single A-side". In Saturday Review magazine, Mike Jahn highlighted the song as an example of how the album successfully conveyed the Beatles' "acquired Hindu philosophy and its subsequent application to everyday life", in this instance by describing "a detached observer, a yogin, who meditates and watches the world spin". Richard Goldstein of The New York Times rued that, more so than Sgt. Pepper, the soundtrack demonstrated the Beatles' departure from true rock values and an over-reliance on studio artifice and motif, such that when "the hero of 'The Fool On The Hill' sees the world spinning round, we whirl gently amid dizzy rhythms". He nevertheless found the song "so easy to adore", with a melody that he deemed "the most haunting thing on the album", and concluded: "The fool as visionary is a common theme ... But there are lovely ways of presenting cliché, and this is one of them." Rex Reed, in a highly unfavourable review of the LP for HiFi/Stereo Review, described "The Fool on the Hill" as "the only item on the disc that is not distorted so much that you can't understand the lyrics" and admired the flutes on the recording. Having dismissed the Beatles as "lousy entertainers and downright untalented, tone-deaf musicians", he added that the song "will probably be picked up by people who can sing, and then maybe I will like it even more". Robert Christgau, writing for Esquire in May 1968, said the song "shows signs of becoming a favorite of the Simon & Garfunkel crowd and the transcendental meditators, who deserve it. A callow rendering of the outcast-visionary theme, it may be the worst song the Beatles have ever recorded." Christgau added that McCartney "should know better by now", but also conceded that the new material was meant to be heard in the context of the Magical Mystery Tour TV film. In his article "Rock and Art" for Rolling Stone in July that year, Jon Landau rued that the basic values of rock 'n' roll music had been lost to an artistic aesthetic, a trend he found particularly evident in the Beatles' recent work. He said the song represented the "complete negation of their earlier selves" and contained "all the qualities that the early Beatles sought to deflate: it is pious, subtly self-righteous, humorless and totally unphysical." NME critics Roy Carr and Tony Tyler described the song as "exquisite" and paired