In case you've been hiding somewhere for the last couple of weeks, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is 40 years old this month. Most media coverage has been devoted to the question of whether the record's actually any good or not, which gives rise to all sorts of enjoyable, harmless critical jousting, but rather misses the point.
It's an important anniversary for two reasons, neither of them specifically to do with the music. The first is that it gives us yet another opportunity to get wistful about the summer of love, even those of us who weren't there. (Of course, many of those who were there weren't entirely there, but that's another thing.) The other is that its release provides a starting point for the whole school of rock criticism as we know it; the point at which the focus shifted from "ephemeral" singles to "serious" albums. It's no coincidence that 1967 also saw the first edition of Rolling Stone magazine.
There's another musical anniversary this month, one that doesn't merit as much attention, mainly because it doesn't justify footage of mini-skirted dollybirds with flowers in their hair. Radiohead's third album, OK Computer, saw the light of day in June 1997. It achieved immediate critical acclaim, and very healthy sales figures for something so dense, bleak and complex. It seemed to sum up the unease of its time, scratching away at the veneer of shiny consumerism and the brash optimism of the newly elected Blair government. But it also marked the end of a 30-year period when rock albums were at the centre of the pop cultural experience.
From Sgt Pepper to OK Computer, albums were there to be discussed, analysed, pored over. Meanings and messages were teased out of Ziggy Stardust, Dark Side of the Moon, even Brothers In Arms. But following OK Computer (part of a gloom-rock triple-whammy, in a year that also saw the release of Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, by Spiritualized, and The Verve's Urban Hymns), things began to fall apart.
Dance music, never a genre suited to chin-stroking analysis, began to dominate the album charts, with Moby and Fatboy Slim soundtracking the next few years. By the time the White Stripes and the Strokes had arrived, to remind us what guitars sounded like, the punters had discovered the joys of downloading.
Not only did this deliver a body blow to the finances of many record companies, but it also placed a big, fat question mark over the whole notion of the album as a discrete work of art. Why accept a set number of songs, in a predetermined order, when you can download the three tracks you actually like, make your own remix of another, and shuffle them up with the works of a thousand other artists? The communal, unifying sense of an album that you and all your friends know inside out is gone forever.
This doesn't mean, of course, that there are no great albums out there. Check out the latest from Arcade Fire and Feist if your collection's been feeling a little jaded lately. But the idea of a single album defining the historical moment - as Sgt Pepper and OK Computer both did - has passed.
