The Beatles, Album by Album--The White Album

And what we have here is perhaps my single favorite Beatles album. Along with A Hard Day's Night, Revolver, and Abbey Road, it is an album I never get tired of. While I've heard others complain that it's too bloated and that the fat could be excised to make it one disc instead of two, that defeats the purpose of The White Album for me. It is memorable because it's the first encyclopedic rock album. While Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde was rock's first double-album (and perhaps the finer record of the two), it has a unified feel. Forerunner to such albums as the Clash's Sandinista!, Prince's Sign o' the Times, and Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life, The White Album (properly titled, simply, The Beatles) is brilliant in the sense that it tries to tackle everything, and while every piece of art with such a goal is going to fail, they often fail in the most spectacular of ways. Like Moby-Dick or Ulysses, The White Album drags at times (I'm looking at you, disc two), but the whole work is greater than the sum of its parts, and what we admire is the ambition itself, and with repeated listens, we wouldn't want the journey to be any shorter.

Famously, the Beatles wrote a large number of these songs while they were practicing yoga and meditation in India. The seclusion and focus on craft shows, as the songwriting has returned to its peak after the muddiness of their psychedelic era. It is nice to see them branch out as wide as they can, instead of being limited to psychedelic-sounding songs. There is a lot of ground covered in the 30 tracks here. But, aside from the stylistic variety of this album, the Beatles manage to shine through in every single track. They were always about the small details that elevated their music above their pop contemporaries, and this album is perhaps the finest showcase of that they put on record. It's impossible to name them all, but here is a list of some of the little things I absolutely love on this record:

-The gradual introduction of instruments and when that bass groove kicks in during "Dear Prudence."
-The piano fills at the end of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da."
-The flamenco guitar intro of "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill."
-Eric Clapton's guitar solos in "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." They elevate an amazing song into something divine, and might be the finest solos of his career. So melodic.
-Lennon's high note at the end of "Happiness is a Warm Gun." This is probably my favorite Beatles moment outside of the vocal climax right before the coda begins in "Hey Jude."
-The harpsichord solo in "Piggies."
-Paul's wordless ab-libbing in "Rocky Raccoon." Basically I love any time he does this, but you already know that.
-Lennon's lyrics in "Yer Blues." He strips the blues to their suicidal essence (and you know I love the Dylan reference).
-The off-kilter piano intro to the loopy and, indeed, sexy "Sexy Sadie."
-The 1930's instrumentation in "Honey Pie."
-The jazz-lounge sound of the electric organ in "Savoy Truffle."

This also has my favorite Beatles sequence on record: from "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" to "I'm So Tired." It is the equivalent of the sequence from "Visions of Johanna" to "Stuck Inside of Memphis with the Mobile Blues Again" on Blonde on Blonde. We take a journey through the absurd, slightly malevolent whimsy of John's children's song "Bungalow Bill" (weren't all of his children's songs somewhat malevolent? At least most of them....) to the power and gravitas of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Happiness is a Warm Gun," to "Martha My Dear" and "I'm Only Tired," which both showcase perfectly their creators' personalities (Paul and John, respectively). But I'm sure everyone has a different favorite sequence on here. That is part of the fun of this record. It has something for everyone.

To me, this record sounds like the Beatles rediscovering the joy of music itself, instead of the over-intellectualizing of it. Their experimentation with abstraction and the intellectual power of music to me hit its peak in the diamond-like clarity of Revolver, and then digressed into the above-mentioned muddiness of the 1967 psychedelic period. Here the Beatles rediscover the adrenaline rush of the sound of music itself, of playing together as a group. They have a bluesier, more unified instrumental sound on this album, discarding the excesses of Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour, in the process transforming themselves into the best rock band in the world. Tracks like "Glass Onion," "I'm So Tired," and "Sexy Sadie" all have a powerful groove to them that was lacking from the previous albums. And it's hard to talk about their power as a rock band without mentioning "Helter Skelter," which became the heaviest song in the world on top of Ringo's crashing cymbals and the relentless buzz-saw guitar in the background. Beating out contemporaries such as Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Who, and Cream, the Beatles proved they could be the heaviest band in the world before Black Sabbath if they so chose to. But of course, they had other things on their mind. Paul details the chaos, confusion, and ultimately the collapse of society in the lyrics--the total opposite of songs like "All You Need is Love."

On the flip-side, this album is also chock-full of acoustic ballads, showing the influence of their genesis in studio-free India. "Dear Prudence," "Blackbird," and "Mother Nature's Son" are all beautiful, among others. While I think "I Will" is too much of a precursor of Paul's later sappy ballads as a solo artist, because it's missing the melodic sophistication of a song like "Here, There and Everywhere," it is nonetheless a pretty song in its own right.

Harrison finally proves himself with a stone-cold classic in "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." His yearning vocals on this are absolutely beautiful. Supposedly he came up with this song by randomly flipping through a book (the Tao Te Ching?) and landing upon the phrase "gently weeps." His other songs on here ("Piggies," "Long, Long, Long," and "Savoy Truffle") are all interesting in their own way (and radically different), but none come close to the majesty of what is easily a top ten Beatles song (along with "Happiness is a Warm Gun" from this album). Ringo even contributes his only completely self-penned number with "Don't Pass Me By," which isn't half-bad.

Finally we are left with "Revolution 9," a track many of us long to wish away. But the fact remains that it's there and we need to confront it. Eight minutes and twenty-three seconds of audio clips and various studio effects form a sonic collage that remains impossible to completely unravel, as I'm sure was the intent. Obviously influenced by Yoko Ono's avant-garde sound experiments, John created an incredibly dense and puzzling piece that has different meanings for every person who listens to it (and even attempts to brood on it, which I'm sure most don't). At first to me it represented either a day in the life of a person (a la Ulysses or the Beatles' very own "A Day in the Life") or a portrait of one person's entire life, but in recent listens (and based upon the title) I have decided that it's far more of a social than a personal piece. Other than the repetition of the number nine throughout, the one thing that remains constant is the sound of people, lots of people. Just as "Revolution" (and its brother on this album, "Revolution 1") deals with the complexities of revolution and social change, the mournful tone and the sounds of violence in "Revolution 9" seem to both foreshadow revolution and also prophesize that ultimately nothing will ever change. Still, this kind of thing has no place on a Beatles record. Let's be honest.

The emergence at the end of the 1960s of the Beatles sounding like a rock group that could tackle anything, with both a sense of humor and an incredible earnestness, shows the creative peak of a group that you can listen to grow up through their musical career, through the progress of their studio albums. It is ironic that they hadn't sounded this unified as a musical group in years, considering that this is the album where the band began to experience an irrevocable personal rift. But that only goes to show that art and the personal lives of its creators are two completely different things.

--Edward