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.
