhaps they're too precisely performed, but I'm not going to complain.

So, he's not going to complain. I almost wish he did.

To be fair, though, it's not as if the guy played the record a single time and dashed off a review with just three more words than tracks on the album (if you count that final "hidden" bit at the end). Christgau did write a lengthy column for Esquire in 1967, reprinted in Any Old Way You Choose It in 1973, in which he discusses some of the Beatles' output up to that point, noting:

Sgt. Pepper is not the world's most perfect work of art. But that is what the Beatles' fans have come to assume their idols must produce.

MORE CRITICS TO HATE!!!1!

Meet the malevolent Richard Goldstein.

Christgau also references the backlash to a review of the album in the New York Times by Richard Goldstein (quick digression: this Richard Goldstein was a fellow Voice writer reviewing the work in the Times, not a different but almost-the-same age Richard Goldstein who was a Times editor and writes books on sports).

Goldstein's review, which I'm not paying $3.95 to read, resulted in enough backlash to compel the writer to defend himself in his own paper in an article titled "I Blew My Cool Through the New York Times." Goldstein, about whom Christgau wrote, "I often disagree with Goldstein, but a sellout he is not. He is unfailingly honest and about as malevolent as Winnie-the-Pooh," stressed that

[i]n Revolver I found a complexity that was staggering in its poignancy, its innovation, and its empathy. I called it a complicated masterpiece. But in Sergeant Pepper I sense a new distance, a sarcasm masqueraded as hip, a dangerously dominant sense of what is stylish.

On the album's 40th anniversary, the Times mentioned a handful of critics who panned it, either upon release or more recently. So he wasn't alone.

WHAT ABOUT YOU?
Glad you asked. I like (and own) the album. There was a time during high school when I'd be lifting weights in my parents' basement, playing "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" over and over again, imaging this girl that I had a huge crush on, a girl that maybe sort of had an interest in me but we were both too shy to find out if the feelings were mutual, and I'd focus on that last line, feeling all alone among the plasticine porters with looking-glass ties, hoping that suddenly she'd appear at the turnstile, that girl with kaleidoscope eyes...

...but I'm not 16 anymore. Perhaps because I'm more mature (or just, well, older) my favorite song, one of my favorite of all Beatles songs (even if it's a little mawkish), is "She's Leaving Home." Now that I'm a parent, I feel more of a connection to it.

But don't ask me to like "When I'm Sixty-Four" when I'm 64.