We take a break from our regularly scheduled nonsense to bring you this important announcement: today marks 50 years since the Beatles' album "Rubber Soul" came out.
This is quite an important album, and is often ranked as one of the best (both ever and for the Beatles). It marks the first album where they really started to depart from just run-of-the-mill rock and roll and into more experimental stuff. It also includes only original songs, no covers, which was still unusual for groups in the 60s (even though the Beatles had already done that with "A Hard Day's Night").
The sitar is introduced on this album and is included for the first time ever in Western music into a pop song. The song is "Norwegian Wood", and of course George Harrison is playing it. This is a great indicator of where the Beatles would take their music next, as George got more interested in Eastern music and philosophy. Songs like "Nowhere Man" and "Girl" show how far John Lennon has come with song writing, and are great examples of how different the Beatles started to sound now. And there's also "In My Life", which is a song that's responsible for many tears. Paul McCartney is contributing songs like "You Won't See Me" and "I'm Looking Through You" (but overall I would say that John dominated this album). George even contributed "Think For Yourself", a rather harsh song but pretty catchy. And then there's the harsh-but-catchy song to dominate them all: "Run For Your Life". Really John? Ringo also gets to sing on "What Goes On", and he sounds good! People always assume that Ringo is the weak link of the group, but I'll literally fight them on that, Ringo is a good singer! This album also has pastiche songs, or songs where they would imitate other genres. Most notable is Paul's "Michelle", an imitation of a French chanson.
I could go on about this album for a very long time, but I won't, I'll just leave it with the fact that it's one of my favorites and has a lot of my favorite songs on it and go give it a listen in honor of its anniversary, please.
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