The White Albums’ Crit­i­cal Recep­tion and it’s Legacy

The Bea­t­les were at the peak of their global influ­ence and vis­i­bil­ity in late 1968. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released the pre­vi­ous year, had enjoyed a com­bi­na­tion of com­mer­cial suc­cess, crit­i­cal acclaim, and immense cul­tural influ­ence that had pre­vi­ously seemed incon­ceiv­able for a pop release. Time, for instance, had writ­ten in 1967 that Pep­per con­sti­tuted a “his­toric depar­ture in the progress of music — any music,” [1] while Tim­o­thy Leary, in a widely quoted assess­ment of the same period, declared they were pro­to­types of “evo­lu­tion­ary agents sent by God, endowed with mys­te­ri­ous pow­ers to cre­ate a new human species.” [2]

After cre­at­ing an album that had deliv­ered such crit­i­cal, com­mer­cial, and gen­er­a­tional shock­waves, The Bea­t­les faced the inevitable ques­tion of what they could pos­si­bly do to top it. The next full-length album, what­ever it was, was des­tined to draw con­sid­er­able scrutiny. The inter­ven­ing release of Mag­i­cal Mys­tery Tour notwith­stand­ing (released as a double-EP pack­age in the UK), The Bea­t­les rep­re­sented the group’s first major musi­cal state­ment since Sgt. Pep­per, and thus was a highly antic­i­pated event for both the main­stream press and the youth-oriented coun­ter­cul­ture move­ment with which the band had by this time become strongly asso­ci­ated. Expec­ta­tions, to say the least, were high. The reviews were mixed.

Tony Palmer, in The Observer, wrote shortly after the album’s release: “If there is still any doubt that Lennon and McCart­ney are the great­est song­writ­ers since Schu­bert, then … [the album The Bea­t­les] … should surely see the last ves­tiges of cul­tural snob­bery and bour­geois prej­u­dice swept away in a del­uge of joy­ful music mak­ing.…” [3]

Richard Gold­stein, writ­ing in The New York Times on Decem­ber 8, 1968, described the album as a “major suc­cess.” [4]

Another review in The New York Times, this one by Nik Cohn, con­sid­ered the album “bor­ing beyond belief” and described “more than half the songs” as “pro­found medi­oc­ri­ties.” [5]

Alan Smith, in an NME review enti­tled “The Bril­liant, the Bad, and the Ugly,” derided “Rev­o­lu­tion #9″ as a “pre­ten­tious” exam­ple of “idiot imma­tu­rity” and, in the fol­low­ing sen­tence, assigned the bene­dic­tion “God Bless You, Bea­t­les!” to “most of the rest” of the album. [6]

Smith’s review estab­lished a pat­tern that has endured for much of the crit­i­cal assess­ment that fol­lowed. Many of the reviews since 1968 — and “The Bea­t­les” surely ranks among the most-reviewed releases in rock his­tory — have tem­pered rap­tur­ous enthu­si­asm with a con­sis­tent note of crit­i­cism about the album’s seem­ingly undis­ci­plined struc­ture. Unlike such albums as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Revolver, The Bea­t­les is a release that, four decades on, tends to pro­voke heated dis­cus­sions of such top­ics as con­ti­nu­ity, style, and integrity.

The New Rolling Stone Album Guide praises the album but main­tains that it has “loads of self-indulgent filler,” iden­ti­fy­ing “Rev­o­lu­tion #9″ in par­tic­u­lar as “justly maligned,” and sug­gests that lis­ten­ers in the CD era, who can pro­gram dig­i­tal play­ers to skip over unwanted tracks, may have an advan­tage over the album’s orig­i­nal audi­ence. [7]

Some con­tem­po­rary crit­ics say the album’s inclu­sion of sup­pos­edly extra­ne­ous mate­r­ial is a part of its appeal. The allmusic.com review con­tends that: “Each song on the sprawl­ing dou­ble album “The Bea­t­les” is an entity to itself, as the band touches on any­thing and every­thing they can. This makes for a frus­trat­ingly scat­ter­shot record or a sin­gu­larly grip­ping musi­cal expe­ri­ence, depend­ing on your view, but what makes the White Album inter­est­ing is its mess.” [8]

One impor­tant cur­rent trend in crit­i­cal assess­ments of the album is to draw par­al­lels between the band’s dis­in­te­grat­ing ensem­ble and the chaotic events of the tumul­tuous year in which The Bea­t­les was cre­ated, 1968. Along these lines, Slant Mag­a­zine observed that: “(The album) reveals the pop­ping seams of a band that had the pres­sure of an entire fis­sur­ing generational/political gap on its back. Maybe it’s because it shows The Bea­t­les at the point where even their music couldn’t hide the under­ly­ing ten­sions between John, Paul, George, and Ringo, or maybe because it was (coin­ci­den­tally?) released at the tail end of a year any­one could agree was the embit­tered honeymoon’s end for the Love Gen­er­a­tion, the year when, to bor­row from a famous Yeats poem, the cen­ter decid­edly could not hold … for what­ever rea­son, The Bea­t­les is still one of the few albums by the Fab Four that resists reflex­ive can­on­iza­tion, which, along with society’s con­tin­ued frag­men­ta­tion, keeps the album fresh and sur­pris­ing.” [9]

In 1997, “The Bea­t­les” was named the 10th great­est album of all time in a ‘Music of the Mil­len­nium’ poll con­ducted by HMV, Chan­nel 4, The Guardian and Clas­sic FM. In 1998, Q mag­a­zine read­ers placed it at num­ber 17, while in 2000 the same mag­a­zine placed it at num­ber 7 in its list of the 100 Great­est British Albums Ever. [10]

In 2001, the TV net­work VH1 named it as the 11th great­est album ever. [11]

It was ranked num­ber 10 in Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 great­est albums of all time in 2003. [12]

In 2006, the album was cho­sen by Time Mag­a­zine as one of the 100 best albums of all time. [13]

On the 40th anniver­sary of the album’s release the Vat­i­can issued an unusual review of the album. The offi­cial Vat­i­can news­pa­per, L’Osservatore Romano, pub­lished a lengthy arti­cle which declared that “Forty years later, this album remains a type of mag­i­cal musi­cal anthol­ogy: 30 songs you can go through and lis­ten to at will, cer­tain of find­ing some pearls that even today remain unpar­al­leled.“[14] For­giv­ing John Lennon’s “more pop­u­lar than Jesus” remark, the paper called the White Album the “cre­ative sum­mit” of the Bea­t­les’ career, com­par­ing it favor­ably to con­tem­po­rary music and tak­ing note of the now anti­quated equip­ment used, con­clud­ing that “a lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence like that offered by the Bea­t­les is truly rare.”

NOTES:
1. Time mag­a­zine, Sep­tem­ber 27, 1967, page 128
2. IMDB Tim­o­thy Leary bio
3. Nor­man, Phillip (1981). “Shout!”. Fire­side Press.
4. New York Times, Decem­ber 8, 1968
5. “A Briton Blasts The Bea­t­les,” New York Times, Decem­ber 15, 1968
6. New Musi­cal Express, Novem­ber 9, 1968
7. Brack­ett, Nathan (2004). The New Rolling Stone Album Guide. Simon and Schus­ter.
8. “Music.com White Album review”. Retrieved on 2007-10-08.
9. “Slant Mag­a­zine review”.
10. “The 100 Great­est British Albums Ever”. Q. Retrieved on 2007-11-20.
11. “2001 VH1 Cable Music Chan­nel All Time Album Top 100″
12. “The 500 Great­est Albums of All Time”. Rolling Stone
13. “The All-Time 100 Albums”. Time
14. “Vat­i­can news­pa­per: Bea­t­les’ music bet­ter than today’s pop songs,” Catholic News Ser­vice, Novem­ber 24, 2008