What is the name of the album that Christgau believes to be "dated in the sense that it speaks with unusually specific eloquence of a single point in history"?
Although few critics in 1967 agreed with Goldstein's criticism of the album, many later came to appreciate his sentiments. In his 1979 book Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, Greil Marcus wrote that, by 1968, Sgt. Pepper appeared vacuous against the emotional backdrop of the political and social upheavals of American life, and he described it as "playful but contrived" and "a Day-Glo tombstone for its time". Marcus believed that the album "strangled on its own conceits" while being "vindicated by world-wide acclaim". In a 1976 article for The Village Voice, Christgau revisited the "supposedly epochal Works of Art" from 1967 and found that Sgt. Pepper appeared "bound to a moment" amid the year's culturally important music that had "dated in the sense that it speaks with unusually specific eloquence of a single point in history". Christgau said of the album's "dozen good songs and true", "Perhaps they're too precisely performed, but I'm not going to complain."Writing in 1981, Lester Bangs – the so-called "godfather" of punk rock journalism – said that "Goldstein was right in his much-vilified review ... predicting that this record had the power to almost singlehandedly destroy rock and roll." He added: "In the sixties rock and roll began to think of itself as an 'art form'. Rock and roll is not an 'art form'; rock and roll is a raw wail from the bottom of the guts." In another 1981 assessment, for the magazine The History of Rock, Simon Frith described Sgt. Pepper as "the last great pop album, the last LP ambitious to amuse everyone".
In his feature article on Sgt. Pepper's 40th anniversary, for Mojo, John Harris said that, such was its "seismic and universal" impact and subsequent identification with 1967, a "fashion for trashing" the album had become commonplace. He attributed this to iconoclasm, as successive generations identified the album with baby boomers' retreat into "nostalgia-tinged smugness" during the 1970s, combined with a general distaste for McCartney following Lennon's murder in 1980. Citing its absence from the NME's best-albums list in 1985 after it had topped the magazine's previous poll, in 1974, Harris said that its lack of critical favour in the UK was such that it had become "the most underrated album of all time", adding:
Though by no means universally degraded ... Sgt. Pepper had taken a protracted beating from which it has perhaps yet to fully recover. Regularly challenged and overtaken in the Best Beatle Album stakes by Revolver, the White Album, even Rubber Soul, it suffered more than any Beatles record from the long fall-out after punk, and even the band's Britpop-era revival mysteriously failed to improve its standing.
Sgt. Pepper