It wasn’t really until the second half of the 1960s that the album became popular music’s main format to not only disseminate an artist’s work but, in many cases, to make a musical statement by said artists. With that in mind, it’s not a stretch to state that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band [Parlophone-1967] marks the specific point in time in which the album format established itself in that regard.
Considered by many the greatest album in the history of popular music, time has not been completely as kind to its status, even within The Beatles’ catalog itself, as befits such a designation. But its release was indeed a watershed moment that showed what was possible for a pop combo to achieve and has proven to be immensely influential.
As the folks over at Pitchfork acknowledged in their 2009 appraisal of the Fabs’ remastered catalog, the shadow cast by Sgt. Pepper’s, even in these fractured times, is “so pervasive and so instructional regarding the way music is crafted and sold to the public that [the album format] is still the predominant means of organizing, distributing and promoting new music…decades later, well after the decline of physical media.”
Not too shabby.
Released on May 26th in the UK and June 1st in the US, 1967.
