Most artists don’t see themselves as pure musicians nowadays. The entire concept of the album has changed over the years, and it’s about more than simply putting together music that can hold together as a piece of work in the age of streaming. That usually means going above and beyond to create a visual experience behind everything, but like most of the bold innovations that have been made over the years, the bones of creative ingenuity can be traced back to The Beatles on Magical Mystery Tour.
At the time of its release, though, no one would have blamed you for thinking this was one of the worst things that the Fab Four had ever produced. They had only just come off of the death of Brian Epstein, and to fulfil the contract of their movie deal, Paul McCartney came up with the idea of making a variety-style showcase of their material, complete with striking images meant to evoke that sense of 1960s psychedelia.
Then again, the choice to show the piece in black and white robbed the audience of any of those images. There are pieces that still work, like the jovial dance-hall vibe of ‘Your Mother Should Know,’ but most of the movie’s biggest draws are the striking images that come from watching tracks like ‘Blue Jay Way’ or the image of McCartney’s silhouette across a serene landscape on ‘The Fool on the Hill’.
When looking at the movie objectively, it doesn’t hold together as a good story, but some pieces planted seeds for what would become known as the visual album. Although it’s no big deal for most artists to release visualisers of all their songs and call it a day, people like Beyonce have managed to make music that takes audiences on a journey so they understand what each song is about.
While The Beatles were probably not thinking in those terms at the time, each little vignette presented in the movie feels like getting tiny stage pieces of their songs. ‘Blue Jay Way’ does a perfect job at capturing the feeling of George Harrison waiting for his friends on the streets of Los Angeles, and even though Macca has absolutely no dialogue on ‘The Fool on the Hill’, he plays the role of the fool perfectly, walking through the countryside without a care.
And despite most of the back half of Magical Mystery Tour being thrown together from singles, their videos still look at what a visual album could do. ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ took the listener down the rabbit hole that John Lennon envisioned, and when looking at the footage for ‘I Am the Walrus’, that psychedelic vision comes to life spectacularly, from everyone dressing up in their animal costumes to the grainy footage looking like you’re watching the performance through a haze.
When artists like Beyonce got ahold of this idea, though, she managed to take things one step further. While each of her songs on Lemonade was about her fallout with Jay-Z, seeing each video depict a different scene in her emotional process is like watching the concept of Magical Mystery Tour taken to its most logical conclusion.
Sgt Peppers may have been the first time that The Beatles flirted with the idea of a central theme running throughout an album, but Magical Mystery Tour had the idea for a masterpiece that wouldn’t be capitalised on until multiple generations passed. It may not have had the same impact in 1967, but it takes a special kind of magic to have something so forward-looking that even when it bombs, it’s still looked at as trailblazing.
