31 Facts About Rubber Soul

1.

Rubber Soul is the sixth studio album by the English rock band the Beatles.

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2.

Rubber Soul was met with a highly favourable critical response and topped sales charts in Britain and the United States for several weeks.

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3.

Rubber Soul was highly influential on the Beatles' peers, leading to a widespread focus away from singles and onto creating albums of consistently high-quality songs.

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4.

In 2013, Rubber Soul was certified platinum by the BPI for UK sales since 1994.

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5.

Rubber Soul was a matter of having all experienced the recording studio, having grown musically as well, but [getting] the knowledge of the place, of the studio.

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6.

Lennon recalled that Rubber Soul was the first album over which the Beatles took control in the studio and made demands rather than accept standard recording practices.

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7.

Rubber Soul said the project revealed the first signs of artistic conflict between Lennon and McCartney, and friction within the band as more effort was spent on perfecting each song.

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8.

Author Bernard Gendron dismisses the commonly held view that Rubber Soul is a folk rock album; he cites its incorporation of baroque and Eastern sounds as examples of the Beatles' "nascent experimentalism and eclectic power of appropriation", aspects that he says suggest an artistic approach that transcends the genre.

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9.

Author James Decker considers it significant that Rubber Soul "took its narrative cues more from folk crossovers such as Bob Dylan and the Byrds than from the Beatles' pop cohorts".

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10.

Rubber Soul was the group's first album not to feature their name on the cover, an omission that reflected the level of control they had over their releases and the extent of their international fame.

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11.

Rubber Soul began its 42-week run on the Record Retailer LPs chart on 12 December 1965.

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12.

Rubber Soul is the result of their first extended period in the studio.

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13.

Rubber Soul adds that Rubber Soul is "full of great tunes" from Lennon and McCartney notwithstanding their divergence from a common style, and demonstrates that Harrison "was developing into a fine songwriter".

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14.

Stanley highlighted Rubber Soul as having been "a good 18 months ahead of its time" and "the first album of the rock era that sounded like an album".

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15.

Rubber Soul said that the album was "way ahead of what anyone had done before" and, given the short period in which they had to record, he called it the Beatles' "accidental masterpiece".

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16.

Rubber Soul says that Rubber Soul usually trails the Beatles' next four albums in critics' assessments of their work, yet "it's undoubtedly their pre-acid, pre-antagonism masterpiece: beat music as high art".

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17.

Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys described Rubber Soul as "the first album I listened to where every song was a gas" and planned his band's next project, Pet Sounds, as an attempt to surpass it.

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18.

Rubber Soul similarly inspired Pete Townshend of the Who and the Kinks' Ray Davies, as well as Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, who issued their first album of all-original material, Aftermath, in April 1966.

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19.

John Cale recalled that Rubber Soul was an inspiration as he and Lou Reed developed their band the Velvet Underground.

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20.

Rubber Soul said it was the first time "you were forced to deal with them as something other than a flash in the pan" and especially admired Harrison's introduction of Indian sounds.

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21.

Rubber Soul describes it as an album-length confirmation of the "transformation of pop's range and reach" that the Beatles had first achieved when "Yesterday", McCartney's introspective and classically orchestrated ballad, topped US singles charts in late 1965.

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22.

Rubber Soul is widely viewed as the first pop album to make an artistic statement through the quality of its songs, a point that was reinforced by its artsy cover photo.

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23.

Rubber Soul was the release that encouraged many folk-music aficionados to embrace pop.

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24.

Rubber Soul's attributed pop's recent embrace of psychedelia and "many of the strange new sounds now in records" to the LP's influence.

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25.

Rubber Soul was voted fifth in Paul Gambaccini's 1978 book Critic's Choice: Top 200 Albums, based on submissions from a panel of 47 critics and broadcasters including Richard Williams, Christgau and Marcus.

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26.

Since 2001, Rubber Soul has appeared in critics' best-albums-of-all-time lists compiled by VH1, Mojo and Rolling Stone .

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27.

In September 2020, Rubber Soul was ranked at number 35 on the same publication's new list.

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28.

In 2000, Rubber Soul was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, an award bestowed by the American Recording Academy "to honor recordings of lasting qualitative or historical significance that are at least 25 years old".

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29.

Rubber Soul was released on compact disc on 30 April 1987, with the fourteen-song track line-up now the international standard.

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30.

Rubber Soul went back to the original four-track tapes and remixed them for stereo.

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31.

Newly remastered version of Rubber Soul, again using the 1987 Martin remix, was released worldwide as part of the reissue of the entire Beatles catalogue on 9 September 2009.

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