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Channeling the spirit(s) of the age: Irony, dialogism, and “genius” in Sgt. Pepper

ABSTRACT Through multi-channel rhetoric—verbal, musical, and visual—popular music multiplies decentered rhetorical agency. The Beatles’s cultural watershed, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, brilliantly exploits this capacity and arguably exemplifies “genius,” conceptualized as an extraordinary confluence of agency channeled both from and to audience and culture. My analysis of Sgt. Pepper’s cover art and songs reveals a singular combination of irony, dialogism, reconstitutive rhetoric, and enthymematic/enthymodal elements working to galvanize listeners’ agency in ways that exceed the Beatles’s designs. This study demonstrates how rhetorical criticism of culturally significant popular music can benefit from close reading attentive to the synergy of lyrics, musical form, visual presentation, and artist–audience relations.