I Hate Beatles Fans

The BBQ Pit
81

The problem with the Beatles is the same problem we have with a lot of “all-time greats”. A lot of people loved them at the time, they’ve been highly influential, and they have a guaranteed place in history for generations to come. But viewing any of these sorts of groups or people is always done through rose-tinted glasses and lacking any sort of meaningful comparison of context.

For instance, take an all time great from baseball like Babe Ruth. He rightfully has a place in history for his accomplishments and has had enormous influence on all subsequent players, but regarding him as the best player ever, losing the context of his era, and he probably would be thoroughly embarassed by modern pitchers. And once you start adjusting his talents to include modern training, you go right from meaningful context to pure speculation. How would other athletes in other sports compare generations later? Hell, many NFL players of more than 20 years ago couldn’t compete in the modern league as is.

Music is very much the same way, except the influence and social trends are much stronger. The Beatles were undoubtedly extremely popular, and as such extremely influential, but to argue that their popularity or sales or age has any kind of correlation to their talent or that someone HAS to like them are all text book examples of logical fallacies.

These are exactly the sorts of arguments that Beatles fans put forth to non-Beatles fans, and its just plain ridiculous. Yes, one has to recognize their sphere of influence, yes one has to recognize a certain level of their musicianship and technical skill, but liking or not liking a band is entirely subjective and you’re just going to turn off the person you’re trying to convince that much more by pushing those sorts of arguments. It’s as annoying and counter-productive to a non-Beatles fan to tell them they have no taste in music if they don’t like them as it is for an atheist to attack a theist about how uneducated they must be or, for the atheists among us, a religious person to tell an atheist how immoral or whatever they must be.
I personally do not like the Beatles. I have no problem recognizing their sphere of influence, but it is exactly that that makes it difficult for me to recognize their talent or musicianship. Consider that John Lennon died more than 30 years ago, and the Beatles themselves had been done far longer; they’ve been a ubiquitous part of popular culture as long or longer than many people have been alive. What may have been new and exciting when they first did it and has since been rehashed a thousand times cannot ever have that sort of effect on a younger generation that it had when it was fresh. It is borderline impossible to appreciate that difference on any level other than intectually realizing they did it first, and so they just come across as the first and bizarrely most popular among a line of forgettable pop bands.

And I have a similar feeling for many bands even in genres that I am very passionate about. For instance, I am a metal fan, and while I have that level of intellectual appreciation for a band like Black Sabbath knowing they were the first, so many of the bands in their sphere of influence have taken what they’ve done and further improved upon it, and I have enmormous difficulty isolating that freshness from a modern context. And I also realize that so many bands I love today and see as highly innovative will likely appear the same to future generations. In fact, I expect I’ll have the opposite problem, having difficulty separating the influence and seeing a lot of it as trite rip-offs. No wonder there’s always a generational divide on music.

Moreso, the Beatles have a specific sound and a specific set of themes that simply won’t appeal to everyone. Sure, many of their songs are catchy or pushing the boundaries of whatever genre you want to put them in, but to argue that one MUST like them, even if one doesn’t like that genre, is like insisting that one must like some other archetypal band of a genre they may dislike. The bottom line is, that genre just doesn’t appeal to me, musically or emotionally. And while I can intellectually recognize them as among the best of that sort of genre, I can’t like them anymore than I can like the best prepared food of an ingredient I find completely repulsive.
So sure, like the Beatles, love them even, just chill out with some of the obnoxious assertions about their untouchable talent and genius and accessibility or whatever. Similarly, non-fans should chill out on the whole Beatles suck stuff and at least acknowledge the objective facts of their body of work, its influence, and its place in history.

82

I love you.

Steve Miller Band

83

Here’s the difference: while the Bambino will never get to hit against last year’s Cy Young winner, I can put the Beatles and Arcade Fire on the same playlist on my iPod, and come to my own conclusions about which is better when played side-by-side.

84

I did not know this. Great music trivia! But which band had the time machine?

You aren’t, perchance, posting from a hill of sorts…watching the sun going down…

85

Oh, so you’re trying to portray those things as good things, huh?

86

The Beatles suck, but RATT … fucking RATT … is a go-to group? What about Twisted Sister, you wanna throw those geniuses in there too?

Here’s my take on The Beatles: when all I ever knew of them was She Loves You and I Wanna Hold Your Hand I might have agreed with the OP. But then I began to actually pay attention to them – all of their work, and their story, and their philosophies, and whatever else I could devour.

I’m still not a huge fan of their earliest work, but I love seeing how exponentially it advanced. Hells bells, Please Please Me is only about 3 or 4 years removed from Helter Skelter.

But all in all, it’s not that The Beatles were the greatest; it’s that they were the first. Like someone else said, there will never be another Jordan or Gretzky. That’s the cachet that The Beatles hold in music.

87

Meh. Life goes on, brah.

88

This is fine, but I’ve seen Beatles fans (not necessarily anyone in this thread) trying to connect the dots between their being the first to do such-and-such and some idea that this makes them the inheritors of the mantle of “greatest rock band,” objectively defined. That seems disingenuous to me.

And I’m not so sure that being “the first” is inherently that important. Edouard Dujardin is considered by some to be the first writer (or one of the very first writers) who used stream-of-consciousness narration, but who’s heard of him? I think a case can be made that what matters is who went on to refine and perfect a technique from its beginnings, and in that sense, while it bears consideration that the Beatles were “the first” to do various things, I’d say it’s valid to admit any number of other artists onto an equal plane of achievement.

89

You quoted that whole fucking post to add this?

Steve Miller blows!

90

That’s a good point.

That and the fact that The Beatles are the most awesomest band ever.

91

That’s what people should do, because we can with the arts what we can’t in so many other fields. Still, part of what makes any form of art meaningful is the cultural context. A significant part of what makes up the Beatles phenomenon isn’t so much what they did, but how it related to the cultural at the time. For someone like me, I simply cannot relate to that culture because it was gone years before I was born, the significance is completely lost. Ironically, that’s the one place where sports has the advantage, at least for now, because we make a point of looking at those players within the context of their eras… we just sort of take it for granted.

This is a very important point and I touched on it a bit, but I think it’s the crux of the whole Beatles love-hate argument. Beatles were the first at a lot of things, but being first means nothing. Hell, I hate going back to another sports analogy, but we have record of the first Basketball game; could anyone make any sort of serious argument that anyone in that game is remotely comparable to a modern NBA player?

A lot of times being first is about as far from the best as it gets because they have an idea but it takes someone else picking it up and running with it to perfect it. Sometimes it takes the collaboration of many artists over many years, and the artists generations later are incomparably better than the first.

And in music, as with any art with as much history as music has, I’m not even sure that “first” has a whole lot of meaning. Any artist is a culimation of their influences and their own contributions. So as much as the Beatles may be the first at what they did specifically, but they were undoubtedly as much influenced by earlier and contemporary musicians as any one of today. And so, the only thing that really makes their firsts any more signficant than anyone elses is the sphere of influence and time in history.

Basically, my point is that sometimes the master is always the master, and sometimes the pupil surpasses the master. First is meaningful historically, but nothing more.

92

That’s another thing that I hate about so many of these “legendary,” “super awesome” bands that you can’t say you dislike lest you be shunned as a blasphemer.

It’s not that they had good music - it’s that they had good stories. People latch onto these bands because of their stories, their backgrounds, their trials and tribulations, and as a result come to like their music.

Even if they don’t like their music, they CONVINCE themselves they like their music, or tell themselves they must like the music if they want to be true fans of the band.

That’s why so many guys who died early or tragic deaths live on as “legends” - because their stories were super tragic, and people are attracted to tragic stories.

Elvis
Cobain
Marley
Morrison

And more recently, Michael Jackson.

Remember, before Michael Jackson died, he hadn’t necessarily left the spotlight, but his popularity and mind share had declined since his heyday. Then he kicked and, oh my gosh, he was everybody’s favorite singer again! He was suddenly the greatest thing since the flushable toilet!

When popular guys kick, or a band wanes but it has a good story and a vocal enough group that doesn’t want people to forget about it, that band is forced into the mainstream and into peoples’ minds until they CAN’T forget about.

Through repetition and cultural conditioning people become huge fans of guys like the aforementioned…and the Beatles. And part of that conditioning includes the inculcation of the cult-like devotion to the Beatles.

Which is why the Beatles (which was originally a band for screaming teenage girls) has been adopted and adored by modern men as well…even young men, who never lived through Beatlemania or their heyday. They’ve been trained and conditioned to love them.

Fleetwood Mac

93

Longevity = strength?

Strength = Greatness? Strength = delivering the best talent and performing the best?

Not so. Strength is often derived from who can manipulate whom the best. Who can twist peoples’ brains into thinking their the best.

AT&T for example.

Longevity = strength, so AT&T is strong. They’ve been around forever.

By your argument, strength also equals greatness and delivering “the best.” AT&T has been roundly criticized for a myriad of things, so they are hardly the best and they are hardly great at what they deliver. But they’re still strong.

Just because something has been “strong” for a long time doesn’t mean it is “great.”

Allman Brothers Band

94

What does make a band great then in your wise view?

95

I do like this as a punch-line to your post (though personally I much prefer Fleetwood Mac to the Beatles) :slight_smile:

96

I think that says a lot here.

97

What’s with all the Styx hate, anyway? Why are they so universally reviled? Why are they a punchline?

(also like the Beatles, tho)

98

My definition of greatness can be convoluted, however often it at least partly has to do with: What created the band’s purported greatness? Was it the music it produced, or was it media/marketing created hype, often apocryphal stories and notable tragedies, trials and tribulations…and oh yeah, they made music too?

The Beatles’ greatness is a result of the latter.

Which is why I stated earlier that many of the bands that achieved immortality do not deserve that immortality. They are immortal not because of their music - they are immortal more because of the peripherals. And once immortality due to peripherals has been achieved, the music is once again brought to the fore.

Just look at Michael Jackson. Peripheral: He died. Then once again, his music became super duper popular.
Cultish followings, like the Beatles have, also seem to develop after years of retrospect. People look at the past with rose colored glasses - the past was better than the now, the present can never be better than the past, and therefore nothing today can usurp anything from back then…which is why today no modern baseball player can ever be as good as Willie Mays and Willie Mays could never be as good as Babe Ruth. People prop up the past because they want to believe what the past created is better than anything today can create. They get cultishly-obsessed with defending it, because they cannot tolerate the thought of some present or some more recent past being better than the past they are trying to sustain.

Only when the current present and the past are both in the past, after a future has come and gone, can people really look at anything with any sort of objectivity. But it takes time. A lot of time sometimes. Only in recent years, for example, have people begun to think that, hey…maybe Mays WAS better than Ruth.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

99

Perhaps it is the Beatles cult that has the most closed eyes of all.

Earth, Wind & Fire

100

In all seriousness, the accusation that Rolling Stone is essdentially a Baby Boomer publication is an accurate one. According to them, of the ten best albums ever made, nine were made in a twelve-year stretch and six of those nine by just two artists. The only outlier was made just five years after than twelve-year stretch and in the 32 years since nothing’s topped them, and few albums have come close. Indeed, most of the top fifty are from the same time period.

I really like me some Beatles, and I admit it is theoretically possible that all the best albums ever made were made between 1963 and 1974, but frankly it really, really strains credulity. Where the hell is “Achtung Baby”? Where’s “Fear of a Black Planet?” “Rumors?” Am I seriously being asked to believe that “Plastic Ono Band” is the 21st best album of all time? Shit, man, it isn’t in the top thousand and wouldn’t be The Tragically Hip’s fourth best LP. (I admit my opinion here is a minority one, but the hell with it; it’s only well regarded because Lennon’s name is on it.) Rolling Stone is so preposterously old, so dominated by 57-year-old cranks, they they should hold their business meetings at a Swiss Chalet at 4:30 in the afternoon.

I suppose that it’s theoretically possible that all the best music was made before 1974 or 1980 or whatever arbitrary old fart cutoff one wants to use, but… oh, hell, of course it isn’t true, it’s a million miles from being true. I’m sorry, but U2 rocks, and Prince rocks, and REM rocks, and Peter Gabriel rocks, and The Police rock, and Public Enemy rocks, and Pearl Jam rocks, and The Beastie Boys rock, and Springsteen rocks, and Nirvana and the Fugees and NWA and The White Stripes and hell, throw in the Hip, too. I’ll put “Fully Completely” on any day, any time.