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ABSTRACT
Through multi-channel rhetoric—verbal, musical, and visual—popular music multiplies decentered rhetorical agency. The Beatles’s cultural watershed, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, brilliantly exploits this capacity and arguably exemplifies “genius,” conceptualized as an extraordinary confluence of agency channeled both from and to audience and culture. My analysis of Sgt. Pepper’s cover art and songs reveals a singular combination of irony, dialogism, reconstitutive rhetoric, and enthymematic/enthymodal elements working to galvanize listeners’ agency in ways that exceed the Beatles’s designs. This study demonstrates how rhetorical criticism of culturally significant popular music can benefit from close reading attentive to the synergy of lyrics, musical form, visual presentation, and artist–audience relations.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Naaman Wood for his collegial comments on an early draft; the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions; and editor Karrin Vasby Anderson for going above and beyond with detailed feedback that ultimately inspired me to rework the manuscript to its full potential.
Notes
1 For example, see Allan F. Moore, The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Olivier Julien, ed., Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008); Kenneth Womack and Kathryn B. Cox, eds., The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, and the Summer of Love (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017).
2 Andrew Ford, “Why Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a Decisive Moment for Western Civilisation,” ABC News, October 5, 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-28/why-sgt-pepper-was-a-decisive-moment-for-western-civilisation/8550530.
3 Mikal Gilmore, “Inside the Making of ‘Sgt. Pepper,’” Rolling Stone, June 1, 2017, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/inside-the-making-of-sgt-pepper-125417/.
4 Sheila Whitely, “‘Tangerine Trees and Marmalade Skies’: Cultural Agendas or Optimistic Escapism?” in Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today, ed. Olivier Julien (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 22.
5 I have encountered only one substantially rhetorical treatment of Sgt. Pepper in publication: John Kimsey, “The Whatchamucallit in the Garden: Sgt. Pepper and Fables of Interference,” in Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today, ed. Olivier Julien (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 121–38.
6 See Richard Goldstein, “From the Archives: The Original Review of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,’” New York Times, June 1, 2017 (originally published June 18, 1967), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/arts/music/archives-beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-review.html.
7 Greil Marcus, ed., Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, 2nd ed. (New York: Da Capo, 2007), 258.
8 Robert Christgau, “Christgau’s Consumer Guide to 1967,” The Village Voice, December 20, 1976, 69. Also available at https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/rock/cg1967.php.
9 Kimsey, “The Whatchamucallit in the Garden,” 131–32.
10 Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004), 3–5.
11 For example, see Moore, The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; Julien, Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles; Womack and Cox, The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, and the Summer of Love.
12 Christian Lundberg and Joshua Gunn, “‘Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications?’ Agency, Ontotheology, and the Death of the Humanist Subject, or, Continuing the ARS Conversation,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2005): 84, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773940509391323.
13 Lundberg and Gunn, “Ouija Board,” 88.
14 Lundberg and Gunn, “Ouija Board,” 85.
15 Lundberg and Gunn, “Ouija Board,” 97.
16 “Genius,” Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/genius (accessed July 30, 2019).
17 See “genie,” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/genie (accessed July 30, 2019).
18 For example, see David L. Palmer, “Virtuosity as Rhetoric: Agency and Transformation in Paganini’s Mastery of the Violin,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84, no. 3 (1998): 348–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639809384223.
19 “‘Geography of Genius’ Explores How Surroundings Influence Ideas,” NPR, January 10, 2016, https://www.npr.org/2016/01/10/462302443/geography-of-genius-explores-how-surroundings-influence-ideas. See also Eric Weiner, The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World’s Most Creative Places, from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016).
20 “‘Geography of Genius.’”
21 Palmer, “Virtuosity as Rhetoric,” 351, 352.
22 Deanna Sellnow and Timothy Sellnow, “The ‘Illusion of Life’ Rhetorical Perspective: An Integrated Approach to the Study of Music as Communication,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18, no. 4 (2001): 399, 408–09, https://doi.org/10.1080/07393180128090. For other important rhetorical approaches to musical form, see James R. Irvine and Walter G. Kirkpatrick, “The Musical Form in Rhetorical Exchange: Theoretical Considerations,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58, no. 3 (1972): 272–84, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335637209383124; Karen Rasmussen, “Transcendence in Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80, no. 2 (1994): 150–73, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639409384065.
23 Suzanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 206.
24 Roy Schwartzman and Constance Green, “Say, You Want a Revolution?” Carolinas Communication Annual XV (1999): 28, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED436797.pdf; see also 24–26.
25 Theodore Matula, “Contextualizing Musical Rhetoric: A Critical Reading of the Pixies’ ‘Rock Music’,” Communication Studies 51, no. 3 (2000): 218–37, https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970009388521.
26 Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 293–304.
27 According to a popular urban legend, Paul had died in a car crash prior to the making of Sgt. Pepper and was replaced by a look-alike to spare fans grief; supposed clues to this fact included the reference to Billy Shears in Sgt. Pepper and the image of Paul walking barefoot amid his shod bandmates on the cover of Abbey Road.
28 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 512.
29 Robert E. Terrill, “Irony, Silence, and Time: Frederick Douglass on the Fifth of July,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 3 (2003): 229, https://doi.org/10.1080/0033563032000125322.
30 Kathryn M. Olson and Clark D. Olson, “Beyond Strategy: A Reader-Centered Analysis of Irony’s Dual Persuasive Uses,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 1 (2004): 31, https://doi.org/10.1080/0033563042000206781.
31 Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 308.
32 Irving J. Rein and Craig M. Springer, “Where’s the Music? The Problems of Lyric Analysis,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3, no. 2 (1986): 252, https://doi.org/10.1080/15295039609366649.
33 John B. Hatch, “Incongruity, Irony, and Maturity in Contemporary Worship Music: An Extended Burkeian Analysis of A Collision,” Journal of Communication and Religion 37, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 68–101, Communication & Mass Media Complete. See also Laura L. Groves and John B. Hatch, “Prophetic Imagination and Racial Inertia: The Lyrical, Musical, and Visual Rhetoric of ‘Is He Worthy?’,” Journal of Communication and Religion 43, no. 1 (2020): 5–24, Communication & Mass Media Complete; Warren Buckland, “Visual Rhetoric in Michael Gondry’s Music Videos: Antithesis and Similarity in Deadweight,” Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication 5, no. 1/2 (2015): 49–57, https://doi.org/10.1386/ejpc.5.1-2.49_1.
34 Michael Leff, “Textual Criticism: The Legacy of G. P. Mohrmann,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State College, PA: Strata, 1995), 518.
35 See Leff, “Textual Criticism,” 515, 524.
36 For example, see chapters 3, 7, 9, and 11 in Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four, eds. Kenneth Womack and Todd F. Davis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006); chapters 3, 5, and 7 in Womack and Cox, The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, and the Summer of Love; and chapters 2–6 in Julien, Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles.
37 Because the line “I can’t hide” sounds like “I get high,” Bob Dylan assumed that they were marijuana users, and he suggested they smoke some together. “Bob Dylan Turns The Beatles on to Cannabis,” The Beatles Bible, August 28, 1964, https://www.beatlesbible.com/1964/08/28/bob-dylan-turns-the-beatles-on-to-cannabis/.
38 “100 Greatest Beatles Songs,” Rolling Stone, April 10, 2020, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/100-greatest-beatles-songs-154008/ (see no. 4 “Yesterday”).
39 Quoted in Barry Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 293.
40 David Sheff and G. Barry Golson, The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono (New York: Playboy Press, 1981), 78, quoted in Mark Hertsgaard, A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles (New York: Delacorte, 1995), 200.
41 Moore, The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 25.
42 Kenneth Womack, Long and Winding Roads: The Evolving Artistry of the Beatles (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 168.
43 Michael R. Frontani, “The End of Fantasy: The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour, and the Counterculture,” in The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, and the Summer of Love, eds. Kenneth Womack and Kathryn B. Cox (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2017), 199.
44 Jennifer Van Evra, “Sgt. Pepper at 50: 20 Fascinating Facts about the Beatles’ Landmark Album,” CBC, June 1, 2017, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/q/blog/sgt-pepper-at-50-20-fascinating-facts-about-the-beatles-landmark-album-1.4140829.
45 Frontani, “The End of Fantasy.”
46 Hertsgaard, A Day in the Life, 191.
47 Greil Marcus, “The Beatles,” in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, rev. ed., ed. Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke, Holly George-Warren, and Jim Miller (New York: Random House, 1992), 216.
48 Quoted in Richard Harrington, “It Was 20 Years Ago Today,” Washington Post, May 31, 1987, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/style/1987/05/31/it-was-20-years-ago-today/cbc5b512-cce3-4d2b-880d-bfad51ac1dd4/.
49 See George Martin (with William Pearson), With a Little Help from My Friends: The Making of Sgt. Pepper (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994), 22, 54, 75, 150; Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey, Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles (New York: Avery, 2006), 139, 147–49, 187–88. Quote is from Martin, With a Little Help, 150.
50 Martin, With a Little Help, 63.
51 See Ian Inglis, “Cover Story: Magic, Myth and Music,” in Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today, ed. Olivier Julien (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 91–102.
52 “100 Greatest Beatles Songs” (see no. 60 “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”).
53 The source for this and all subsequent quotations of lyrics is The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Capitol B06WVHB7B3, compact disc, 2017, originally released 1967.
54 Ian Marshall, “‘I Am He as You Are He as You Are Me and We Are All Together’: Bakhtin and the Beatles,” in Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four, eds. Kenneth Womack and Todd F. Davis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 13.
55 For example, “Norwegian Wood” and “Eleanor Rigby.”
56 For example, “Drive My Car,” “She Said She Said,” and “For No One.”
57 For example, “The Word” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
58 The art of song lends itself to this; see Mark W. Booth, “The Art of Words in Songs,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 62, no. 3 (1976): 246–48, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335637609383338.
59 “100 Greatest Beatles Songs” (see no. 1 “A Day in the Life”).
60 Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1964, repr., New York: Citadel Press, 2007).
61 “Timothy Leary,” Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Timothy-Leary (accessed October 15, 2020).
62 “100 Greatest Beatles Songs” (see no. 19 “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”).
63 Martin, With a Little Help, 148–49.
64 Colin Fleming, “‘Sgt. Pepper’ at 50: The Flaws and Misunderstood Genius of The Beatles’s Most Iconic Album,” Daily Beast, May 28, 2017, https://www.thedailybeast.com/sgt-pepper-at-50-the-flaws-and-misunderstood-genius-of-the-beatles-most-iconic-album.
65 Fleming, “‘Sgt. Pepper’ at 50.”
66 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259–422.
67 Martin, With a Little Help, 133.
68 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
69 Jill Gordon, “Dialectic, Dialogue, and the Transformation of the Self,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 29, no. 3 (1996): 259–78, Communication & Mass Media Complete.
70 Martin, With a Little Help, 149.
71 Womack, Long and Winding Roads, 176.
72 Miles, Paul McCartney, 319.
73 Emerick and Massey, Here, There, and Everywhere, 147–49.
74 Fleming, “‘Sgt. Pepper’ at 50.”
75 For more thorough musical analysis, see Sheila Whitely, The Space Between the Notes: Rock and the Counter-Culture (London: Routledge, 1992); Moore, The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
76 Kenneth Burke, “Ideology and Myth,” in On Symbols and Society, ed. Joseph R. Gusfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 312–14.
77 Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 514.
78 Brian Wawzenek, “Paul McCartney Praises Pot, Slams Fans on ‘Fixing a Hole,’” UCR, May 22, 2017, https://ultimateclassicrock.com/beatles-fixing-a-hole/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral.
79 Wawzenek, “Paul McCartney Praises Pot.”
80 Martin, With a Little Help, 124.
81 “Timothy Leary.”
82 Whitely, “‘Tangerine Trees and Marmalade Skies,’” 22.
83 Walter Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 118.
84 Jack Hamilton, “Sgt. Pepper’s Timing Was as Good as Its Music,” Slate, May 24, 2017, https://slate.com/culture/2017/05/the-beatles-sgt-peppers-was-a-masterpiece-of-timing.html.
85 Jonathan Gould, Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007), 345, quoted in Kenneth L. Campbell, “‘You Say You Want a Revolution’: The Beatles and the Political Culture of the 1960s,” in The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, and the Summer of Love, eds. Kenneth Womack and Kathryn B. Cox (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2017), 163.
86 For a discussion of competing interpretations, see Moore, The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 60–65.
87 See Whitely, The Space Between the Notes, chapter 3.
88 Moore, The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 68.
89 Leff, “Textual Criticism,” 518.