sgt. pepper's lonely hearts club band (super deluxe edition) track listing

It’s become almost axiomatic that Pepper is not The Beatles’ best album. Much of the initial reaction, from inarticulate fans or lettered academics, scans today as hype: enthusiasm magnified by mass response and deprived of long reflection. Composer Ned Rorem believed the album announced “a new and glorious renaissance of song,” while literary scholar Richard Poirier called it “an eruption … for which no one could have been wholly prepared.” Wagner and Eliot, Monteverdi and Joyce were invoked for comparison. It was embraced not only by pop fans, who kept it at #1 throughout the Summer of Love, but also highbrows previously dismissive of popular taste. Pepper undoubtedly did effect was a new fusion of High and Low, of marketplace and ivory tower. (Thus missing, as experts often do, the rhetorical value of overstatement: there’s a reason those words are still being quoted today.) But one unity Sgt. Pepper album was released.” An assertion so sweeping wouldn’t survive an hour in the social-media wind tunnel of today: experts both bona fide and instant would descend on it with annotated lists of other, far more unifying events. “The closest that Western civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815,” critic Langdon Winner famously wrote at the time, “was the week that the Sgt. Among the many things that were possible then and are impossible now is the unanimity that welcomed The Beatles’ eighth album as a culminating event in cultural history – if not History.

Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in North America exactly 50 years ago today.

Sgt. pepper's lonely hearts club band (super deluxe edition) track listing