The Cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

The most interesting thing that I noticed about Sgt. Pepper was exactly how much of a message is contained within the work. When I was younger I loved the Beatles and listened to Sgt. Pepper many times, but I never fully understood what any of the symbolism or sentiment was actually about.

When I was younger I thought that Sgt. Pepper was cool, simply due to the fact that it had fun pictures and that the music was "different" than other music I heard on the radio or at my friend's houses. With a deeper look in to the material I am able to see that there is a specific reason for each aspect of what I thought was weird or cool, that each element of the album is somehow tied in to a greater plan for the text, one that conveys many of the topics that we have been studying in class.

One of the most fascinating aspects to the album is the cover. As I have previously stated, when I was younger I thought that the album was "cool" and the main reason was because it had so many pictures on the front. Now when I look at the cover again I cannot help but recognize the reference made to the idea of the "pop icon."

Marilyn Monroe, Edgar Allen Poe, and even the Beatles themselves grace the cover of the album. Not only are they pictures of influential and prominent popular culture stars of the time, but they are also the stereotypical pictures that would be found of these "celebrities" if one was to find the most often used picture of the person.

This concept of placing all of the "famous" artists on the cover looks almost, to me, like an advertisement for popular culture. When I was younger I thought the CD looked like Mount Rushmore due to the fact that there were so many faces on the cover. I still think that, but also now have the more educated opinion that it is probably more of a dysfunctional family portrait then a national monument...well, maybe it is that too.

The music on the album still amazes me given the fact that it was very unconventional for the time that it was made. Some of the album sounds like pure noise, but when one listens closer to the music you can distinguish that there is actually a lot of very intricate and rational use of the instruments used on the album.

Since I am a musician and have studied music since I was a child, I feel that I listen for different things when I listen to music. I hear individual instruments rather than the whole work. The album appealed to me because it caters to my ability to hear in this manner.

Thinking about how I viewed this album when I was younger and comparing it to the present is one of the things that has helped me most when trying to study the text now. It may seem ridiculous, but I can look at Sgt. Pepper and remember how I viewed it when I was 10 and then look at it now and see how much I have learned in college.

When I look at the album now my mind immediately looks for any kind of Marxist relation; noticing class, power, gender, and race. This is the most interesting thing that I have found while studying this text, that I have learned something in college that I can actually apply to something in the "real world," that I can put theory in to practice.