𝐅𝐑𝐎𝐌 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐂𝐑𝐘𝐏𝐓𝐒 - 𝐂𝐄𝐋𝐄𝐁𝐑𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐏𝐀𝐒𝐓 𝐀𝐋𝐁𝐔𝐌 𝐑𝐄𝐋𝐄𝐀𝐒𝐄𝐒 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐘 𝐨𝐟 𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐃 𝐑𝐎𝐂𝐊 & 𝐇𝐄𝐀𝐕𝐘 𝐌𝐄𝐓𝐀𝐋… 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐏𝐒𝐘𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐃𝐄𝐋𝐈𝐀, 𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐓 𝐓𝐖𝐎!
(The Beatles - Rubber Soul, December 3, 1965)
In Retrospect (Continued):
Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph wrote in 2009;
"this is where things start to get very interesting ... Rubber Soul is the result of their first extended period in the studio. The production is open and spacious, adorned but not yet overcrowded with new instruments and ideas. The songs themselves are like little Pop Art vignettes, where the lyrics are starting to match the quality of the melodies and arrangements."
Scott Plagenhoef of Pitchfork describes the album as "the most important artistic leap in the Beatles' career – the signpost that signaled a shift away from Beatlemania and the heavy demands of teen pop, toward more introspective, adult subject matter".
Paul Du Noyer wrote in his review for Blender in 2004:
"Their talent was already a source of wonder, but now the songs themselves were turning mysterious. Under the influence of Bob Dylan – and, it might be said, marijuana – the Fab Four laced their tunefulness with new introspection, wordplay and social comment. University professors and newspaper columnists started taking note."
Writing in Paste, Mark Kemp says that the influence of Dylan and The Byrds seems overt at times but the album marks the start of the Beatles' peak in creativity and, in the context of 1965, offered "an unprecedented synthesis of elements from folk-rock and beyond".
According to Richie Unterberger of AllMusic, the album's lyrics represented "a quantum leap in terms of thoughtfulness, maturity, and complex ambiguities", while the music was similarly progressive in its use of sounds beyond "the conventional instrumental parameters of the rock group". He adds that Rubber Soul is "full of great tunes" from Lennon and McCartney notwithstanding their divergence from a common style, and demonstrates that Harrison "was also developing into a fine songwriter".
Writing in the Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Colin Larkin describes it as "not a collection of would-be hits or favourite cover versions … but a startlingly diverse collection, ranging from the pointed satire of Nowhere Man to the intensely reflective In My Life."
In the 2004 edition of The Rolling Stone Album Guide, Rob Sheffield recognises Help! as "the first chapter in the (Beatles') astounding creative takeoff", after which the band "grew up with an album of bittersweet romance, singing adult love ballads that feel worldly but not jaded".
In an article coinciding with the 50th anniversary of its release, for The Guardian, Bob Stanley lamented that Rubber Soul was often overlooked in appraisals of the Beatles' recording career, whereas Revolver and The Beatles had each gained in stature to surpass Sgt. Pepper. Stanley highlighted Rubber Soul as having been "a good 18 months ahead of its time" and "the first album of the rock era that sounded like an album".
Also writing in December 2015, in Rolling Stone, Sheffield especially admired the singing and the modern qualities of the female characters depicted in the lyrics. He said that the album was "way ahead of what anyone had done before" and, given the short period in which they had to record, he called it the Beatles' "accidental masterpiece".
Conversely, Jon Friedman of Esquire finds the work vastly overrated, with only the Lennon-dominated songs Norwegian Wood, Nowhere Man, In My Life and Girl worthy of praise, and he dismisses it as "dull" and "the Beatles' most inconsequential album". Although he considers that McCartney "comes off third-string" to Lennon and Harrison, Plagenhoef defends the album's subtle mood; highlighting the influence of cannabis on the Beatles throughout 1965, he writes:
"With its patient pace and languid tones, Rubber Soul is an altogether much more mellow record than anything the Beatles had done before, or would do again. It's a fitting product from a quartet just beginning to explore their inner selves on record."
In his review for Rough Guides, Chris Ingham highlights the musical arrangements, three-part harmonies and judicious use of new sounds, in addition to the band's improved musicianship and songwriting. He says that Rubber Soul usually trails the Beatles' next four albums in critics' assessments of their work, yet "it's undoubtedly their pre-acid, pre-antagonism masterpiece: beat music as high art".
In 2020, when asked of which Beatles albums qualified for an A-plus grade, Christgau considered Rubber Soul as a "prime candidate" among scholars of the band, but concluded that, "while I feel and understand the artistic skill and historical momentousness ... in fact I only cream for three of its songs: Norwegian Wood, Girl, and In My Life.'"
Legacy:
“It was the most out-there music they'd ever made, but also their warmest, friendliest and most emotionally direct. As soon as it dropped in December 1965, Rubber Soul cut the story of Pop music in half – we're all living in the future this album invented. Now as then, every pop artist wants to make a Rubber Soul of their own. – Rob Sheffield, December 2015
Music historian Bill Martin says that the release of Rubber Soul was a "turning point" for Pop music, in that for the first time "the album rather than the song became the basic unit of artistic production." In author David Howard's description, "Pop's stakes had been raised into the stratosphere" by Rubber Soul, resulting in a shift in focus from singles to creating albums without the usual filler tracks. The release marked the start of a period when other artists, in an attempt to emulate the Beatles' achievement, sought to create albums as works of artistic merit and with increasingly novel sounds. According to Steve Turner, by galvanising the Beatles' most ambitious rivals in Britain and America, Rubber Soul launched "the pop equivalent of an arms race".
Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys described Rubber Soul as "the first album I listened to where every song was a gas" and planned his band's next project, Pet Sounds, as an attempt to surpass it. Rubber Soul similarly inspired Pete Townshend of the Who and The Kinks' Ray Davies, as well as Jagger and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, who issued their first album of all-original material, Aftermath, in April 1966. John Cale recalled that Rubber Soul was an inspiration as he and Lou Reed developed their band the Velvet Underground. He said the album was the first time "you were forced to deal with them as something other than a flash in the pan" and especially admired Harrison's introduction of Indian sounds.
In his chapter on Rubber Soul in the Cambridge Companion to Music's volume on the Beatles, James Decker credits the album with effecting the "transformation" of 1960s Pop. In addition to citing it as the precedent for early experimental works by bands including Love and Jefferson Airplane, Decker writes that Rubber Soul presented "a variety of techniques hitherto unexplored in popular music" while encouraging listeners "to be cognizant of more flexible dimensions of pop music and to desire and expect them as well". Music historian Simon Philo also sees it as heralding the experimentation that characterised late-1960s Rock. He describes it as an album-length confirmation of the "transformation of pop's range and reach" that the Beatles had first achieved when Yesterday, McCartney's introspective and classically orchestrated ballad, topped US singles charts in late 1965. In a 1968 article on the Beach Boys, Gene Sculatti of Jazz & Pop recognized Rubber Soul” as the model for Pet Sounds and Aftermath, as well as "the necessary prototype that no major rock group has been able to ignore".
Cultural Legitimization of Pop Music:
Rubber Soul is widely viewed as the first Pop album to make an artistic statement through the quality of its songs, a point that was reinforced by its artsy cover photo. The belated acceptance of the Beatles by the editors of Newsweek was indicative of the magazine's recognition of the band's popularity among American intellectuals and the cultural elite. This in turn was reflected in The Village Voice's appointment of Richard Goldstein, a recent graduate and New Journalism writer, to the new position of rock critic, in June 1966, and the Beatles' central role in achieving cultural legitimisation for Pop music over 1966–67. Referring to the praise afforded the band, particularly the songwriting partnership of Lennon and McCartney, by Newsweek in early 1966, Michael Frontani writes:
"The Beatles had a foothold in the world of art; in the months that followed, their efforts would lead to the full acceptance and legitimization of Rock & Roll as an art form."
Paul Williams launched Crawdaddy! in February 1966 with the aim of reflecting the sophistication brought to the genre by Rubber Soul and Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home – the two albums that, in music journalist Barney Hoskyns' description, "arguably gave birth to 'Rock' as a more solid concept than 'pop'". According to Sculatti, Rubber Soul was "the definitive 'rock as art' album, revolutionary in that it was a completely successful creative endeavor integrating with precision all aspects of the creative (Rock) process – composition of individual tracks done with extreme care, each track arranged appropriately to fit beside each other track, the symmetrical Rock & Roll album". Christopher Bray describes it as "the album that proved that rock and roll could be suitable for adult audiences", "the first long-playing Pop record to really merit the term 'album'" and the LP that "turned Pop music into high art".
The Development of Sub-genres:
The album coincided with Rock & Roll's development into a variety of new styles, a process in which the Beatles' influence ensured them a pre-eminent role. Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones' manager and producer at the time, has described Rubber Soul as "the album that changed the musical world we lived in then to the one we still live in today". Norwegian Wood launched what Indian classical musician Ravi Shankar called "the great sitar explosion", as the Indian string instrument became a popular feature in Raga Rock and for many Pop artists seeking to add an exotic quality to their music. The harpsichord-like solo on In My Life led to a wave of Baroque Rock recordings. Rubber Soul was also the release that encouraged many Folk-music aficionados to embrace Pop. Folk singer Roy Harper recalled:
"They'd come onto my turf, got there before me, and they were kings of it, overnight. We'd all been outflanked ..."
Author George Case, writing in his book Out of Our Heads, identifies Rubber Soul as "the authentic beginning of the psychedelic era". Music journalist Mark Ellen similarly credits the album with having "sowed the seeds of Psychedelia", while Christgau says that "psychedelia starts here." Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald in July 1966, Lillian Roxon reported on the new trend for Psychedelia-themed clubs and events in the US and said that Rubber Soul was "the classic Psychedelic album now played at all the Psychedelic discotheques". She attributed pop's recent embrace of psychedelia and "many of the strange new sounds now in records" to the LP's influence.
In Marc Myers' view, the Capitol release "changed the direction of American rock". In the ongoing process of reciprocal influence between the band and US Folk Rock acts, the Beatles went on to inspire the San Francisco music scene. Recalling the album's popularity in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, where Jefferson Airplane were based, journalist Charles Perry said: "You could party hop all night and hear nothing but Rubber Soul." Perry also wrote that "More than ever the Beatles were the soundtrack of the Haight-Ashbury, Berkeley and the whole circuit", where pre-hippie students suspected that the album was inspired by drugs.
Citing a quantitative study of tempos in music from the 1960s, Walter Everett identifies Rubber Soul as a work that was "made more to be thought about than danced to", and an album that "began a far-reaching trend" in its slowing-down of the tempos typically used in Pop and Rock music. While music historians typically credit Sgt. Pepper as the birth of Progressive Rock, Everett and Bill Martin recognise Rubber Soul as the inspiration for many of the bands working in that genre from the early 1970s. As with Revolver, Everett sees the album's Progressive Rock antecedents among its combination of "rich multipart vocals brimming with expressive dissonance treatment, a deep exploration of different guitars and the capos that produced different colors from familiar finger patterns, surprising new timbres and electronic effects, a more soulful pentatonic approach to vocal and instrumental melody tinged by frequent twelve-bar jams that accompanied the more serious recording, and a fairly consistent search for meaningful ideas in lyrics".
Further Recognition:
Rubber Soul was voted fifth in Paul Gambaccini's 1978 book Critic's Choice: Top 200 Albums, based on submissions from a panel of 47 critics and broadcasters including Richard Williams, Christgau and Marcus.
In the first edition of Colin Larkin's book All Time Top 1000 Albums, in 1994, it was ranked at No. 10, and in 1998 it was voted the 39th greatest album of all time in the first Music of the Millennium poll, conducted by HMV and Channel 4. It was listed at No. 34 in the third edition of Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums, published in 2000.
Since 2001, Rubber Soul has appeared in critics' best-albums-of-all-time lists compiled by VH1 (at No. 6), Mojo (No. 27) and Rolling Stone (No. 5). It was among Time magazine's selection of the All-Time 100 Albums in 2006 and was favored over Revolver in Chris Smith's book 101 Albums That Changed Popular Music three years later. In 2012, Rolling Stone again placed it at No. 5 on the magazine's revised list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. In September 2020, Rubber Soul was ranked at No. 35 on the same publication's new list.
Rubber Soul appeared in Rolling Stone's 2014 list of the 40 Most Groundbreaking Albums of All Time, where the editors concluded:
"You can say this represents 'maturity,' call it 'art' or credit it for moving rock away from singles to album-length statements – but regardless Rubber Soul accelerated popular music's creative arms race, driving competitors like the Stones, the Beach Boys and Dylan to dismantle expectations and create new ones."
Three years later, Pitchfork ranked it at No. 46 on the website's 200 Best Albums of the 1960s. In his commentary with the entry, Ian Cohen wrote:
"Every Beatles album fundamentally shaped how Pop music is understood, so Rubber Soul is one of the most important records ever made, by default ... Even in 2017, whenever a Pop singer makes a serious turn, or an anointed serious band says they've learned to embrace Pop, Rubber Soul can't help but enter the conversation."
In 2000, Rubber Soul was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, an award bestowed by the American Recording Academy "to honor recordings of lasting qualitative or historical significance that are at least 25 years old". The album has been the subject of multi-artist tribute albums such as This Bird Has Flown and Rubber Folk. Writing in December 2015, Ilan Mochari of Inc. magazine commented on the unusual aspect of a pop album's 50th anniversary being celebrated, and added:
"Over the next several years, you can bet you'll read about the 50th anniversary of many other albums – thematic volumes composed by bands or songwriters in the tradition Rubber Soul established. All of which is to say; Rubber Soul, the Beatles' sixth studio album, was the record that launched a thousand ships."
Note: The reviews shared here are for historical reference. The views and opinions expressed within are not always supported (in full or in part) by Into the Wells. — E.N. Wells
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