The Beatles
Revolver

Let's start writing reviews on DeBaser by focusing on that group without which pop wouldn't exist, rock wouldn't exist, and moving forward, DeBaser wouldn't even exist, and hence I wouldn’t have people to tease.

Let's start with the Beatles. They are the most talked about, the most plundered, the most hated, the most loved. You can't count their song covers anymore, they are thousands, both those with a punk and irreverent twist and those that are tributes, performed by the most diverse musicians.
It’s difficult to "give the Beatles what belongs to the Beatles." Turned into a cultural phenomenon, they found themselves in the middle of something much bigger than them that would have happened anyway. They certainly weren't the ones to foment rebellion, the long hair, etcetera, but for many young people of that time, they were an excuse to transgress parents’ teachings and play at being revolutionaries... Musically speaking, they are the immense melting pot where all the genres and trends of their era merged, sometimes successfully, sometimes a bit clumsily and, I'm sorry to say, into the ridiculous: see "Helter Skelter," a pathetic imitation of the "hard" sound of the Who and the likes... It almost makes you feel tenderly.

They are the most underrated and the most overrated band at the same time: there are those who say "the Beatles didn't invent a damn thing" and those who say "don't touch them, they made music history".
The fact is, both sides are right: no musician can claim to have invented something from scratch, not even –or least of all– Mozart. It would be like saying that Chuck Berry had an epiphany and invented rock'n'roll, Jelly Roll Morton jazz, and the Maiden metal.
There are simply those who influenced or innovated more (Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground, and the Beatles, of course) and those less (Mino Reitano...), but music is about influencing each other, emulating and synthesizing, ultimately reaching one's own personal style, an "artistic maturity."
With Rubber Soul, it became clear that the Beatles didn't make music just to pick up girls. With Revolver, they really started to get serious. More than the overrated Sgt. Pepper, Revolver is the emblem of this work of synthesis that the Beatles accomplished.
There's almost everything: the riffy blues rock ("Taxman"), the chamber music ("Eleanor Rigby"), the children's rhyme (guess which one...), the "sophisticated" pop (the excellent, little-known and McCartneyan "For No One"), the psychedelia that exploits studio effects that were establishing themselves those years ("Tomorrow Never Knows": it still sounds modern today, a cross between the Chemical Brothers and the minimalist electronics of Radiohead). There’s the sitar and Harrison's social satire; McCartney's pop pranks and the song of lost love; Lennon's sarcasm and Eastern philosophy. And of course, the inevitable reference to drugs (Got to Get You Into My Life seems to be Macca's sincere declaration of love to cocaine).
"Maybe there's even too much... There's a risk of just making a big mess," one might think. I don't know, you be the judge...

There’s no doubt, however, that in '66 Revolver was an album that was current to the point of being pioneering, the fruit of curious and receptive minds exploring venues and emerging bands –as well as their own minds– in search of the new and unexplored.
Not everyone knows, for example, that McCartney, even before the other Beatles, was one of the very first fans of Pink Floyd when no one paid them attention except the hippie college students. In short, the euphoric atmosphere of swingin' London, a human and musical growth, the frenetic changes of the '60s, all this ended up in Revolver. And you can hear it. Damn, if you can hear it...