Why is revolver the best album

The result is simply breathtaking. With "Revolver," Martin and the Beatles had succeeded in establishing what is arguably the most profound demographic growth in the history of entertainment.

During their early years, the band appealed to a narrow swathe of teens and young adults. But all of that changed with "Yesterday," which Martin adorned with a string quartet.

Not only did "Yesterday" emerge as a chart-topping American hit, but the groundbreaking song also saw the band growing their demographic to include the highly desirable world of working adults, ages , who longed for something more sophisticated. Quite suddenly—and scarcely more than two years after their triumphant American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show—the group dominated nearly every quadrant of the consumer age range.

With Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick embracing newfangled production techniques associated with the Leslie Speaker, backwards guitars, and Artificial Double-Tracking, which had been invented expressly for the Beatles by EMI engineer Ken Townsend, Revolver saw the bandmates' imaginations running wild. But for all of the LP's musical and engineering triumphs, nothing could have prepared listeners for "Tomorrow Never Knows," the album's mind-blowing climax. In a single masterstroke, the Beatles created a psychedelic tapestry that ushered in new ways of thinking about the concept of "recording artists," not to mention rock and roll as a musical genre.

In its early manifestations, "Tomorrow Never Knows" sported the working titles of "Mark I" and "The Void," clear indications, in and of themselves, about the composition's avant-garde nature. For the Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows" exerted a profound before-and-after effect upon their listeners. Revolver was preceded by Rubber Soul, recorded in , in which the band had achieved a new level of sophistication in its songwriting. By the time of the White album, The Beatles were splintering and essentially turned the sessions into a series of solo recordings with the rest of the band members acting as session musicians.

Revolver wasn't always so highly regarded. A few months after it was released, The Beatles began recording Sgt Pepper, an event that was chronicled with great fanfare as the band sequestered themselves in Abbey Road studios. Its magnificence seemed a fait accompli. But time has affirmed the enduring worth of Revolver. Greg Kot is the music critic at the Chicago Tribune.

His work can be found here. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc. Music Pop music.

Yellow submarines? There is a universal idea of The Beatles which one inherits in the same way as language, or your mum and dad. The Beatles represent a specific cultural moment in the s: the creation of Pop. The Beatles are, and exist in the public consciousness, as a monument to popularity itself: a totem of pure memory we cannot help but uphold. As ever, memory takes hold and turns what once seemed irrepressible to stone.

Revolver must do that…. Revolver is the only Beatles album that does not belong to History. The songs are classic, but in a way not wholly assiminable to the Big Other: familiar, but resistant to, the reified stream of British and Western complicity.

Just ask Paul Weller. The Beatles were instrumental in establishing the collective popular consciousness of Late Capitalism and on Revolver they came closest to untethering its potential from a wasteful trend towards powerless servility. The Beatles always, but never more so than here, served as a conduit to another world, a glimpse into the aesthetic pleasures of self, made accessible through four recognisably scouse lads. In his swaggering, parodic portrayal of the taxman, George Harrison travels the waves of capitalist value creation and lives a life the common consumer can only dream of….

Eleanor Rigby reads like a 19th Century novel in miniature; it has the traditional English country setting and all the tragic content one expects from Thomas Hardy or George Eliot.

Another Paul tune, For No One, is a similarly tragic tale, transplanted into the setting of a modern romance: a crestfallen ballad of sheer emptiness. Never again will Pop be so accommodating. Listening, we are invited into this dream-world of leisure and creativity.

But there is no shame in this leisurely realm, for this is a romantic indolence, through which The Beatles embody a process that denies the veracity of the world the audience inhabit, instead portraying a plane of pure possibility.