29. The Beatles, "The Beatles" (White Album)

 

I would have to say that this is the White Album of Beatles albums HA HA HA I've been wanting to do that for so long.  But it's kinda true, right?  I mean, "White Album" is now shorthand for a kind of sprawling, exploratory, multigenre album, usually a double album, where a band tries out all kinds of different approaches and styles.  Maybe members who don't usually sing get to sing and maybe the guitarist plays drums on a track and there's a mariachi-inspired track by a punk band.  

This record, the Beatles' ninth studio album, was written largely in India, where the band had decamped to study Transcendental Meditation.  They were supposed to be getting away from music but if you're John Lennon and Paul McCartney and George Harrison you don't really "get away" from music, because you can't, it's just bubbling out of you like exhaling when you're 28 years old or so and under the influence of marijuana and EMI Records.  And so Lennon and McCartney would shuffle into each others' rooms and play snippets of songs they had been working on and then they brought it all back to Abbey Road and got to work.  

It's a wild explosion of creativity and sound.  You could listen to the first song, "Back in the USSR," and think, "oh, ok, here's a straight-up rocker with some Beach Boys backing vocals, this is gonna be fun," and then two songs later (after "Dear Prudence," a wonderful gem in its own right) there's "Glass Onion," where Lennon is directly confronting the mythology around the band that had sprung up in the wake of Sergeant Peppers and taking the piss out of the fans, as they'd say:

I told you about the walrus and me, man
You know that we're as close as can be, man
Well, here's another clue for you all
The walrus was Paul
Standing on the cast iron shore, yeah
Lady Madonna trying to make ends meet, yeah
Looking through a glass onion

Lennon is usually throught of as the more wild and experimental one and McCartney more of the traditionalist - McCartney's "Honey Pie" is so traditional it sounds like it walked out of the 1930's, stopped to put on a Nehru jacket, and joined up - but McCartney was largely responsible for some of the wildest shit on here, like "Helter Skelter," a foray into proto-punk that was so insane at the time it inspired Charles Manson, and "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?," a bluesy plea to, you know, do it in the road.

But McCartney also wrote some of the prettiest stuff on here, like the achingly beautiful "Blackbird," a song I can remember listening to over and over and over again when I was a kid, and "Mother Nature's Son," about as good a melody as Paul ever wrote.  

Lennon was, uh, less constrained by conventional songwriting parameters, and so you get "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey" and "Happiness Is a Warm Gun," which goes through, I think, three time signature changes, and at least three distinct styles (and whose title was inspired by John seeing that phrase in an NRA magazine and correctly thinking it was insane).  

Harrison contributed the absolutely lovely "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," a beautiful song marred only by a guitar solo from asshole Eric Clapton (kidding, sort of, the solo is fine, but Clapton is still a dick).  He also wrote "Long, Long, Long," a kind of psych-folk before the psych-folk movement existed; it sounds like modern band Woods' entire catalog.

Look, I love this album, I'm not gonna beat around the bush about it.  I haven't even gotten to the weirdo stuff like "Bungalow Bill" and "Rocky Raccoon," which at first I didn't love but have since grown on me, but just look at the songs I've mentioned so far.  So many songs!  So many legendary songs, real staples of rock history.  Everybody has their three favorite Beatles albums, and this is one of mine.  

Is this album in my personal Top 100? Yes.