Month: June 2007

It’s getting better all the time

sgt-peppers.jpgInspired by all the news buzz surrounding yesterday’s the 40th anniversary of arguably the most influential concept album of all time, I’ve decided to crank up my digitized version of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as I skim the news, blogs and email. I haven’t listened to the entire album in ages. How amazing that it still holds up after all these years. While Sgt. Pepper’s seems to be the consensus pick greatest rock album of all time, it doesn’t quite fit that bill for me. (The Clash’s London Calling holds that spot.) Nor is it even my favorite Beatles album. (Abbey Road holds that distinction.) It’s been in my top 10 for as long as I’ve been making and remaking that list, though, and I have to admit — as the hypnotic, sitar-soaked sounds of “Within You Without You” ooze from my computer — that this album might be getting better all the time.

Since this is a blog about higher ed, I suppose I should link to this story about how the album has become a serious subject of academic study. Experts will gather at the University of Leeds later this month to discuss the album’s impact on popular culture. But the pop critics of the mediasphere is already telling us everything we need to know about that, isn’t it?

Forty years later, music lovers are still gushing about it. For example:

  • “Every concept album that came afterward, from Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ to Green Day’s ‘American Idiot,’ never surpassed ‘Sgt. Pepper’s.’ We decided that The Beatles were not only brilliant, they were first” (via).
  • “It was, by any estimation, a revolutionary moment, one that marked the closing of one chapter and the beginning of another that is still being written to this day. Just about everything – not just music, but popular culture in its entirety – seemed different after the Beatles released their masterpiece on June 1, 1967” (via, which also lists 10 other great albums from 1967).
  • “This album is as fresh and unusual and groundbreaking today as it was on June 1, 1967. And I haven’t even dropped any acid” (via).
  • 40 reasons to still love Sgt. Pepper’s.
  • One I overlooked previously: Design of Experience, the Sgt. Pepper kind, from Valeria Maltoni’s Conversation Agent

Friday Five: clearing the cache edition

Cleaning out some starred items from the RSS reader:

  1. Michael Stoner wonders: Who listens to podcasts, anyway? Good question. And Stoner sort of answers.
  2. A university gets possessive. Via University Business, the Boston Globe reports on Boston University President Bob Brown’s “test-driving” of a new slogan for the campus: “Boston’s University.” It sounds like Brown has convinced Globe columnist Alex Beam, anyway. The tagline “removes two of BU’s outsized competitors — Cambridge-based Harvard and MIT — from the mix entirely. Boston College, its name notwithstanding, huddles in the shady groves of Newton. Both US News & World Report and Washington Monthly rank BU well above Northeastern University, the only other claimant for the title. So ‘Boston’s University’ it is.”
  3. Facebook vs. MySpace (video). A nice parody of those Mac vs. PC TV ads, from CNET.
  4. Paging Joseph Campbell: Tired of those Internet “trolls” who crash your forums with inane or inflammatory comments? You may as well despise the court jester! Via Boing Boing comes word that the troll is nothing more than the archetypical trickster of our mythology, who enter our online discussions with “the cracked, stoic smile of Robin Goodfellow, a Puck with the simple desire to disrupt peace itself.” If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended.
  5. From the effective keywords department: ‘Distance learning’ breaks out. Bob Johnson discusses how “a relatively rare example of academic jargon moving out into common use.”