A Brief Rumination on the ‘Concept Album’ and the Sixties!!!

This is not a usual presentation of a cultural history; I am supposed to be presenting a history of a genre of music, that of the rock opera, and yet it feels pretentious, even wrong to cite sources related to any expected proper introduction to the genre’s precedent. Pet Sounds. Sgt. Pepper’s. What do these two combinations of two words mean to you? They could mean everything; they could mean anything that isn’t nothing. They cannot mean nothing. Endless dissections before I have proven that plainly. You often even forget that the music was made by human hands, they are considered so untouchable and perfect, until inter-personal-band tensions and pop-apocrypha are remembered, stories told and retold to the extent that someone who simply listens to the music with no interest in how the Beatles interacted with each other or the familial strife within the Beach Boys is, within dedicated music circles, considered equivalent to an imbecile. You cannot just enjoy the music to enjoy it in such a scene. You have to study it to truly get something out of it.

Once, my mother and I were listening to oldies radio in the car, and a song from Music for Big Pink came on, I believe “The Weight” — a favorite album, a favorite song. I make some offhand comment about how, regardless of all the stories and literature and documented history, it really makes no difference to me that the Band were Bob Dylan’s backing group. It made my mother laugh because she, who has seen Dylan perform three times, had no idea of this trivia. She’s the kind of woman who considers Dinosaur Jr. one of her favorite groups, though she only knows one of their albums, and she hadn’t to Radiohead aside from The Bends for some while out of fear that being exposed to other work of the group would ruin what makes that album so special to her. She’s the kind of woman who had no interest in watching the recent biographical film on Dylan’s early days, for she prefers Dylan as a nebulous and mysterious and secretive figure. Most people who can claim Blood on the Tracks as the first compact disk they ever bought, at the precipice of the technology, would not share this sentiment or be expected or assumed to. Yes, this is not your usual essay on music and its history and its cultural relevance, because it is not concerned with the mythos of rock music that has become so entrenched with the way music is, quote on quote, ‘supposed’ to be listened to. It is not even intended to be listened to; it is intended to be consumed. It is cruel to only know and adore a band for one album you know like the back of your hand from years of the CD footing around your car. You must know every song, every manner in which the demos differ, every inspiration, agitation, and muse, every little detail of the personal life of its members that have been made publicly available. If your hero is legendary enough in status that their personal diaries have been published, you must buy them, and you must analyze them down to the bone, and you must never let the art have a life outside of the artist’s psyche, which is always tortured.

This perspective stands in direct opposition to the universal concept of seeking contact with the world beyond our immediate selves through any form of art. It is funny, then, that poetry — including poetic prose — and music — beautiful words set to music and presented in poetic format in liner notes and gatefolds — are the most susceptible to this weakness of the spirit. Within the lines of abstraction, simile, metaphor, and more, we fill in our own lives, our own experiences, what experiences we would like to have and what we would like our lives to look like. We find a great solace in words, thin black script on a papyrus page, because we get to color them in. No art form not centered around words and what they say as opposed to pictures has that quality of simultaneously lacking and being overwhelmed with color.

Yet another art form, often overlooked due to its lack of recognition as art, carries the same quality in a very different way. That art form is history itself. Yes, history is the realm of thin black script on the pages of textbooks, academic articles, peer-reviewed journals. But it is also the air we breathe, the clothes we wear, the personal experiences we have had. Each second we live in is history, no matter how boring or exciting or whether or not we consider it boring or exciting in the moment as we live it. It is the cultural artifacts of these living seconds — the primary sources, as opposed to the previously mentioned secondary sources compiled from study and research — that are the building blocks of how we perceive history from a retrospective position.

Any other analysis of the phenomenon of the nineteen-sixties ‘concept album’ would dive deep into the two albums most definitive of this phenomenon both on a surface level and a music-aficionado level. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, a thirty-six minute long ode to life, love, and the inevitable happiness and sadness of both, would send ripple effects across the music industry and spur the ever-present social phenomenon of composer Brian Wilson as a ‘genius’ of the popular realm. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, with heavy inspiration from the previous album — which was not as — would be the first record to truly spur the concept of popular music as something to be taken ‘seriously’, to be studied on a wide scale. Gone were the days, apparently, of frivolous Beatlemania, the days of simple songs about surfing and cars. Pop music was something for mortal men to find meaning in besides something to cut a rug to to impress a potential mate of the opposite sex. Mortal women had already found the true meanings in these works through the manners in which they fueled their developing libidos, but now pop music was something that could be considered entirely sexlessly, with the thrust of academic consideration being the only thrusting in sight.

Much of the drive and ambition of the general art that emerged from this window of time and the often rainbow-colored, flowery manifestations it existed as can be explained by drugs — the cop-out explanation that I will most likely succumb to at least once throughout the course of this essay. But when one considers the context of the time on a deeper level, one can come to consider that the brashness that modern times associate with the sixties on a surface level owe much to something more prominent in the air. These creatives lived in a time of great social change, and they were aware of it. They took advantage of the excitement that naturally comes with such a realization, every whim and indulge: long hair on men, short skirts on women, flowers, murals, painted bodies, light shows, loud music.

These phenomena of the time — these primary sources — existed because of whims and whimsy, a direct opposite to the well constructed and tediously researched recounts by historians to come — the secondary sources. This conflict is what defines history as an art form. There is color in history, it is obvious, even when all of the photos are in sepiatone. Where the color lies is up for witnesses of history to decide, with ink pens making notes for paintbrushes, bias for individual style. No historian is truly without bias, however impartial they try to be, and no monochrome recitation of facts is without the drawing of conclusions. Facts arise from personal experience, and initiatives such as oral histories are crucial for developing more recent cultural stories on such personal levels. The memories at play here fail, embellish, downplay; thus is humanity’s eternal flaw. And then there is art, music in particular: each album or single is lightning in a platinum-selling bottle, eternally in stasis, seemingly never fluctuating and only what it is. It as an object means nothing without context, but that context means something different for every one who takes the time to listen. It plays in the forefronts and backgrounds of individual lives, failing, embellishing, downplaying births, deaths, the worst and best days, shapeshifting them as well as with them. To make grandiose statements already made an infinite number of times over is to do those lives a disservice.

Unknown people in any given time, unless they were intense diarists, cannot have their lives reconstructed down to the moment, which rock-stars and other ‘big men’ of the past are often subjected to. It is no wonder, then, that the sweetly-blind concertgoer’s lessons learned from music are considered much less interesting than the individual occurrences of turmoil that have gone into the recording of albums or the sour breakups of un-blind bands. Little moments of humanity can be discarded and replaced with tired archetypes, who, regardless of functioning level, look as if a gaggle of acid casualties: analyzed to the bone with terrifying scalpels yet never understood. Any moment of happiness or earnest humor is refused and laughter at any shred of conscious, flawed life is mandated. Any moment that sticks out must be made into a grandiose statement on how society treats its supposed bards, geniuses, martyrs, as if we in our gawking do not defile them just the same. It is as if historians of creativity and culture are supposed to suspend themselves in time as all-knowing soothsayers, communicating cautionary tales of only what-could-have-been instead of satisfaction at whut-wuz, because today is never better than yesterday, let alone decades ago, and it is always some dragged-in unseen force’s fault at our current, supposedly endless, predicted misery. We then perform our autopsies, hovering over the bodies in inherent superiority, knowing every use, symptom, and diagnosis they were too human, too flawed, to realize consciously or care about.

I propose that historians instead let themselves become un-stuck in it. The sun streaming through your window is history. A bomb dropped on a city is history. And listen: that song on the radio that comes on at just the right time is the most important history of all.