Guardian (UK) article comparing Astral Weeks and Sgt Pepper
John Finn
Guardian
on 2nd December. I don't think he's fair to Sgt Pepper but he's
definitely right
to lavish praise on Astral Weeks, a truly magical album.
John
So, what's the best album ever made? No, not Sgt Pepper
In the first of a new series challenging conventional views on pop,
Sean O'Hagan argues that Van Morrison's Astral Weeks has far more
claim to true greatness than that Beatles album
Thursday December 2, 1999
The Beatles have colonised our collective consciousness like no other
pop phenomenon. A dull consensus has congealed around them that
neither time nor the vagaries of popular taste have dented. We no
longer even bother to question their primacy. Every opinion poll
conducted over the last three decades, whether weighted towards the
record-buying public or the arbiters of critical excellence, convinces
us that their 1967 release, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, is
the greatest pop album ever made: unassailable, inviolable.
Personally, the only time I listen to Sgt Pepper is when I am
confronted with yet another of those mind-numbingly predictable poll
results, and then it is only to reassure myself that, despite all the
collated evidence to the contrary, it is not the greatest album ever
made but a very ornate period piece, a record that, barely 30 years
after its conception, sounds like a relic of a bygone time, rather
than a timeless classic.
Apart from a couple of tracks, such as A Day in the Life, on which an
LSD-scrambled Lennon fleetingly rediscovers his mordant wit, Sgt
Pepper is the sound of pampered psychedelic self-indulgence rather
than true iconoclasm. At worst, the album's hippy-trippy veneer only
barely conceals the twin curses of unbridled nostalgia - the mawkish
She's Leaving Home or the self-congratulatory With a Little Help From
my Friends - and ersatz eastern spirituality - the interminable Within
You Without You. There is simply too much expensively produced,
endlessly manicured filler to make this an enduring work of pop art.
The strange thing is that almost everyone I know who has a genuine
interest in popular culture agrees with me. In a straw poll of around
two dozen of my acquaintances, more than half of whom have what might
be termed an obsessive devotion to popular music, I could not find a
single person, even among the three Beatles fanatics, who placed Sgt
Pepper in their top five albums of all time.
The Fab Four did well, mind, with Revolver, which preceded Sgt Pepper,
and the White Album, which came two years after it, emerging as the
albums that people loved and, perhaps more importantly, still listened
to regularly. The paradox of Sgt Pepper's canonical status and its
aesthetic value suggests that there is probably a collective
sentimentality for pop's "golden age" governing at least part of our
reasoning when we are asked to submit Best Albums of All Time lists.
Either that, or we place undue importance on the value of received
wisdom. When the Guardian probed the underlying cultural import of one
of those Greatest Albums polls a few years back, the writer, while
accepting the sanctity of The Beatles' magnum opus, opted to question
the collective rationale behind the inclusion of two other "classic"
late-60s albums: the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and Van Morrison's Astral
Weeks. He suggested that neither album was listened to by anyone other
than devotees, but that, when asked to compile their personal lists,
people felt they had to include both albums, so great was the weight
of the received importance attached to them.
This respect for the established canon may perhaps partially explain
the choice of Pet Sounds, an album, like Sgt Pepper, initially praised
for its post-LSD formal sophistication. But Astral Weeks is an
altogether more elusive object of devotion. For a start, it was all
but ignored when first released, and thus never had the impact -
cultural or musical - of The Beatles' or Beach Boys' albums. In fact,
it is an album that had no discernible influence on the shape of the
pop music made in its wake, and, to this day, it continues to stand
out, even within Morrison's own output, as a strange, but brilliant,
aberration.
Though they are both concept albums, Astral Weeks is everything that
Sgt Pepper is not: it is steeped in the primal influences of folk,
blues and jazz, where the latter is drenched in contemporary
psychedelia; it is anguished and often wilfully inarticulate, whereas
the latter is whimsical and flowery; it was recorded almost live in
the studio over a couple of days - the latter was the result of a
long, painstaking process.
Astral Weeks is not altogether untouched by the burgeoning psychedelic
culture of the time: each side has a collective title, In the
Beginning and Afterwards, and, like much of Morrison's early solo
albums, it is filled with nature imagery and has a distinct
return-to-Eden undertow.
Morrison, though, unlike fellow acerbic John Lennon, never quite
managed to view the world through Day-Glo spectacles. While The
Beatles managed to psychedelicise Liverpool, Morrison never tried to
do the same for his native Belfast. Instead, in the very year the
Troubles began, he offered a series of fleeting, but intensely
expressed, exile's impressions of his home city: a prelapsarian
Belfast of tree-lined avenues and labyrinthine back streets,
mysterious viaducts (a constant motif in his subsequent work) and
train tracks. A Belfast of the imagination, as heartfelt and as unreal
as his lost youth.
There is nothing remotely like Astral Weeks in pop's history. It is
the sound of someone sailing beyond the parameters of pop, playing
with the idea of the "song" until he demolishes our notion of what a
song should be. It is also the sound of the innocence and the
arrogance of youth - the very idea of a barely 20-year-old Belfast lad
walking into a studio full of seasoned jazz players and, not only
communicating his vision to them, but stretching them until they
forge, in the space of a couple of days, a brave new music.
One of the qualities of Morrison's first solo album is the sense of
mystery that underlies the elliptical narrative of the songs - take
Madame George which, though ostensibly about Morrison's Belfast
adolescence, seems to pivot on an unexplained encounter with a drag
queen. This is a world away, in terms of allusion and metaphor, from
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, a track that clubs you over the head
with its obvious symbolism.
Unlike The Beatles', Morrison's songs never described an era, and thus
have not dated. He is, instead, an artist of personal epiphany: he
sings about intimate moments of enlightenment, rendering them in a
form that is as heightened as the actual experience. The enunciation
of the words, rather than their manifest meaning, is all important
here - a repeated fragment such as "dry your eye", repeated half a
dozen times, may look meaningless on the page but is infused with
longing and deep regret on Madame George, as he worries the words into
new meanings while the music falls away.
For its vocal reach alone - the murmurs, stammers and repetitions that
tease out or accentuate meaning - Astral Weeks is unique in modern
popular music. It seems, in its wilfully perverse way, to be an album
that sounds more contemporary than the lauded musical monolith that is
Sgt Pepper. It is one of the few genuine works of art in pop, the
whole effortlessly transcending the sum of the individual tracks.
The essential truth of Astral Weeks - the dark anguish that lies
beneath the surface of these beautiful songs - outweighs and outlives
the myth that has formed around it: the reverse, in fact, of the
process that has elevated Sgt Pepper.
Daniel
hope not too many people respond to the article.....
--
And Cebes, lapsing into his own dialect, laughed quietly and said: "Zeus
knows it is."
John Finn <jaf...@esatclear.ie> wrote in message
news:82h3k4$omh$1...@fraggle.esatclear.ie...
bongo
Well hell, not even Beatles fans agree that it's the best
Beatle album.
But these things do tend to get confused somewhat with "albums which
made the greatest cultural impact at the time", a measure by which
Pepper stands huge.
Pepper, the White Album, and Abbey Road all changed everything
which followed, in a way Astral Weeks, a fine album, did not.
cheers,
--bongo
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Lizz Holmans
<d_h...@canada.com> writes
>God, I stopped reading this partway through. Pretty ghastly stuff... I just
>hope not too many people respond to the article.....
Sorry to disappoint you, but I thought that article was right on the
money.
I'm a first generation Beatles fan. I wouldn't be the person I am today
if it weren't for the Beatles. The world wouldn't be the same place it
is now if it weren't for the Beatles.
But Astral Weeks is a better album than Sgt. Pepper. It hasn't dated in
the least; it has no pretensions; it's simply gorgeous music with an
incredible vocal performance by Van Morrison.
When I die, I want Astral Weeks on the headphones. I simply can't thing
of a better way to slide into the slipstream.
Lizz 'Van is God; Eric Clapton just fills in on weekends and holidays'
Holmans
--
Lizz Holmans
Mike D'Aversa
if you consider that album pop. Personally, it sounds more like a jazz
record to me, and should probably be classified as such.
Mike D'Aversa
mjd...@enter.net
"bongo" <kstewart...@fc.hp.com.invalid> wrote in message
news:0237dd28...@usw-ex0101-008.remarq.com...
Mike Warren
an old press device.
When trying to put one thing in a good light, slag off something else as
a comparison.
This IMO is lazy journalism, because, if you think something is good, you
shouldnt have to bolster your argument by putting something else down.
Mike Warren.
John Finn
JF
Lizz Holmans <di...@jackalope.demon.co.uk> wrote in message :
: Sorry to disappoint you, but I thought that article was right on the