Up until about 1967 the question would have been absurd. The Beatles were not just rock, they were pure rock and roll. Sure, they might have dabbled with the occasional ballad (“Yesterday”) but so did the Stones (“As Tears Go By”).
After that they did do a lot in a different voice. But go through their later albums and you’ll still find straight-ahead rock on every one of them. The Beatles were true to their roots.
The only possible validity to the “boy band” comparison would be in the way Brian Epstein marketed them and “cleaned up” their image. But remember, without their talent (as musicians AND songwriters), their music would not have endured as it has. How many people will still be singing “I Want it That Way” in twenty (or even ten) years?By the way, on another Beatles subject, am I the only person who doesn’t think “Sgt Pepper” is even in the top three Beatle albums? I mean, it’s a great album, but I think Revolver, the White Album, and Abbey Road are far superior. Any thoughts?
It was also one of the first songs L&McC ever wrote. They tossed it onto Let It Be as filler, more or less.
When the Beatles chose to rock, they rocked as well as anyone ever. They also had other things they wanted to do.
The arbitrary idea of what “rocks” is not what makes a rock band a rock band.
The music that they played fits very easily into the Pop-Rock category.
A lot of younger folks would think some of the dad rock you mentioned does not “rock,” but that doesn’t mean it is not rock and roll music. It’s pop music as well, it’s popular and it has mass appeal.
Sweating semantics too much is no good for anyone.
Listen to their “Live from Hamburg” recordings!!
Well, one question to the OP: Is Chuck Berry rock ‘n’ roll?
Sgt. Pepper is great, but dated. The other albums are as fresh as ever, but Sgt. Pepper is too much in the psychedelic mode, and suffers a bit.
A Hard Day’s Night, Rubber Soul, Revolver…all hold up better than Sgt. Pepper or The White Album.
Sure (she says cautiously, wondering where this is going…)
Oddly enough, I was listening to the 60’s/70’s station today and several of the Beatles tunes played seemed so tame-I had a flashback to Mom tossing a fit when my sister bought a Beatles album, a total hissy. :rolleyes: 
They’re almost squeaky clean compared to Offspring, Aerosmith, Nine Inch Nails or Blink 182.
That’s why they shouldn’t be mixed with Coca-Cola.
All of whom (NIN being perhaps the exception) are squeaky clean compared to Lydia Lunch, Psychic TV, GG Allin, and any number of other bands who were around not long after the Beatles were around.
I’d contend that the Beatles are far more threatening than any of the examples you listed. There is nothing “squeaky clean” about some of their material (typically their best material), whereas you can take something like, for example, a modern grindcore band (let’s say Waco Jesus) who can be as profane as is humanly possible, play music at 230 bpm, and it means nothing.
Right, and well put. The Monkees are a lot closer analog to NKotB than the Beatles are (though I’d take the Monkees over the New Kids any day).
I agree. Hell, I’d take real monkeys over NKOTB.
All of those bands did what was more or less status quo for rock acts and pushed nobody’s envelope – instead of clean, let’s talk safe. Offspring, Aerosmith, and Blink 182 are safe as can be, within their packaged commercial output of “dirty” rock. Only NIN escapes the label of being completely fake, ersatz danger.
If The Beatles were not a rock band, there’s no such thing as a rock band.
The music they played that rocked hasn’t aged as well as, say, the Stones or Led Zeppelin; nor has it aged as well as their less rock and roll stuff (“Here Comes the Sun,” “I’m Looking Through You,” “Eleanor Rigby”). But that’s just because of the way things went. And I think that some of Lennon’s stuff both in and out of The Beatles really holds up. I was just listening to “Instant Karma” the other day, and it really rocks.
I think the Beatles are a bit similar to the California band Love in that Love also ran a gamut from more pop-sounding stuff to more exploratory hard rock and psychedelic sounds. For instance, many songs from Love’s first two albums sound as if they could have been themes from “hip” movies of the era. Good songs, but not enormously inventive or groundbreaking. They were a Los Angeles band, so maybe there was some Hollywood influence happening there. Then you get to the third album, Forever Changes, and that totally blew off the cover of anything they’d done–or anyone else had done.
At the time the Beatles became famous in the UK they were considered a “beat” group (hence the pun in their name), a hard, R&B-derived sound that established the template for pretty much all the innovations in rock sound that followed in the 60s, if not beyond. It was the hardest “mainstream” sound in existence up 'til then, shearing away the more soulful country/gospel influences of Elvis/Ray Charles/et al and replacing them with a simplified, driving attack carried basically by guitars. (No horns, no keys—at least not yet.) “I Want to Hold Your Hand” may sound embarrasingly polite by today’s standards, but older listeners of the period found it clangorous and illiterate and grating, hardly worthy of the term music. Listen to the record while keeping in mind what had come before, and you see that while there was some undoubtedly great music before then, no one else (except Little Richard) had a sound with such a physical impact, like it was actually designed to knock you out of your chair.
I happen to agree with you to an extent. I think Revolver and Abbey Road are the best two of their albums, with Pepper coming in at #3. The White Album suffers too much from things like ‘Rocky Raccoon’ and ‘Obladi Oblada’, and IMO is basically a four-sided collection of Beatle solo recordings with the others used as session players. While I admit there are also some searingly great numbers on it, like ‘Glass Onion’ it’s just too choppy to be a great album.
I think all of you need a little perspective on what is “pop” and “rock” along with “soul”, “jazz”, etc.
Pop music is merely shortened form for “popular music” and does not, in and of itself, constitute a genre of music. The term originated, I believe during the 20’s and 30’s as there were two main genres of music - swing and show tunes. Swing (African-American bands not their white imitators) was more associated with dance clubs and with dancing and show tunes were exactly what the name implies. With the advent of radio(in the 20’s), music sales shifted primarily from sheet music (the primary method of selling music up to the late 20’s) to records (78’s) and later to 45’s and finally to LP’s and now CD’s and DVD’s. This trend continued as swing bands took on vocalists (Sinatra was originally the vocalist for Dorsey’s band) as tastes in music shifted away from the purely instrumental. As swing (and large bands in general) died out popular music became primarily the era of the vocalist and the heyday of the “Tin-Pan Alley” writers who dominated pop music from the 30’s to the 50’s.
Enter Elvis who; along with his influences from R&B, western swing and C&W, helped create “rock and roll” as sort of a backlash against the boring and predictable music of the “Tin-Pan Alley” hacks. Rock became the popular music of the mid to late 50’s replacing the Guy Mitchell’s, Frankie Laine’s and Frank Sinatra’s as teenagers were becoming a force in the music buying public. Rock died a quite death in the late 50’s when Elvis went in the Army and you had Fabian, Annette, Frankie Avalon, etc. dominating the popular music charts.
The Beatles with their covers of American R&B and fresh new rock songs single-handedly reestablished rock-n-roll as the predominat popular music of the mid to late 60’s. Rock-n-Roll started to branch out into psychedelic and metal and art-rock and all sorts of other sub-genres.
In summary, the Beatles were both rock-n-rollers and also pop music leaders. Later rock-n-roll evolved into other and softer rock music just as R&B evolved into “soul” into “funk” and finally into “hip-hop”. Some genres of music have never attained what could be really equated to “pop” music status and one of the best examples of that would be “jazz”.
Sorry about the length.