Abbey Road

Moi ICI:

It's my least favorite Beatles record (which still makes it better than 99% of albums ever made (though saved only by George Harrison's songs and the final Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End run))

Of course The Beatles have slaughtered everybody else on iTunes since they've allowed people to buy their songs there, but it's strange to me that of all albums, Abbey Road is the #1 seller. Which has been the case throughout the years even BEFORE they got on iTunes, actually. As I said, while it's still a great album despite being my personal least favorite Beatles album, I don't understand why this one would reign supreme: Lennon's stuff is absolute shit, and the whole medley, while having it's moments as listed by me above, is a bit hoity-toity; certainly not the big rock'n pop stuff the world went bananas for, and still does. In addition, now we see that it being on iTunes only fucks it up even more:

Since the Beatles signed up with iTunes, you can download individual tracks from their albums. You may start to question the band’s reputation for creative genius, however, should you download the Abbey Road classic, She Came In Through The Bathroom Window. It starts mid-beat with the guitar outro from Polythene Pam and ends with clumsy abruptness before the sublime segue into Golden Slumbers.

It sounds horrible and ridiculous, because it has been artificially extracted from side two’s (now there’s a quaint notion) seamless medley that weaves together ten songs, building with operatic grandeur to the band’s gorgeous, emotional farewell to their public, The End (also available to download as a 2 minute 20 snippet). The medley really needs to be heard in full, in order, just as its creators intended. Out of context, the climax is robbed of all emotional impact. But this is just an extreme example of how we listen to most music these days, as individual tracks selected by computer algorithm. In the process we turn classic albums into a random jumble of arbitrary fragments. 

Curious to me.