White Album 50th Anniversary Edition | Page 8 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

We have an internet/uhf channel called Double J here in Australia, a sort of older hipster sibling to the youth station Triple J, both run by the ABC. And as part of the 50th anniversary doings, they’re doing a profile on the album tonight from 8pm AEDT (I don’t know if it’s geoblocked but you can try here), and their website has a couple of articles. You may enjoy this one which I find a bit hilariously wrong. For instance, a taste of Wild Honey Pie :

Not McCartney’s finest moment. But you’ve got to admire the creativity. Like every song on The White Album , it has its place, mainly as a kind of buffer between two aforementioned shockers ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da ’ and ‘The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill ’. The best thing about it? It’s perhaps the closest thing to concrete evidence that Paul couldn’t do weird anywhere near as well as John could.

The worst thing? Even if you cut it from the album, you only gain 53 seconds.

If you’re going to pan this and defend Revolution 9 in the same breath, maybe don’t make comparisons that forget that Paul did the tape loops on Tomorrow Never Knows . Here’s another, about Honey Pie :

This one is worse.

Paul McCartney ’s love of classic British music hall fare is all well and good. But it was rarely a good thing when this style of music cropped up on Beatles records.

This definitely should have been on a McCartney solo record. When he starts doing his little ad-lib semi-scat part in the middle of the song it’s the closest I come to turning the record off (yes, more than ‘Revolution 9 ’).

But including this song is further proof at just how much the band were throwing at this record. That an album can feature the deep, yearning ‘Yer Blues ’, the wild wig out of ‘Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey’, the proto-metal ‘Helter Skelter ’ and then… this? Truly astounding.

Fine, but John does the guitar solo.  You can tell that the writer is a John fan, they make excuses for the disliked John songs, but perhaps the weirdest review is this:

There are plenty of people who will tell you that George is the best Beatle. And that’s hard to argue with. But ‘Piggies ’ is probably the worst song on the White Album . His intention to write an anti-capitalist anthem, inspired very clearly by George Orwell’s classic novel Animal Farm, was certainly fulfilled. But the light-heartedness of the arrangement makes it fall short. He did a much better job on Revolver with ‘Taxman ’. While it doesn’t hold up against even The Beatles’ most middling songs, at least it got George reaching for new sounds and ideas.

Finishing ‘Piggies ’, which he’d started a couple of years earlier, was apparently the impetus for his writing ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps ’. I don’t want to live in a world where that song was never written.

Poor George can’t win, either he’s too serious or not serious enough.  But it’s pretty awful to dismiss a song as merely background for another you like more. So anyway, my point is that the White Album is awesome and just be prepared for some howler reviews by those more interested in controversy than research.