Teacher's Pet wrote: Thu Jan 29, 2026 10:42 am
zorg wrote:
DrAwkward wrote: Wed Jan 28, 2026 11:26 pm
Hahaha, fantastic. This is exactly the opposite of what the Beatles fans in my life have said. But I'm not going to argue the point.
Probably because they also hold some standings for Billboard #1 singles, but that was nothing revolutionary from a rock act at that point.
If I'm not incorrect Hard Days Night is literally the first ever rock LP with original material penned exclusively by the artist...even before Dylan (who at this time was still a folk act). This of course opened the floodgates so that we could get all sorts of self-indulgent rock dreck filling out albums from lesser talents.
Depends on the year. You could argue that the early U.S. "albums" are more like arbitrary compilations (and soundtracks).
But after a certain point, after they invented albums (in the sense that we understand them now), everyone else had to start making albums, too.
Sgt Pepper maybe being the big bang of "all of these songs need to be heard together and in this specific order" which nobody bothered with too much before that.
That's fair, and you could say that Hard Days Night was an accidental evolution to being the first rock "album", because they just simply had a lot of new songs to sell (and a movie). But even by the time of Rubber Soul a year later they'd started to figure out how sequencing and packaging (they famously didn't include the band name on the cover) impact the LP product. They were also pissed that Capitol in the US was re-editing them for US release up till Sgt. Peppers, at which point the suits had to concede. All of which to say, they believed in the LP as a cohesive "Statement".
Funnily enough Lennon formally backing out of the Beatles was with a single, "Instant Karma!" which was written, recorded, and released in 10 days. So again their relationship to the "form" and related psychology of pop music, and toying with that, has got to be one of their key achievements.