Unfortunately a lot of people today know “The Beatles” just for Yesterday, Let it be etc. In fact these are 4 English boys (Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Star and George Harrison) that had shaken the world upside down in the 60s. They are really important and they had huge influence in the evolution of music, especially after the release of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Beatles left a big mark in the History of Music. Not by chance I choose to write about their 8th album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, for me this is the most significant and innovative studio album they have recorded.
I will start with a statement from McCartney about the album: "I thought, let's not be ourselves. Let's develop alter egos."What I truly love about this album is the creativity and originality in this beautiful piece of art that immediately hit the charts and moved the borders of the music in a new dimension.One of the significant achievements of Sgt. Pepper is that it managed to focus the attention to the album as a whole rather than to a single song., but most interesting thing is that they decided not to release any of the songs as singles. Of course Sgt. Pepper is not the first concept album that has been made, but definitely it’s the first album that was shown to the public as a finalized marketing product.In the album every song has it’s own unique and specific instrumental arrangement different one from another—or we can conclude that the songs are sorted to provide a complete contrast on a record album, not intended for a live performance. In the album are used a ton of studio-produced effects, the most sefnicitant of which are the sound collage. This effect practically overlaps the end of “Good Morning Good Morning” with the reprise of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, we can also find distorted voices in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and my favourite is the chaotic orchestral collapse that appear twice in “A Day in the Life”. Actually Sgt. Pepper did for the rock album what Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” had done for the rock single. It rewrote all the rules, and things were never the same again. The album sold eight million copies and remained on Billboard’s album charts for more than three years.
I experienced the album like a “show” performance where first The Beatles introduce the fictional band to the listeners, starting with the song “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” with lines like “We hope you will enjoy the show,” and “You’re such a lovely audience, we’d love to take you home with us.” This song is repeated, and in the reprise the song is with different words (“We hope you have enjoyed the show”). After the “performance” ends the performers return to the actual “reality” with “A Day in the Life” (“I read the news today, oh boy”). The Beatles’ brilliant concept of Sgt. Pepper as a “performance” is more than visible even before the music starts: the opening sounds on the record are a noisy and loud audience. Yet we can say clearly that this is not a recording of a live performance. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album is a pure avant-garde that I found mostly psychedelic rock, but also elements of hard Rock, art rock, pop, progressive rock. The album inspired a lot of people to start experimenting and to develop new sound, this is an album that emerged many other genres to come out.
