Happy 55th Anniversary to The Beatles’ eponymous ninth studio album The Beatles (a.k.a. ‘The White Album’), originally released November 22, 1968.
I don’t think people learn The Beatles like they learn other bands. In the case of most classic rock acts, you hear a few of the big songs on the radio. Then, if you’re curious enough, you start working through the back catalogue album by album, uncovering the deep cuts that you love and the whole works that somehow speak to you. These discographies have arcs to them, defined by changes in lineups or aesthetic philosophies, and one begins to appreciate the band’s Progressive Phase, or the Era With The Original Drummer.
The Beatles are not like this. While often credited for advancing the album as an art form on work like Revolver (1966) and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), Beatles tunes circulate through our culture so aggressively that they hardly bear the remnants of the records they come from. The ubiquity of the singles means that one can be rather literate in the band without having heard most of the records all the way through. My own first exposure to The Beatles was 1 (2000), a compilation of their number-one singles—the Beatles defined by a massive volume of popular songs.
The songs were so commonplace, I knew all the words to albums I didn’t know existed. As a result, I had no way to distinguish between, say “Back In The U.S.S.R.” and “I Saw Her Standing There” when I was growing up. In isolation, little signifies that one of these songs is from the band’s fabled Disaster Record and the other is from their meteoric rise. They just sound like Two Rock Songs By The Beatles. Or how does one draw a line between “Yesterday” and “Julia,” two tender entries in the band’s jukebox?
Which makes The Beatles, the shaggiest and most disorganized Beatles record out there, the one Beatles record that actually feels like listening to The Beatles in 2023. It’s the entire sensibility of the band—the full-throttle rock and roll, studio experimentation, intimate ballads, and complete stupidity—on shuffle. Essentially, after overhauling the album in 1967 with Sgt. Pepper’s, they released something that sounds like a playlist, before anyone knew what that was. While mixtapes and CDs would be decades on the horizon, and playlists a couple of decades after that, The Beatles made the leap in just a year.
This is a funny thing to write for a website that is specifically dedicated to the album as an art form. The Beatles is an anti-album, rejecting the cohesion and synthesis that defined Sgt. Pepper’s and trying for something that reflected the diverging interests of the band members. Of course, Sgt. Pepper’s itself doesn’t fully deliver on its concept; it is essentially abandoned after “With A Little Help From My Friends” and only recapitulated later. Maybe The Beatles shows us that the cohesion that Sgt. Pepper’s represents, and that this website celebrates, is not worth pursuing.
Listen to the Album:
Such an argument rests on the assumption that The Beatles is good: that in its bewildering mess, there is an artistry that one should admire or imitate. This is a controversial claim. On the one hand, very few will question the quality of its standout tracks: “Blackbird,” “Dear Prudence,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Helter Skelter,” and “Happiness Is A Warm Gun,” have legendary reputations, while a few of the sleeper tracks, like “I’m So Tired” and “Julia” absolutely rip. That’s already most of the way to a stellar record.
On the other hand, there are a few tracks that simply never needed to see the light of day: “Piggies,” unlike the rest of the band’s goofier stuff, is only annoying, and “Don’t Pass Me By” is a tune so forgettable that, every time it comes on, I feel like I am hearing it for the first time.
This imbalance has led critics and fans to try to “correct” this album, trimming it down to a single, sleek LP. (The correct single-LP version, for the record, is “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” played thirteen times.) Others will counter that reorganizing this mess compromises the record’s encapsulation of a band falling apart at the seams; it’s not merely chaotic, it’s a representation of chaos, man.
It’s fine to have this conversation, but to me it no longer tracks with how The Beatles work in the cultural imagination. Today, each part of the band’s confusing history is now fused together into one narrative, spun off into endless playlists and greatest hits compilations. “Hey Jude” and “Love Me Do” and “The Long and Winding Road” exist in an entangled, inseparable relationship, despite the eight years between them. The Beatles simply sounds like a cross-section of this history: circular, contradictory and, as a result, unequivocally The Beatles. While it’s uneven and deranged, these are the qualities that make this album the definitive Fab Four record of the streaming age.
Listen: