Hands down my favorite Beatles album, even though I didn’t come to it until a few years later, when I was a junior in high school.
I haven’t smoked pot for more than twenty years; alcohol does me just fine, thank you; however, if I ever go back for another bowl, let’s hope the trip includes this album. It took a couple of Beefeater and tonics to take the edge off tonight’s listening, conducted straight through with only a brief pause in the middle for the necessary refill.
Things like this make me emotional. As the author observes, 1967 may have been the Summer of Love, but 1968 was a year for the barricades.
The Accidental Perfection of the Beatles’ White Album, by Jordan Orlando (The New Yorker)
… The Beatles’ naïve and aggressively experimental musicianship propelled their most fractured and divisive project into a kind of accidental perfection. Fifty years later, the record is still good, still indelible, still as clean and pure as its sleeve, requiring no explanation or description beyond the band’s name. As the first century of electricity and world war recedes—the century of radio and movies and television and jazz, the final unconnected century, when teen-agers around the world flooded the seaport docks as new vinyl arrived—these ninety-four minutes endure, preserving the instant that rock joined the pantheon of the highest arts.
