The Beatles (White Album) Review

The received complaint is that it should have been a single album. The received complaint is wrong, because the excess is the character. Recorded in a period of open hostility, with an engineer walking out and the drummer quitting for a fortnight, it plays like four writers filing separately and letting the contradictions stand. While My Guitar Gently Weeps is Harrison's best song and he had to bring in an outside guitarist to make the others take it seriously.

Happiness Is a Warm Gun stitches three unrelated fragments into two minutes and forty five seconds. Blackbird is one man, one guitar and a metronome tap. Helter Skelter is a deliberate attempt to make the loudest and dirtiest thing on record and it succeeds. Revolution 9 is eight minutes of loops that most people skip and that belongs there anyway. Yes, Wild Honey Pie and Ob La Di are slight. The variety and the nerve of it outweigh the misses by a wide margin, and no other record of the period sounds this unguarded.