The Beatles
The White Album

Paradoxically, it is precisely the synthesis, along with a sharp irony, that forms the foundation of this great rock work.
Analyzing it closely, one realizes how the Fab Four could have derived at least a triple album if they had completed some ideas traceable in the published double. But their art mainly consisted of this: eliminating the superfluous, avoiding baroque excess, reaching the essential, the immediacy. Without being superficial.

The album references genres, styles, atmospheres, and tones that are completely different. Certainly, it is a work of notable impact, disordered, dadaist, I would even say Fellini-esque.
It is a "beautiful confusion" that baffles the listener: hot jazz ("Honey Pie"), pure hard rock ("Helter Skelter", "Back in the USSR"), extremely successful collages like "Happiness is a Warm Gun", three completely different songs and yet harmonious, in their own way consistent with the overall spirit of the album.
Heartbreaking and painful "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", descending progression with Clapton on lead guitar and the jewel of Harrison's production, also offering the reflective "Long Long Long" and the satirical "Piggies".
McCartney convinces with the playful arrangements in "Martha My Dear", just as the corrosive "Sexy Sadie", a masterful mocking of the Maharishi, does not leave one indifferent. Memorable "Back in the USSR" which references the Beach Boys and "O-Bla-Dì O-Bla-Da", deliberately vacuous.
There is also room for the late-psychedelic Lennon ("Dear Prudence", "Cry Baby Cry"), for the underrated but surprising "Savoy Truffle" and its "compressed" saxophones, for romantic and bucolic ballads ("Julia", with its enchanting arpeggio, as sweet as the highly inspired "Blackbird", "Mother Nature's Son" and "I Will").
And let us not forget the drugged indolence of "I'm So Tired", the Mayall-like "Yer Blues" and the lascivious, elemental "Why Don't We Do It in The Road". Harder "Me and My Monkey" and the festive "Birthday".
Sure, the air of disintegration and impending separation is perceptible, but the product does not suffer from it. Even the lesser episodes ("Bungalow Bill" with the unbearable Yoko Ono, the proto-muzak of "Wild Honey Pie", Ringo Starr's naive "Don't Pass Me By", the self-referential "Glass Onion", the sad country of "Rocky Raccoon" and the pseudo-avant-garde of "Revolution n.9") have their function.

Rarely has a rock record managed to embody the characteristics of the "open work", an interpretive model very much used at the time and particularly suitable for the "White Album".
It especially captures the end not only chronologically of the '60s; the landscape is desolate, disheartening, reality is elusive and ambiguous: the idea of universal love was a beautiful and colorful illusion, but the Seventies are arriving. A difficult, violent, traumatic decade that the Beatles announce, in some way. Indeed, in their own way.