Lord

Masterpiece, "Under my Thumb" is the best, without taking anything away from the others.

Great song

And then psychedelia has always existed; humanity intertwined it with music and cinema in the second half of the '60s, in a massive and almost always free way. But in itself, psychedelia has never had a beginning or an end. If you think about it, the Big Bang was a psychedelic show like no other, even though it lacks the psychic component.

Let's add all of this to the Beatles' production and see what grade comes out for their artistic career.

Ahh well, if the "13th floor elevator" invented the term Psychedelia then... Alright, the trend of trashing the Beatles will pass, after all, they went through periods of complete darkness even in the '80s. "...thanks to Harrison and Lennon, because if it depended on your Macca, they wouldn't have even done that little..." and it showed later how it was: take an album like "McCartney II" for example: it's a decent product, a 6.5/10, for goodness’ sake, but it contains a level of experimentation that Harrison and Lennon never implemented, neither with the Beatles nor as solo artists. Wonderwall by Harrison and the very first solo sounds of Lennon are glaring naïvetés, not to mention rubbish (maybe that's too much). Lennon created 3 immortal songs, ones that will never be removed from history, but what about the rest? For the 10 years that separated the end of the Beatles from his death? Let's leave Harrison where he is; I wonder how his triple album from 1970 can be defined a masterpiece: just the fact that it's three discs in one means filler in heaps, as it actually is; Ringo Starr, let’s leave him where he is, maybe he’s not as bad as they say; and finally McCartney, someone who after the Beatles always worked hard, giving free concerts at universities to reconnect with his roots, a composing career that has produced an impressive body of work (not always top-notch, but in 40 years as a solo artist he really has made a lot of good music), incomplete albums, mistakes that led to rock-pop masterpieces (Band on the Run?), he’s always done what he wanted when he wanted, and the album reviewed here is a testament to that. Plus, a fact that is always overlooked, McCartney has a great voice, a crazy range, an incredible ability to adapt to different situations—sentimental, rock, refined pop, folk. I won’t hide the fact that he’s made some missteps in his discography, the ‘80s weren’t his best, but overall his releases have always been sufficient and varied enough not to be boring. And once in a while, a masterpiece has even slipped through.

Verse-chorus, what a load of crap, it seems to me that they were quite free in their composition style, "Within You Without You", "Tomorrow Never Knows", "Happiness is a Warm Gun", the Magical Mystery Tour, "Sgt. Peppers", "You Never Give Me My Money", the world-famous "A Day in the Life", practically all their production post-'65, filled with freely structured experiments, among other things remarkably successful, where the verse and the chorus are deconstructed and reconstructed or are completely absent. And I don't believe that the verse and chorus are a limitation; let's take the masterpiece "In the Court of the Crimson King" as an example: all the tracks are composed of verse-chorus repeated 3 or 4 times interspersed with instrumental interludes of undeniable charm: nothing could be more straightforward, yet incredibly revolutionary. It's time to stop with these damn prejudices (it's a bit of a cliché).

True

Well said. Just think that back then, making a song about sex, drugs, VIETNAM meant raking in money by the bucket load. But do you really believe that everyone was an experimenter and a flower child? A good portion were doing experimentation, psychedelia, and the like just to ride the trend: by the end of the seventies, they’d be sporting punk crests and by the '80s they’d turn into ruthless yuppies. It was all a fad and, as has been aptly said (!), the Vietnam War ended because it was made to end just like it began, certainly not because of the Peace & Love (Out of millions of Hippies, the only true ones, who believed in what they were doing, were probably just a handful...). The Beatles always did what they liked, and in their “conservatism,” they were the most honest and transparent; their pop was much more complex than it’s often believed to be. It’s too easy to make long 20-minute drivel with sitars, bells, little organs, etc. The Beatles managed to apply these contaminations to the song form and traditional pop, which is much more commendable than the acid-stewed clunkers of the time (I don’t want to generalize; the greats of psychedelia remain and will remain greats, but lately with Scaruffian revisionism, we tend to give oxygen to the fakes at the expense of the true music that influenced the times). For example, I’ve never had a problem; I’ve always made Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Doors, CCR, tradition, and experimentation coexist without any inner conflict. There are masterpieces at both extremes.

I prefer McCartney. He’s a well-rounded musician, has written beautiful lyrics, can play all the traditional rock instruments, understands music, and has always done what he wanted. If he wants, he’s even a bit of an experimenter. Lennon wrote many beautiful lyrics, but with a few exceptions here and there (Imagine, Mother,...), musically he was less than mediocre. John Lennon’s story with the Beatles is a whole different matter; that’s where he really put in the effort musically, even though McCartney has always been superior to him. However, I don’t want to tear him apart; masterpieces like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," "Benefit of Mr. Kite" (or however the hell you spell it), "Dear Prudence," "I’m Only Sleeping," and many others were all the work of the bespectacled genius John Lennon. For me, it's in the Beatles that he gave his all.

It's a 5-star album with your eyes closed, just for "Tunnel of Love."