Thanks for the wake-up call, Townsman dbuskirk!
By Daniel J. Levitin, Washington Post
Friday, June 1, 2007Yes, it’s been 40 years exactly since Sgt. Pepper, having labored the previous 20 years teaching his band to play, arranged for its debut in full psychedelic regalia. He leveraged a little help from his friends, notably the vocalist Billy Shears and a riverboat owner named Lucy who had apparently made her fortune in the diamond business. Pepper realized that good music-making requires the expanding of horizons. A recent “trip” inspired him to incorporate tabla and sitar into the music. The band exhorted us to sit back and let the evening go so that they could turn us on, musically, lyrically, and blow our minds for the next several decades.
…To a neuroscientist, the longevity of the Beatles can be explained by the fact that their music created subtle and rewarding schematic violations of popular musical forms, causing a symphony of neural firings from the cerebellum to the prefrontal cortex, joined by a chorus of the limbic system and an ostinato from the brainstem. To a musician, each hearing showcases nuances not heard before, details of arrangement and intricacy that reveal themselves across hundreds or thousands of performances and listenings. The act we’ve known for all these years is still in style, guaranteed to raise a smile, one hopes for generations to come. I have to admit, it’s getting better all the time.
Related: See, also, what “Mom” says.
Show of hands: Does anyone NOT own Sgt. Pepper’s?
I only acquired it recently. Back in the day I didn’t own it. You didn’t have to. Everyone played it all the time everywhere. Then for a long time I was sick of it and the Beatles. Just recently when I got a hard drive to store/play all of my music, I was trading some stuff with a friend, and he gave me basically the entire Beatles catalog. I think I listened to it at that time, but it’s not something I can really enjoy. It’s overrated and underrated, and I can’t really form an opinion on it anymore.
What a moment of excitement, wonder, and hope for the future! Nothing was like it ever again! I mean, not that it was like that for me. But that’s what I’ve heard…