NY Times

The Popcast is hosted by Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The New York Times. It covers the latest in pop music criticism, trends and news.

When the Beatles released “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in the summer of 1967, it was a change of pace for the band, which had just retired from the road, fed up with how the hysteria surrounding them was pulling them farther from the music.

“Sgt. Pepper” was the group’s most musically ambitious album, and one made possible by the full range of of-the-era studio manipulation. But it did not make for a shift that was universally well-received.

“The sound is a pastiche of dissonance and lushness,” the critic Richard Goldstein wrote in The New York Times. “The mood is mellow, even nostalgic. But, like the cover, the overall effect is busy, hip and cluttered. Like an over-attended child ‘Sergeant Pepper’ is spoiled.”

Last week, on the occasion of the album’s 50th anniversary, The Times’s chief pop music critic Jon Pareles offered a different take. “Now that rock itself is being shunted toward the fringes of pop, it’s a good time to free ‘Sgt. Pepper’ from the burden of either forecasting rock’s eclectic future or pointing toward a fussy dead end,” he wrote. “It’s somewhere in between, juxtaposing the profound and the merely clever.”

On this week’s Popcast, Mr. Caramanica speaks with Mr. Pareles about how the album was received in its time, its formal innovations, how it has aged, and whether an anniversary of any kind, even one as celebrated as the 50th, has any inherent meaning, or use.

Email your questions, thoughts and ideas about what’s happening in pop music to popcast@nytimes.com.