Phil Ford: There’s a specificity to Sgt. Pepper’s, that it is something rather than something else. That is a very surprising thing to find in a piece of truly popular culture, like really really popular culture. And that is, it’s an incredibly aestheticist piece of art, like it is a piece of art that doesn’t argue so much for the total autonomy of imagination and the artwork as it just does it. It just substantiates it. And it’s all about the total freedom and autonomy of the imagination to go where it will go. ...
It is an album that asserts “all power to the imagination”. And that was maybe a more popular utterance in 1967 than it is in 2021. But listening to it and the degree of open-hearted acceptance of what is and the willingness to find beauty in anything and for that beauty to be enough. For that beauty not having to serve some kind of function, it doesn’t have to get in line and start marching, it doesn’t have to rap anything, it doesn’t have to build anybody’s brand, and it sure as shit doesn’t have to play into somebody’s political agenda. That degree of freedom that it models and that it imagines is something that is – to use a very over-used word – is subversive. In an age now that feels to me that all of the major voices in our culture are about negating exactly that freedom.
JF Martel: Yes ... You kind of hit it there, because when we talk about art as being apolitical, we don’t mean that art exists in a separate realm. It’s funny, because you just said that “all power to the imagination” first of all was used as a slogan by the ... ’68 revolutionaries and students – it’s funny how in a sense this call to the apolitical, to the imagination, has a commonness[?] free of all the machinery of history and politics. The assertion of the freedom of the imagination is itself the most subversive claim you can make. ...
It exists in itself for no reason, and that precisely is what makes it subversive. That’s precisely what makes it irreducible to anybody’s ideology. ...
Phil: I feel I should jump in here and say that when I talk about the autonomy of the imagination, or the autonomy of the aesthetic, that doesn’t mean that it is in a realm separate from politics. —
JF: Exactly, that’s my point—
Phil: What it means is that it turn into anything. It can turn into politics, or it can turn into sex, or it can turn into a blue door, it can turn into fucking anything. But it is not determined by any of the things it could turn into. ...
JF: ... I may seem like I’m contradicting myself but ... The cover of the album establishes a kind of tribe, or lineage, or party. ... It’s making a statement that flowing underneath the surface of what we call the social-political landscape, subterranean currents assert themselves retroactively in moments like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, that suddenly not only is the earlier Beatles material reinvented in that album, but Aleister Crowley in a sense finds new [affordances?], channeled in a new way through the album, merely by being present on the cover of the album. Marilyn Monroe is there ... suddenly everything about her changes in light of the fact that she’s on the cover of this album, which is performing the operation we’ve been describing in this show: It’s calling forth a people ...
So the truly autonomous, let’s say, apolitical and yet deeply political work of art is always calling forth a people that doesn’t yet exist. And it’s not just calling for that people out of the future or out of the present, calling forth those of the listeners who will get it, it’s also calling out of the past, a lineage, a tribe, that by its very existence substantiates a world that does not yet exist.
Phil: Yeah, which is a political kind of thing to do, to define a people, but it’s defining a people of the imagination, and everybody can join. It’s like this album isn’t calling you – are you in the Sgt. Pepper Party? – which is a kind of party of the imagination ... It is, from a certain point of view, an enormous political act, to ask the world to join this people, but without defining it and without defining, like demands or like a 12-point program for change or whatever. It’s a political act of a very sixties kind, and there haven’t been many such acts like that since. It is an extraordinarily generous-hearted act to the extent that it doesn’t feel like politics at all ...
It’s very difficult to imagine politics as it is actually enacted in the world without the spirit of hatred, without the spirit of division. Like to define a people, you have to define it against something, and then the people that you define has to be compared favorably to the people who are outside, that you’ve othered, right? Somehow the Beatles managed to articulate a vision of the Sgt. Pepper party that doesn’t do that. ...
JF: There’s only one prerequisite.
Phil: And that is?
JF: It’s having a lonely heart.
Phil: How you figure?
JF: Well, a loneliness. You have to be able to extract yourself, transcend the collectivizing organic vicissitudes of your time. You have to access the untimely. And you can only do that alone. But what happens when you do that, when you take that lonely flight, is that you find yourself in a kind of angelic company that transcends time. Yeah.
Phil: Yeah.
