The Beatles

first released November 22, 1968

People who think that Sgt. Pepper was the Beatles' finest album are more often than not from the Beatles' own generation, boomers lamenting the loss of cultural unity and spiritual wonder. Well, some generations (X) need a different totem. And guess what they chose? The White Album is appropriately cynical and brazenly ununified by theme. As Blue Oyster Cult once said, "This ain't the Summer Of Love."

Still, for all that, there's not a single set of words that can sum up what this dazzling piece of mass-produced plastic means. It's a sprawl that covers every single area of the Beatles' four personalities and telescopes them until they become a monument to creative control and inner understanding. It's also a testament to the Life Journey, one that surpasses gurus and meditation and goes straight to the heart of how people mature into something more than drunken animals. Lots of folks point to the extremes of this album as proof that the Beatles were fragmenting, but what you're actually seeing is four corners of the same map -- this was the first and only Beatle album on which they dared to show it all. It's a crane shot of the Beatleworld.

The Beatles not a band? Preposterous. Dig the jams on "Yer Blues," "Helter Skelter" and "Birthday," the effortless complexity of the changes in "Happiness Is A Warm Gun," the raucous fluidity of "Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey," and especially that final part in "Dear Prudence," when you hear the essence of everything Beatle opening up like a rare hothouse flower. And Ringo personally considers this his fave Fab album, because the band was "a band again." His words.

Of course, there ARE lots of points where the Fabs go off alone and create things with no other Beatle around. "Martha My Dear" was the most Paul song recorded to date, and "Julia," publishing credit aside, contains not one DNA strand of Macca's influence. George was beginning to not only stand up next to the Beatles, but match and in some cases surpass them. Ringo even comes up with a song!

Still, this "fragmentation" is nothing to shame the group for. Shoehorning John into projects he wasn't fully suited for (Pepper, the Abbey Road medley) was ultimately a denial of something more important than Beatles -- the men themsleves. (John himself loved the fact that the album was expansive enough to show so many sides of the group and its members.) Working at the peak of their powers, these four giants were, on The White Album, finally stripping the artifice away and showing us who they really were, sustained for the first time over the course of an entire album.