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'Sgt. Pepper' was a landmark, and a cultural moment

The album is getting a plush 50th-anniversary release.

Fifty years ago, The Beatles gave birth to the pioneering opus that's long been recognized as the psychedelic era's creative zenith: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Which naturally means that the album, long regarded as the greatest of the band's masterworks — now more commonly (and correctly) ranked below both 1965's Rubber Soul and 1966's Revolver — is getting a plush 50th-anniversary release.

Read more: It's been 50 years since the Summer of Love

We come neither to bury nor praise Sgt. Pepper, however, but to consider its cultural moment, and how it relates to our own. Pepper is just one of a series of landmark releases from 1967. Some come out of the psychedelic playbook: Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow,  Cream's Disraeli Gears, Love's Forever Changes, the Jimi Hendrix Experience's Are You Experienced.  Others followed their own path: The Velvet Underground & Nico, Aretha Franklin's I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, The Kinks' Something Else, Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding, and the great Philadelphia soul man Howard Tate's overlooked-at-the-time Get It While You Can.