The Beatles are bigger than Jesus.
Just rechecked: When on leave, JOhnny and other go to Vancouver and encounter a policeman with a series of ribbons. Then they go to Seattle and get attacked by Merchant Marines who are unhappy that their jobs don’t qualify as Federal Service. Merchant Marine asses are kicked, policemen show up and just tell the boys to take a walk.
Well, I’m not going to go into a dissertation on what Billy Joel was trying to do there. It would indeed be a hijack. Regardless, if he thinks that at least half of what he does is “hard rock,” he’s delusional. (Thanks for giving me a reason to post a link to an Eddie Cochran song, by the way!)
And this we can agree on. Not only was it delusional to think that, but it also caused people to look at them a lot more critically than they would have otherwise.
I do believe you just won the thread.
I was waiting for this. If said for the Funny, cool - but if posted to assert that John Lennon tried to indicate that HE thought they were bigger than Jesus, then that’s simply not true. He was commenting on the behavior of some of the fans, and taken in context, the analogy was valid for the point he was trying to make. The fact that it was pulled out a year later was a manipulative play - these days, it would be referred to as “swift boating.”
Delusional is in the eye of the beholder - the biggest factor is the gap between your opinion of the artist and their opinion of themself. Miles Davis is a god to me - one of the top handful of artists in the 20th century in terms of his art and his influence. I agree with **Carson’s **explanation - but Miles could’ve said he was a musical unicorn or something, and I would have to stop and say “well, it doesn’t make sense to me, but it clearly works for him on some level” and leave it at that…the musical risks he took - and the heights he scaled - must have required him to have some pretty interesting beliefs about himself that I couldn’t hope to understand…
(Continuing sidetrack mode)
When Lennon made that comment- prior to all the backpedaling to lessen the religious hatred- it seemed he meant within the context of their individual occurence. Jesus had some share of the middle east, by word of mouth, 2000 years ago. The Beatles had Western attention (at least) via word of mouth, newspaper, radio and telly. Much larger attention share.
Even considering Jesus vs. The Beatles in the 60s, as contemporaries, the latter were arguably more popular.(Continuing the Beatles theme.)
For a while, comic book writer Grant Morrison was doing these totally nutbar interviews where he talked about how he wanted to turn the DC family of comics into a living organism, although I was never clear on what that meant in his drug-addled brain.
It’s like, dude. You write some nifty Batman comics sometimes. Get a grip.
Yeah, I read this yesterday. Sigh - this just feeds the media beast, no different than trying to change the “Lennon McCartney” order of names for some songs, when everybody knows he wrote Yesterday by himself.
How does he sleep?
(ducks and runs)
Yes and no. If Yoko Ono truly does not understand why her songs are not as popular as Paul McCartney’s, then there is something seriously wrong with her thought processes. It doesn’t matter what I think of her or what she thinks of herself. She’s delusional because she refuses to accept the fully forseeable consequences of her artistic decisions.
Her work, by it’s very nature, would naturally appeal to few people. It’s obvious that avante-garde and “experimental” art of any kind will attract a smaller audience, especially at the time that it’s created. Sometimes that which is avant-garde does become mainstream. Sometimes it doesn’t. In this case, it didn’t.
Paul McCartney wrote pop songs. Pop songs are, by their very nature, designed to appeal to a wide audience. And in the intervening years, the overall music scene has not shifted in such a way that would make Ono’s songs seem palatable to most people. So Paul’s songs still sell records. Yoko’s songs still don’t.
I want to say “Hey lady! You wanted to be all out-there and stuff. You got your wish. Shut up.”
I think we are saying the same thing:
Your opinion of Ono - weird avant-garde stuff that at best will only find a small audience (a POV that I, and most of the music-listening world, agrees with)
Yoko’s opinion of herself - why isn’t my stuff as popular as Paul’s?
Hence, disconnect.
Just wanting to point out that the lion’s share of Yoko Ono’s output *is *relatively normal rock/pop, with a dance/electronica slant on her later albums. She only ever made a few albums of the avant-garde tape collage and screamy vocal stuff, (the first three John & Yoko albums, side two of Live Peace in Toronto, and her first two solo albums), all early in her recording career.
Of course your rite.:smack:
But who’s the delusional one, me or Yoko? (Wait a minute…don’t answer that!)
I guess I’m not familiar with the other stuff. Thanks for pointing it out.
On a HUGE pile of money. 
Is Yoko being quoted correctly?
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_/ai_n15708734
Nice job fighting ignorance - thanks. I think I went with the quote because it plays to the basic casting of Yoko as someone who equates herself with Lennon / The Beatles, when most of the public sees her as an outsider, in her art and her role. Not that Yoko needs to care about that…
Ah. Thanks for the explanation. That makes a lot more sense than what I was imagining.
The most delusional “artist” (and I use that term very loosely) I’ve seen is Nancy “N. K.” Stouffer, author of “The Legend of Rah and the Muggles” and the woman who tried to sue Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling for stealing her ideas.
I don’t have a quote handy, but I’ve seen numerous stories where Stouffer firmly believes that her book is better than Harry Potter, that she would be a wildly successful author were it not for Rowling’s stealing her “muggles,” and her belief that her book is better for children than Harry Potter.
I’ve read “The Legend of Rah and the Muggles” (out of train-wreck curiosity–she self published it through a vanity press a few years back). It’s the most appallingly bad, poorly written, badly edited piece of garbage this side of “The Eye of Argon.” I am not exaggerating. But Nancy is convinced it’s quality literature.
Now that’s delusion.
If vanity press is included, I’ll see your Nancy Stouffer and raise you Gene Steinberg, author of Attack of the Rockoids (and some sequels, I see).
Not only did Steinberg consider this drivel a great novel (not unusual for vanity press projects), but back in 1999, he basically spent his entire life defending it on the rec.arts.sf.composition newsgroup after he tried to promote it there and was critiqued (often by published SF authors and editors like Patricia C. Wrede and Teresa Neilsen Hayden). Steinberg replied to every single post. There were thousands; by one count, he posted 3500 newsgroup messages – and more if you include some of his aliases (see below).
Steinberg practically created the Internet trope "The lurkers support me in e-mail*. He also would post under various one-off aliases about how great Attack of the Rockoids was. When called on it, he would deny it – even when the message was posted using his own IP address, and wording of them was exactly the same. He later claimed it was some friends of his son and co-author, who wanted to embarrass him – but no explanation how they used the same computer.
A nice overview is at http://tinyurl.com/5paccv – with comments by Gene himself.
*When people complained about the book, he’d claim that the critics were a small minority and he was getting many more e-mail from lurkers who didn’t want to join in. Right.