The Number Ones: The Beatles' “All You Need Is Love”
The Beatles were already a monstrously successful band before the summer 1967 release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But that album brought them to a new level of cultural prominence — one that began to transcend pop music or even celebrity. Sgt. Pepper was arguably the first event-album, the LP that wore its own experimentalism on its sleeve and forced any serious-minded people to reckon with what the Beatles were doing. You could not be a culturally informed person and dismiss the Beatles in 1967. It just wasn’t possible. After Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles stopped being an extremely popular band of pop musicians. Instead, they became, more or less, goodwill ambassadors to the entire human race. That’s not an easy position to be in.
Source: Tom Breihan @tombreihan/ stereogum.com
