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 "The obsession with production, coupled with a surprising shoddiness in composition, permeates the entire album. There is nothing beautiful... an album of special effects, dazzling but ultimately fraudulent."
-The New York Times, June 18, 1967
"Music may never be the same again."
-The Washington Post, June 18, 1967
These quotes are from two reviews of the same album that ran on the same day in two of the most venerable newspapers in the United States, almost exactly 46 years ago. The album in question was the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Suffice it to say, only one of these reviews was right.
I've spent a lot of the last week thinking about music without precedent, and people without fear. Last Friday saw the sudden debut of Kanye West's blastoff into aesthetic insanity, Yeezus, which leaked five days before its official release date. Yeezus isn't Sgt. Pepper (he declared, hesitantly), but it's a legitimately avant-garde pop record by a truly major artist, a hard, punishing work that seems to defy its own context and thrust us into the key of the epochal ("Music may never be the same again"). The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones suggests that in a few decades Yeezus may be remembered as the album that got a brand new generation of kids into Kanye West, a vision of the future that strikes me as faintly apocalyptic, though I'm probably just getting old.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/06/how-kanye-wests-i-yeezus-i-is-like-i-sgt-pepper-i-or-i-kid-a-i-or-i-riot-goin-on-i/277087/
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