It’s safe to assume that, if a casual music fan is yet to seek any of The Beatles’ albums to understand what all the fuss is about, it’s likely born from fatigue of the “greatest band of all time” bludgeon.
It’d be hard to blame them. Unfortunately, the Fab Four’s legacy has been paraded by a bloated heritage industry that all too often loftily places the Merseybeat success story atop a cultural pedestal that implicitly tells young generations that the contemporary artists and performers scoring their essential soundtrack can never hope to hold a candle to musical barriers already broken by Liverpool’s finest.
Such stuffy mythmaking does everyone a disservice. There’s no such thing as ‘the best ever band’, nor should we ever lapse into thinking that popular music reached some kind of apex perfection during The Beatles’ original chart tenure. Quite rightly, a significant chunk of Millennial and Gen Z pop fans have pushed back against Rolling Stone‘s fawning, keenly raising the issue of John Lennon’s history of domestic abuse, only ever skirted around previously, and less connected to The Beatles’ national presence that had dominated the UK’s musical tapestry so ubiquitously.
The fact is, The Beatles were always an infinitely more fallible and human band than their deified fluffing—a creative unit packed with soaring brilliance and wincing awfulness. This is what makes them eternally interesting, not the ‘four boys from Liverpool…’ narratives but the restless artistry that so breathlessly anchored their work across those short eight years recording with Parlophone. From their debut ‘Love Me Do’ single late 1962 to 1970’s parting Let It Be, the dizzying pace of averaging two albums a year and a wealth of EPs and singles form such essential jewels in their lore, including the duds and misfires such as ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ or ‘Don’t Pass Me By’.
“We were a great little band,” Paul McCartney surmised on 1995’s Anthology series. If any epithet best captures The Beatles’ mark on popular music, it’s that they were the best example of what a band can achieve. Electro-acoustic avant-garde, lush orchestral lullabies, proto-heavy metal, stirring folk balladry, cod-reggae bounce, Indian raga, music hall sing-alongs—the genres and stylings subsumed into the band’s voluminous songbook are nothing short of remarkable in their creative appetite. It shows a level of eclecticism unmatched by any other band since, and is what sets The Beatles apart in pop’s storied history.
With all said, our formerly committed Beatles naysayer has rolled their eyes, reluctantly offered to give you a one-album chance if it’ll shut you up—”why do Beatles fans get offended if you don’t like ‘em?”, they’re currently thinking—and is waiting for that one gateway LP that promises to reveal the fabled Fab Four magic.
So, which Beatles album should a new listener start with?
Ignoring the Yellow Submarine soundtrack and Magical Mystery Tour—brilliant but only expanded to an LP in America and made official album canon during the CD issues’ standardisation of their back catalogue—there are many chapters of The Beatles to go for. Do we plumb for Beatlemania’s height with A Hard Day’s Night? Reach into the fractured scrappiness of their eponymous double LP? Perhaps Rubber Soul’s pivotal transition to more mature songcraft is better suited for our impatient novices? Or do we dive into the safe option and unleash Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’s psychedelic pop marvel as The Beatles’ definitive introduction?
All said have their merits, but if one album were to represent the perfect LP invite, it’d have to be 1966’s Revolver. It’s a record of bristling transition, Beatlemania hanging by a thread as their artistic ambitions take over their stifling live shows, and documents starkly the multi-coloured musical terrain that would sharpen with subsequent albums, but still in touching distance of their early pop cheer. It’s all here, ‘Taxman’s’ jerky stomp, ‘Eleanor Rigby’s’ lonely strings, ‘Got to Get You Into My Life’s’ Motown sunshine, and the eerie loops and musique concrète that haunt the lysergic finale ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Revolver is The Beatles album packed with detours and excursions that will likely throw the most curveballs to the uninitiated.
Novel, inventive, and sparkling with a character that defies the typical Fab Four impressions, it may not be the best Beatles record, but Revolver documents more than any other the reason for their eternal mythologising. It perhaps presents to our curious music fan that there may just be a kernel of truth to the lauded legacy that follows the Merseybeat outfit well into the 21st century.
