The album for Sgt. Pepper is still fugly. I don't care if people have anointed the album of music itself a classic (a point I grant), that album cover is a mess.
I'm going to float a counter-proposal, that The Beatles were not really re-inventing themselves every single album. Their songwriting craft didn't change "that" much, however much production approaches and the mechanics of specific song production processes varied. Critics may have disliked that the band was changing too quickly but songcraft was stable. Gioia obviously had fun doing a short Lexicon of Musical Invective for the Beatles comparable to invective about Beethoven.
But let's play with Gioia's proposal that critics were like soldiers who were trained to win the previous war. What does that mean? Well, in lieu of Ted Gioia giving his own explanation beyond "it was ever thus" I want to go back and quote Leonard Meyer, who proposed what he thought was the problem with musicology attempting to "read the times" back in the 1960s.
MUSIC, THE ARTS, AND IDEASLeonard B. MeyerCopyright (c) 1967. 1994 by The University of ChicagoISBN 0-226-52143-5pages 171-172But suppose the paradigm which posits cumulative change and the discovery of a common style is no longer pertinent and viable? Perhaps none of the "revolutions" will be definitive; then astonishment would disappear. Suppose, too, that there are no "imperatives" of the sort that Boulez assumes (Whose imperatives? What is "our time" but the totality of actions, including art works, that take place in it?), and, consequently, that no style is necessarily superfluous. Suppose, in short, that the present pluralism of coexisting styles (each with its particular premises and even its attendant ideology) represents not an anomalous, transient state of affairs, but a relatively stable and enduring one.I am suggesting not only that such a hypothesis is neither theoretically absurd no empirically impossible but that, once it is adopted, seemingly incompatible pieces of the puzzling present begins to form an intelligible pattern. If our time appears to be one of "crisis," it does so largely because we have misunderstood the present situation and its possible consequences. Because a past paradigm has led us to expect a monolithic, all-encompassing style, the cultural situation has seemed bizarre and perplexing. The "crisis" dissolves when the possibility of a continuing stylistic coexistence is recognized and the delights of diversity are admitted. The question then becomes not is this style going to be THE STYLE, but is this particular work well-made, challenging, and enjoyable.
Where classical music was supposed to "go" and which way was the supposedly legitimate way was a hot-button issue. Boulez and others were sure the path forward lay in things like integral serialism and now who can fault them for their delusions of grandeur? Plenty of people. Conversely, classical music became so disconnected from popular and vernacular styles as concepts like highbrow and lowbrow were scholastically consolidated and journalistically entrenched that someone like Rachmaninov could be popular but dismissed as shallow and showy. Meyer proposed that what seemed like the "crisis" of a pluralism so varied and impossible to winnow down to a "the" style was going to be the new normal.
Ted Gioia could have played with the idea that the solidity of The Beatles corporate songwriting craft was retained despite formal shifts in production was able to represent something like the scope of the musical pluralism Leonard Meyer noticed was endemic to the mid-20th century. The Beatles may have simply been better at being jacks of all trades within popular song than others. It hardly hurt that they had a massive corporate apparatus helping them realize their potential.
Something else Meyer wrote is worth quoting:
Although diversity had been growing since the seventeenth century, the fact was seldom squarely faced. The very ideology that nurtured pluralism tended, until recently, to eclipse its presence and obscure its significance. To believe in progress, in a dialectic of history, or a divine plan was to acknowledge, at least tacitly, the existence of a single force or principle to which all the seeming diversity would one day be related. To accept the Newtonian world view, or later the theory of evolution, was almost inevitably to subscribe to monism and to look forward to a time when all phenomena would be reduced to, or subsumed under, one basic, encompassing set of laws. The notable achievements of science were taken as proof that Truth was One. Behind the manifest variety of phenomena and events lay, it was supposed, the latent unity of the universe which would eventually be discovered and embodied in a simple, all-embracing model. Because the oneness of things was what was real, surface diversity and incongruity could be disregarded.But this picture of the world is, as we have seen, no longer entirely convincing. The inevitability of progress, the reality of either a divine or natural purpose in things, the existence of a single set of categorical cultural norms, and, above all, the possibility of discovering some single fixed and final truth--all these beliefs have been questioned and found wanting. Not only has no unified conceptual model of the universe been forthcoming but diversity within as well as between fields has increased enormously over the past fifty years. And our awareness of this diversity has been intensified by the remarkable revolution in communication.In an ideological climate in which determinism is doubted and teleology is suspect, in which causation is complex and laws are provisional, and in which reality is a construct and truths are multiple--in such a climate it is increasingly difficult to escape and ignore the pervasive presence of pluralism. Impelled by the human desire for simplicity, economy, and elegance, the search for an overarching unity will unquestionably continue. But at the same time it is necessary to recognize that the "dissonance" of intellectual and cultural diversity will probably not be resolved, in the foreseeable future, into a single, consonant "chord of nature."Music, the Arts and Ideas, page 179-180
Gioia mentioned critics complained that The Beatles never repeated themselves and to that I suggest Meyer put his finger on an issue latent in Western aesthetics and social theory, that Western intellectuals were pleased as punch to talk about the virtues of pluralism but, oh, wait, hey, not this much pluralism! Western pluralism was Western pluralism, not pluralism that could take in or take on the truly global pan-historical nature of human artistic activity. Left unsaid in Meyer's book was that the pluralism was also steeped in highbrow/lowbrow distinctions. Meyer said that democracy does not require that every man likes the same things but that every man is free to like what he likes. Call it a bit dated for language, if you will, but the point is noted. To bring things around to George Steiner's observation on what he regarded as a new and unprecedently vibrant culture of musical literacy, The Beatles were a band that was able to develop (or reflect back) the music catholicity of contemporary consumers in a way that critics and journalists, historically gatekeepers of culture, were incapable of accomodating. Gioia stops short of saying that this is because of the very nature of the job of the scholar and the journalist and the arts critic and he should not have stopped short of that because the arts critic is a modern invention and one that was not needed for millennia of human music-making.
Jacques Ellul was surely not the only one to say the arts critic was the "broker" for the consumer, that the arts critic is "the publicity agent for modern art". But he pretty well nailed the nature of the beast and in that sense once you come to a realization like that then you can be fairly patient with someone like Alex Ross stumping for the symphonies of Florence Price even with the bad faith canards and rhetorical flourishes that come along the way because bad faith canards and rhetorical flourishes are part of the music critic's stock in trade! To borrow some tricks from Ted Gioia, it was ever thus. ;)
Somewhat more seriously, the gatekeeping role of the critic as journalist tends to be inimical with prescribing paths forward and even with accurately describing what is going on now. Music journalism is wider and deeper than features pieces and album reviews but I venture this idea that the album reviewer is basically never going to hit upon something that "changes everything". Maybe music journalists hope that they will come across some grand discovery like that but that's almost a scholastic super-myth, like some solitary scholar who does a project on Herman Melville's Moby Dick and then, bam, the book gets canonized and becomes required reading to the bane of American schoolchildren across the nation. Now, me, I actually liked Moby Dick when I read it. At one point it was not only not in the literary canon but when Melville published it some people thought he'd lost his mind.
A dead end of fixating on listening to production (what Theodor Gracyk alluded to in his category of "ontologically thick" music where it matters that this riff was played on a Fender Telecaster rather than a Stratocaster (let alone a Gibson))) as distinct from construction, was that critics who were finding The Beatles wanting because of the production results were not necessarily listening to the structural elements of the song itself, the mechanics of which were largely unchanged. Alternatively, people who think pop songs lack "argument" or "structure" tend to do so on the basis of pop songs not having sonata forms. Roger Scruton sort of went that route in The Aesthetics of Music but the bad faith of that gambit was revealed when he turned around and dismissed Hummel as "vapid". Aha, so having a large-scale worked out sonata form is "vapid" if it's Hummel rather than Beethoven, Mozart or Schubert. For that matter Nirvana was found wanting compared to, you may have guessed this, The Beatles!
Scruton had the luxury of The Beatles having been so canonized by the time he published The Aesthetics of Music in the late 1990s that even the conservative's conservative took their canonical status in the Anglo-American global pop songbook for granted. But Scruton wasn't being inconsistent with his version of aesthetic conservatism because, very much contra Adorno, Scruton believed that at some point academics should admit that what becomes popular becomes popular for actually good reasons. Scruton even grew to like Metallica but, we must hasten to add, he was a philospher and not a music journalist.
The philosopher was able to change his stance because, well, thinking about what his stance was came with being a philosopher. Journalists and music scholars can be in a different category. Gioia has a point, that the gatekeepers are too busy doing their jobs as gatekeepers adjudicating the present to have much by way of ways to see what may be in the musical future. Whether proverbial left, right or center, those who are attempting to adjudicate the present are not even necessarily trying to describe the present. That was what made Leonard Meyer's Music, the Arts and Ideas a pathbreaking work, he said up front he was attempting to understand his present. Here we are more than half a century later and Meyer pretty much called it pointing out that we live in a musical world that is a poly-stylistic steady-state and that the heroes of such an artistic age are not going to be the ones who necessarily master one "true" or "authentic" style but who successfully navigate the boundaries and idioms of the range of options on the proverbial table. That was, I think fairly obviously, what The Beatles managed to do with a little help from their friends.
And I don't even necessarily dig the band that much.
POSTSCRIPT
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And as axioms go, you can't really be the voice of the incoming creative future if you're vocationally occupied gatekeeping and pronouncing on the present. ;) Whoever wrote Ecclesiastes 8:17 ages ago warned that self-identified wise people who think they can anticipate what's coming next are generally wrong.
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