Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) represents the highpoint of the recording career of the Beatles. This is the first detailed study to be made of this or any other such album, and it demonstrates how serious discussion of popular music can be undertaken without failing either the approach or the music. Dr Moore considers each song individually, tying his analysis to the recorded performance on disc, rather than the printed music. He focuses on the musical quality of the songs and the interpretations offered by a range of commentators. He also describes the context in which the album was written - both within the career of the group itself and within the development of popular music globally, both before and since.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface
• 1 Inheritance
• 2 Preparation
• 3 Inception
• 4 Commentary
• 5 Reception
• 6 Legacy
• Appendix
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Discography
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The strength of this interpretive, suggestive, wide-ranging, and sometimes difficult volume on the Beatles' 1967 magnum opus is that it avoids any single approach or perspective. Moore refuses to reduce Sgt. Pepper's to a statement about drugs and the counterculture, and he emphatically rejects the prevailing idea that the album was a unified, cohesive project. Instead, he sees it as a "mixed bag" assembled ad hoc, possessing the "illusion" of coherence. Although Moore often functions as a historian--framing the Beatles in the context of the emergence of 1950s teen culture, 1960s affluence, the "mod" phenomenon, the challenge of The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds (1966), the emergence of progressive rock, and British culture and society generally--at the heart of the book is Moore's belief that Sgt. Pepper's powerful cultural appeal was a function of its sound. In the book's most original chapter, Moore examines the album song-by-song and note-by-note, using the results to comment on interpretations by Wilfrid Mellers, Ian MacDonald, Tim Riley, Richard Middleton, Richard Goldstein, and other Beatles scholars. Readers will need musical training to profit fully from that material, and patience to decipher some of the rather dense argumentation in the rest of the book. Thus, this is a volume for upper-division undergraduates and above. W. Graebner; SUNY College at Fredonia