The Beatles (“The White Album”)

November 22, 1968
Apple
Rating: 5 / 5

The Music Rag One Sentence Review: The perfect answer to the over-the-top near-ridiculous-at-times-ness of Sgt. Pepper’s, no other album covers as much ground as the Fab Four’s eponymous 1968 breakthrough, not just covering every genre from rock (“Birthday”) to music hall (“Honey Pie”), campy sing-alongs (“The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”) to proto-metal (“Helter Skelter”) but covering every mood imaginable as well, from social activism (“Revolution”) to utter nonsense (“I’m So Tired”), simple devotion (“I WIll”) to unbridled lust (“Why Don’t We Do It In The Road”); that The Beatles manages to coalesce into a perfect blend of, well, everything, is a small miracle considering that the group was being actively torn apart during its creation.

A real mockery: To say that the album draws on several genres and influences is perhaps only a half truth – the album is full of mockery that is, for the most playful (“Back In The USSR”, “Honey Pie”) but at times contains searing sarcasm (“Happiness Is A Warm Gun”, “Sexy Sadie”).

Waste of space: Avant garde blowhards will claim “Revolution 9″ is a masterpiece, but it’s little more than a self-indulgent waste of 9 minutes that is only interesting when listening to it for clues that Paul is dead.

It could have been even better: As we’ve heard from the Anthology series, songs left off The Beatles include a large chunk of the second half of Abbey Road, and the original demo of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is such a spine-tinglingly, haunting beautiful dirge that it is downright scary to think what it might have been like if the boys had decided to add a third disc to the package.