Having examined in the previous chapter the extent to which the Beatles hastened the decadence of popular music, I would like now to take a closer look at the more positive side of their legacy: the reasons for their longevity.

What is a ‘concept-album’?

Linguistically, the term ‘concept-album’ is an odd one: you won’t find an equivalent in other artistic disciplines: what writer would call his book a concept-novel? It is impossible to write a novel without a concept, a unifying idea: it is called a subject. We will look equally in vain in cinema for a ‘concept-film’ or in classical music for a ‘concept-opera’. People will argue that the term concept-album is less tautological on the grounds that the modern record-album is, unlike the classical opera, a non-narrative form of musical expression. But music is a temporal art form and as such cannot be anything other than narrative. Even pure music (classical, instrumental music) emerged only after music’s every movement had been fully invested with meaning through its age-old marriage to poetry, so that finally it became possible to tell a story without words.

The modern record-album grew out of the musical’s original cast album: all the songs of one musical sung by the original cast and put on one album. In this, its earliest incarnation, the modern record-album told a story, the songs had a narrative as a unifying idea. A‘n’R managers would go on to show considerable conceptual creativity in compiling albums, even when they had only unity of artist as a central concept. By 1967, however, the narrative nature of songs and the aesthetic power of a meaningfully compiled and ordered record-album was so poorly understood, that the Beatles could present the concept-album as a revolutionary innovation.