Correct me if I am wrong, but in the context of their era wasn’t the early Beatles music still considered edgy and corruptive?
I’m just barely too young to have “been there”, but my father often tells the story of the first time he heard “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” on the radio. It was so different, groundbreaking, and bad ass that he literally stopped what he was doing and stared at the radio. Then, when the Stones came out, all hell broke loose.
So as I understand it, the early Beatles were NOT bubblegum pop (save for album fillers like This Boy, Til There Was You, etc). They were a threat to the morals of the youth at the time.
CheeseDonkey “Just because you like the Beatles and I don’t doesn’t mean my selection of music and knowledge thereof is insignificant or worthless.”
Silly me, here I was all fretting over your opinions…which opinions you apparently see as very important…sorry.
The Beatles (among others) serve to remind me not to be too dismissive of the likes of the Jonas Brothers or Justin Bieber: Just because a band is hot and popular with the screaming fanatical teenage girl contingent, doesn’t mean the band doesn’t have real talent and creativity and the ability to produce real, worthwhile, groundbreaking music before they’re done.
Still, the Beatles were not a “manufactured” band. They were always in creative control of their own music. You certainly can’t say the same for all pop music.
The other thing to bear in mind is that common traits don’t mean a common path forward. Yes, the Beatles and Justin Bieber were both loved by screaming teenaged girls, but then:
Led Zeppelin and RATT were both hard rock bands
Michael Jackson and Christopher Cross both won a lot of Grammys early in their careers
Peter Gabriel and Peter Tork have the same first name
Pink Floyd and The Spice Girls are both from Britain
Bob Dylan and that whiny “Miss Misery” guy have both been nominated for an Oscar
That doesn’t make Zeppelin and RATT the same, etc. etc. The Beatles’ change in career direction was very unusual, which is why we’re talking about them. Many, many bands startout appealing to teenaged girls (hell, that’s why people START bands.) Very few bands go on to become recording giants who sell bajillions of records without even bothering to tour. Asserting they’re equivalent to Justin Bieber because of where they STARTED is sort of like saying Wayne Gretzky is an equivalent hockey player to any number of washed up jerks because they all started their careers in the Ontario Hockey League, or that Barack Obama is the same as Pat Robertson because they both ran a Presidential campaign.
While that’s true, I think the cart is, in part, before the horse. The Beatles were not a great band because they were in creative control; they were in creative control because they were a great (and very, very rich, and threfore able to dictate their terms) band. Not writing your own songs doesn’t mean you can’t make great music; Aretha made lots of great music other people wrote.
Bands that manage to hold on to total creative control, like REM, tend to be ones who are initially way more successful than expected and thus can dictate their terms to the record company.
I mean, you can’t say the Beatles were just in it for music; they were openly, nakedly in it for the money, and they said so. But because of their awesome brand, they could release whatever music they wanted.
Well, yah! It’s a good thing other types of popular music aren’t lyrically or musically repetitive. :rolleyes:
Music is subjective so it doesn’t matter at all if you think the Beatles suck donkey balls. So what? Clearly enough people enjoyed their music to count. I’ve been a professional musician since I was in high school in the early 70s. Styles a preferences as well as skill levels vary, but so does the public taste.
It doesn’t mean anything good or bad that other people have different tastes than you do. My sister thought Willie Nelson was a good singer. By technical standards he’s certainly not but if she enjoyed his singing that’s all that matters. Mariah Carey has some amazing vocal chops but I can’t stand listening to her because IMO she lacks nuance and real emotion.
I’ve gained a new appreciation for classical since my daughter took it up as a profession. It’s a big varied musical world subjective in nature. It’s not really a matter of superiority.
If you need to vent have at it. That’s what the pit is here for.
This is a good point. And I can say, at least for myself, most of the albums I’d consider to be in the top 10 would likely fall in a similarly clustered period. Our musical tastes seem to form at a certain age, sometime in the early teens, and then stop changing much thereafter and anything that came out in that period is just… perfect.
Also, since you mention Fear of a Blank Planet, which is an awesome album btw, I actually think it raises an interesting point for those who see the Beatles as the best band ever. Porcupine Tree has a lot of influence from the Beatles (among others like Pink Floyd and even more recently Opeth), because of their style and being British. Obviously, it’s not the same sound, but from what aspects are influenced, I think they’re an excellent example of taking that “first” that the Beatles did, making it that much better, and then making their own “first” as one of the pioneers in modern prog rock.
Well, assuming the pupil is of equal or greater skill or talent, yes. Because, even if the pupil has identical talent, they get the benefit of the influences and lessons learned by their master along with their own.
However, sometimes a master really is THAT good and his direct pupils just don’t have the talent to match. However, over time, as those lessons and influences pile up, eventually they will outweigh the talent difference or someone as talented comes along with all that and just blows everyone away again. But that should be rare since masters should generally have pupils of similar skill.
To illustrate this point, take a musical master like Joe Satriani. I would say his pupil Steve Vai is probably ever so slightly better. Take another pupil, like Kirk Hammet, and he just doesn’t have the raw talent and never surpassed Satch.
Either way, if you take that to its logical extreme, eventually everyone gets outdone. It might take a generation, it might take a hundred, but eventually someone better will come along. And this is what happened to the likes of Babe Ruth and, in my opinion, this is has happened to the Beatles too.
No, not really. They were considered cute–cheeky & cheery, playing high energy rock & roll. White rock had been in the doldrums in the USA since Elvis got drafted & they were refreshing. Some were offended by their hair–but it really wasn’t much longer than the fashion. They’d just washed out the grease & combed it into bangs. And they wore snappy matching outfits.
The first scandal came when John said they were bigger than Jesus. He really meant they were getting more press–but that didn’t prevent the preachers from organizing Record Burnings…
The Stones were packaged as the anti-Beatles. (Most of the British Invasion bands had image-conscious management. Brian Epstein probably liked the rough trade look the Beatles had adapted in Hamburg, but he knew What The Little Girls Liked.)
Interesting. I think some of these on the American release are different and only have one GH song. I need to look at my collection.
I wonder why I’ve always been led to believe that Abbey Road was the first album to have two original Harrisongs. I didn’t invent this fact; I’ve heard it repeated for years. Weird.
True in the cases of Help, the U.S. version of which loses “You Like Me Too Much,” and Rubber Soul, which loses “If I Needed Someone.” The other albums have all their George songs intact.
If Paul had been holding George back, it’s perhaps interesting to note that the first time George ever got one of his songs included on a single it was piggybacked on one of Paul’s. (“The Inner Light,” B-side of “Lady Madonna.”)
You know who screaming fanatical teenage girls were attracted to before the Beatles came along?
Frank Sinatra.
So if “The Beatles were nothing more than the Jonas Brothers of the 1960s,” then by the same logic, Frank Sinatra was nothing more than the Justin Bieber of the 1940s.
But go right ahead and keep thinking that something that’s popular can’t also be good.
Oh, and FWIW, I’m listening to *Rondo for Violin and Orchestra *(K.373) by Mozart.
I don’t have any dog in this fight except to note that everyone I know who is my age (collegiate and a little older) who really get into the beatles tend to adopt what some could label a poseur or hipster style. It’s one thing to like All You Need is Love, it’s another to drag me to 4 thrift stores because you want to find a vinyl copy of it.
Their music wasn’t manufactured, but their image was. They were a rather… uncouth band before their manager picked them up, he basically told them their music was amazing but if they didn’t ditch their image nothing good would come of this. So in a way a lot of their popularity was manufactured, even if their music was theirs.
Anyway, the Beatles had a LOT of shit, I can’t listen to a lot of their music, but one thing I respect them for over other bands is that they weren’t afraid to step outside the four-man-band territory, and used other instruments in their work (trumpets, violins, etc). Some of my favorite songs of theirs are songs like She’s Leaving Home where they’re not afraid to break the mold of a rock band and change up the instrumentation a bit.
Of course, there are a lot of great bands that rarely if ever changed it up, that had a member that was utterly masterful with their instrument that made up for it, but I really like the variety the Beatles could offer sometimes later in their careers.
