Please stop saying bad things about football. You are making me cry.
I’m currently suffering my way through Don Quixote and I have to tell you, I just don’t know how this became popular, let alone a classic. It’s like a Saturday Night Live skit dragged out to 500 pages. Granted I’m only about 60% through it, so I could be wrong, but it had better be one hell of an ending.
Haha! I agree, and well said.
What are you smoking?
What are you smoking?
Have you read Breakfast of Champions or Slaughterhouse Five? If so, what are you smoking?
Wow. Where do you live 'cause I’m coming over with my nuclear-powered hooka pipe.
Beatles: What are you smoking? Jazz: Agreed
I’m just going to go ahead and get you to tell me what are you smoking.
Just kidding, people, all opinions are valid. 
My thoughts:
Jazz: sucks
Anime: sucks
Bill Cosby: sucks
Any network TV show that deals with police work or crime: sucks
Reality TV: sucks
Musicals: suck
Divas: suck
My all time candidate for this thread is the Mona Lisa–muddy, blah looking portrait of an ugly woman with weird features. Where are the colors? It looks like it was painted with the contents of diapers. Bleah. Even her clothes are too boring to bother to use as inspiration for garb.
Plus, it’s in the Louvre which is a highly overrated museum. Most of it is crammed full of tasteless furniture, gaudy tchotchkes and ugly jewelry stolen from shortened aristos, along with those gigantic French paintings of battlescenes that ought to be sold by late night TV hucksters (Sofa Sized Paintings at INCREDIBLE SAVINGS!) The only thing I really liked in the Louvre was a lovely Durer bronze of a leopard eating a snake, a gorgeous Renaissance portrait (which was NEXT to the Mona Lisa) of a beautiful blonde chick in a fabulous red velvet gown and some incredibly weird china that had snakes and frogs and fish on them–not painted or glazed on, but actual sculpted critters almost life size and stuck on the plates and bowls so as the soup was served out the critters would appear at the bottom–I loved those! The rest? Overrated.
I agree also that the Beatles are HIGHLY overrated. They were average musicians at best. The only thing they had going for them was that they could write catchy melodies, but so can bunches of jingle writers (Byyyyyy Men-nen). Just because you write a good melody, does not make you a good musician. Their lyrics were absolute garbage. For instance:
Here come old flattop he come grooving up slowly
He got joo-joo eyeball he one holy roller
He got hair down to his knee
Got to be a joker he just do what he please
He wear no shoeshine he got toe-jam football
He got monkey finger he shoot coca-cola
He say “I know you, you know me”
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free
Come together right now over me
Uhhh…yeah. Gibberish. They even admitted it was gibberish. That’s like the tailors admitting that the emporer doesn’t really have any clothes on, and yet everyone keeps insisting they can see them. They are a good study in how people will eat crap, and thank you for the privilege of eating crap, even after they are told it is crap by the ones who made it, all because the people serving the crap showed up right when the eaters were really, really hungry. And then the people who come after them eat it, too, because, after all, their moms and dads ate the crap, so that crap must be good.
I say stop eating the crap. The cycle must be broken. Crap is bad for you. It can cause lots of nasty illnesses. And if you eat enough crap, eventually you forget the taste of real food.
The Boswell Sisters
Star Wars. The whole thing. The first two movies are fun, at least, but the whole thing is nowhere near as good as everyone and their mother thinks it is. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if the American moviegoing public had any sense in them, Logan’s Run would’ve outshadowed Star Wars from Day 1.
Or, what WhyNot said.
Also, I really wanted to get into both Hemingway and Steinbeck, but I just couldn’t. No plot whatsoever. If James Baldwin were half as famous as either of those cats, the world would be a better place. He’s a victim of his era (being black and gay).
Exactly! The Disney world is so black-and-white. You have your really ridiculously good good guys, your ridiculously evil bad guys, and nobody has much believable motivation to fall on either side. I can see why kids like it–it’s nice to have the world boiled down to a simple good-and-evil battle when you’re a kid–but I can’t figure out what adults see in the Disney movies.
Then again, a lot of adults can’t figure out what I see in dark and depressing movies about the reality of the human condition, so MMV.
I suspect you’re mixing at least two movies, there.
And it all seems faked to me. I’ve seen very few people who actually feel as excited about sports as sports fans try to convince you that they do–and most of them are in the business.
I love the Beatles and I love jazz, but then, I also love the blues, in whose context the Beatles and jazz make a lot more sense.
You know, I simply cannot imagine anyone liking Seinfeld without living in the US for a long time first.
Like “Graceland” by Christopher Abani. Also depressing, but chock full of awesome.
The reason I love OK Computer is because I was high as a kite the first few times I listened to it. That’s absolutely the key to understanding it, IMO.
Look, you’re entitled to your opinion, but I’ve got to stand up for the Beatles here. They were not “average” musicians, Paul McCartney’s melodic bass playing was absolutely revolutionary, George Harrison’s guitar work was phenomenal without being flashy, and George Martin’s talent for arrangement led to some truly amazing stuff, the Abbey Road medley for one. It’s almost like modern-day classical music. In fact, the Abbey Road medley is basically a symphony, with different movements, and a motif (You Never Give Me Your Money) that gets quoted later on in the song, all woven together in a way that is totally unmatched to this very day.
That the lyrics of Come Together should strike you as “garbage” is understandable if you have a strict definition of lyrics that excludes anything that’s avant-garde or nonsensical. The Beatles were highly influenced by avant-garde culture and beat poetry, and the words of Come Together were chosen not for their literal meaning but for the way they sound. If that’s not your thing, fine, it’s not your thing, but it doesn’t mean the lyrics are garbage, just that they’re unconventional.
Seriously, listen to Abbey Road all the way through, then tell me you’d put it on the level of a shaving cream commercial.
I’m with Fetus about Disney. Fuckin’ DON BLUTH - that’s where it’s at.
All Dogs Go To Heaven - freaky, trippy, psychedelic thrill ride through a debauched world of animal organized crime and murder - and it’s for kids! I could watch that movie a million times.
I hate Radiohead. That they are looked on as some wonder-group of the current day baffles me. I think their music is morose, over-dramatic and boring. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, for instance, beat the hell out of them any day, even if Stadium Arcadium was kind of mediocre. Or Beck. Or The Flaming Lips. There are so many contemporary rock groups that are so much more talented and fun to listen to than fucking Radiohead.
Nearly all contemporary music that can be labeled as classics, Beatles and onward. So much crap, and the occasional glimmer of wasted talent; Jimi Hendrix should have been a classical musician (preferably a cellist).
Many recent poets that are commonly covered in school: Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, e.e. cummings, and a bunch of others.
Gravity’s Rainbow is best used to demonstrate gravity to a high school physics class.
How so?
Sorry, I stand by my statement. The lyrics are garbage. Words have meaning. When you start combining words just because you like the way they sound together, you might as well just stop using english words and make up your own language.
I respect artists who are masters of language, in poetry or music or writing. The Beatles were not masters of anything. And nothing about their music was revolutionary. Beethoven was revolutionary. But to call the Beatles that is to pervert the meaning of the word.
It’s like giving a child finger paints and the child throws the paint on a canvas. We can call it art, and certainly their mother or father is going to think it’s beautiful, but that does not make it art. It has the same nonsensical quality as the Beatles’ lyrics. Just throwing a bunch of words on a page does not make it art.
I do not particularly care for Charles Dickens, but I DO realize that he was a master of language, and can respect him on that level even if I do not enjoy reading his novels. The Beatles had no such mastery of language.
When it comes to the end of year Straight Dope awards for reasoning and critical anaylsis, I don’t think this will trouble the awards committee. A jingle only lasts a few bars, whereas a Beatles song (like the majority of songs in the popular medium) has to work for three minutes or so. A jingle’s ‘lyrics’ are the name of the product and whatever the copy writer / ad agency has come up with, whereas the Beatles wrote lyrics that proved popular at the time and are still considered by many to be admirable and enjoyable forty years later. The ‘music’ for a jingle is by definition disposable, lasting only for the duration of an ad campaign, whereas the Beatles wrote songs that have proved enduringly popular for at least two generations. Thousands of largely anonymous producers can turn out jingles, but only three people in history have ever written a Beatles song.
And I’m not even a massive Beatles fan.
Back to the OP. My nomination: anything and everything by Jane Austen. I have a degree in Eng. Lit., and I can see the worth of most ‘classics’, but not Austen. They are boring, unimaginative books written by a boring, unimaginative writer who has nothing to say and takes forever to get around to not saying it. It’s also hard to grasp why she is credited with six novels, when in fact it’s just the same novel recycled. Every time the same: nothing happens and takes ages not to happen. If you visit the Austen Museum in Bath, it only serves to both illuminate and confirm the fact that this was a woman who led a completely sealed, boring life of severaly cramped horizons, with no awareness of anything much at all beyond her little writing desk. To adapt the old computing mantra: Tedium in, tedium out.
Now Emily Bronte… there is a writer! Powerful imagination, strong passions, superb grasp of a huge array of characters, emotive descriptions, exciting plot development ful of twists and turns… bravura stuff!
Sigur Ros did this, to widespread acclaim. I’m not a huge fan of their music but why not create your own language, if that’s what you want to do? You have this extremely strict, pedantic idea that words can only be interpreted by their literal meaning and that anything otherwise is not worthy of being called art. What’s your opinion on beat poetry? I assume you also think it’s garbage, and a lot of it is, but some of it is amazing. I’m no defender of pretentious people who think you can just throw anything together and have it sound good, but I think Come Together throws together some random words and makes them sound good because the sounds of the words flow together. It’s either something you get or you don’t.
You’re using ONE song as an example of “the Beatles’ lyrics.” Come Together is only one song out of a whole discography of songs that are not nonsensical and that follow conventional lyrical structure. Do you hate those songs too? Like I said, listen to the Abbey Road medley - how can you not dig that? It’s melodically interesting. It uses creative segues from one song to another. It’s like a rock opera - each song sets up its own unique story. The Beatles and George Martin poured their heart and soul, not to mention their diligent labor, in the studio perfecting that album - to compare it to a child’s finger painting is so utterly ridiculous.
But hey, your opinion is your opinion. Who do YOU like to listen to?
Beowulf. First-English-language-literary-masterpiece my ass. More like first English literary work that completely SUCKS BALLS!
And don’t get me started on The Canterbury Tales. . .
"Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour. . ."
Excuse me while I fart. (And whatever happens to come out of my butt will be a lot more interesting that that old garbage.)
Seriously, though, I think most of the things that people are mentioning in this thread are awesome. Whatever it is that causes every critic in the world to universally praise a given movie, book, or whatever, I’ve got it. My favorite movie is The Godfather II. My favorite band is the Beatles. My favorite book is . . . I don’t know, but I love The Great Gatsby.
I am not interested in popular opinion. That’s not even a consideration. There are many things that people overwhelmingly would call excellent. But that does not make it so. And there are many jingles that last more than a few bars. I was just using an example. And there are many jingles that have lived as long as any song by the Beatles. Again, that does not make them excellent.
Only three people in history have ever written a Beatles song. So what? I am not sure how that matters. Only Mozart wrote a piano concerto by Mozart. Just a couple anonymous musicians wrote “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke”. What’s the point?
Suggesting that I “just don’t get it” is a bit much. And how can we communicate if the words do not have strict meanings? You could not read this sentence unless words had strict meanings. Certainly you can use metaphor or hyperbole to paint a literary picture that is open to many different interpretations, but unless the words that construct that metaphor have strict meanings, your metaphor is lost.
I have much more respect for someone creating their own words or own language than bastardizing an existing language. In fact, there are poems where writers have invented new words because they liked the sound of them, and yet the new words they created ALSO had strict meanings that can be determined by the context.
In terms of other Beatles’ songs, how about this one?
So let it out and let it in, hey, Jude, begin
You’re waiting for someone to perform with
And don’t you know that it’s just you, hey, Jude,
You’ll do, the movement you need is on your shoulder
Hey, Jude, don’t make it bad
Take a sad song and make it better
Remember to let her into your heart
Then you can start to make it better
Na, na na na na na na, na na na na, hey Jude. (repeat over and over again)
These are mind-numbingly bad lyrics. However, I WOULD say that the melody for this song is a truly beautiful melody. I already admitted that in my first post. They wrote some good melodies. But in popular music, I would say that the mark of a truly gifted musician is their ability to mesh good melodies with inspired lyrics. If they falter on one or the other, then they are not a great artist. Hence, the Beatles were not truly great artists. They were also not the worst artists ever, either. I hope I did not give that impression.
The original poster was asking about things that were highly overrated. The Beatles are called by many the best group ever. I disagree. Maybe top 100 groups ever. But that still makes them highly overrated.
In the interests of being completely fair, I will listen to Abbey Road in its entirety. If I change my mind about the Beatles, I will let you know. I am not above retracting statements if I find I am in error. I haven’t bothered before because I have heard many of their songs in my life, and didn’t like any of them except for a couple catchy melodies, so there was no need. But on your recommendation, I will.
Alright fair enough. But like I asked before - who do YOU like to listen to?
Yeah, we both posted at the same time. So in response to that - good, you should give it a listen, you might like it. There are a lot of Beatles songs that I DON’T like - I don’t think they’re infallible. A lot of their songs are just okay. But the Abbey Road medley - specifically - is what makes them geniuses in my eyes. It’s head and shoulders above any of their other stuff. So yeah, you might find yourself liking it. But if not, hey, to each his own.