Unmasking "The Beatles"

[arpeggiosnake]

Read it please and tell me your opinions:

The fact that so many books still name the Beatles "the greatest or most significant or most influential" rock band ever only tells you how far rock music still is from becoming a serious art.

Jazz critics have long recognized that the greatest jazz musicians of all times are Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, who were not the most famous or richest or best sellers of their times, let alone of all times.
Classical critics rank Beethoven, who died poor and ignored, over classical musicians who were highly popular in courts around Europe. Rock critics are still blinded by commercial success: the Beatles sold more than anyone else (not true, by the way), therefore they must have been the greatest. Jazz critics grow up listening to a lot of jazz music of the past, classical critics grow up listening to a lot of classical music of the past. Rock critics are often totally ignorant of the rock music of the past, they barely know the best sellers. No wonder they will think that the Beatles did anything worth of being saved.

In a sense the Beatles are emblematic of the status of rock criticism as a whole: too much attention to commercial phenomena (be it grunge or U2) and too little attention to the merits of real musicians. If somebody composes the most divine music but no major label picks him up and sells him around the world, a lot of rock critics will ignore him. If a major label picks up a musician who is as stereotyped as one can be but launches her or him worldwide, your average critic will waste rivers of ink on her or him. This is the sad status of rock criticism: rock critics are basically publicists working for free for major labels, distributors and record stores. They simply publicize what the music business wants to make money with.
Hopefully, one not-too-distant day, there will be a clear demarcation between a great musician like Tim Buckley, who never sold much, and commercial products like the Beatles. And rock critics will study more of rock history and realize who invented what and who simply exploited it commercially.
Beatles' "aryan" music removed any trace of black music from rock and roll: it replaced syncopated african rhythm with linear western melody, and lusty negro attitudes with cute white-kid smiles.

Contemporary musicians never spoke highly of the Beatles, and for a good reason. They could not figure out why the Beatles' songs should be regarded more highly than their own. They knew that the Beatles were simply lucky to become a folk phenomenon (thanks to "Beatlemania", which had nothing to do with their musical merits). THat phenomenon kept alive interest in their (mediocre) musical endeavours to this day. Nothing else grants the Beatles more attention than, say, the Kinks or the Rolling Stones. There was nothing intrinsically better in the Beatles' music. Ray Davies of the Kinks was certainly a far better songwriter than Lennon & McCartney. The Stones were certainly much more skilled musicians than the 'Fab Fours'. And Pete Townshend was a far more accomplished composer, capable of "Tommy" and "Quadrophenia". Not to mention later and far greater British musicians. Not to mention the American musicians that created what the Beatles later sold to the masses.
The Beatles sold a lot of records not because they were the greatest musicians but simply because their music was easy to sell to the masses: it had no difficult content, it had no technical innovations, it had no creative depth. They wrote a bunch of catchy 3-minute ditties and they were photogenic. If somebody had not invented "beatlemania" in 1963, you would not have wasted five minutes of your time to read a page about such a trivial band.

[brewtality]

I completely disagree. I started listening to the beatles around 2000, long after 'beatlemania' had hit its height. Their success has little to do with criticism and everything to do with the music. I love how they sing entire verses in harmony, rather than the occassional refrain like most bands. I'd rather listen to the beatles than the Stones or the Who any day of the week. Btw, I'd hardly call Mick Jagger or Pete Townshend great musicians either.

[musik_man]

I completely disagree with your post.  I guess I'll start by saying that you're also wrong about Jazz and Classical.  Bach is considered at least as great as Beethoven.  Hell, lots of critics practially worship the man.  Look at the respect Bach gets on this forum.  Also Beethoven didn't die an obscure composer.  He died the most famous composer of his time, widely hailed as genius.  His funeral procession had 30,000 people in it.  That's nearly as much as Lisa "Left Eye" Lopez from TLC.

I was also unaware that Ellington and Coltrane were considered the greatest jazz musicians.  How do you leave out Miles Davis?  What about Bill Evans, Louis Armstrong, etc?

The Beatles may be a bit overrated, but they are still at least one of the best rock bands ever.  I'd maybe put Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and the Who above them. (as far as non-prog rock goes)  Have you never listened to Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band?  I can't see how anyone would view that as anything other than a masterpiece.  What's more, the songs are complex and incorporate things that had never been in rock music before like the Sitar.  It also happens to be the first concept album.  If the Beatle's hadn't released that album, I'd bet that the late 60's and the early 70's would have seen nearly as much growth in the complexity and maturity of rock.  A band as popular as the Beatles releasing an album as complicated(for rock) as Sgt Pepper, made other bands willing to do so.  Without Sgt Pepper, there may never have been a Tommy or Led Zeppelin IV, or Dark Side of the Moon.  Bands that produced some of the most artistic music(Yes, Genesis) credit the Beatles as their main influence.  Far from being emblematic of Rock failing to promote talent.  I'd argue that because of the Beatle's transformation from pop group to mature musicians, there was a period where talent was important to rock music.  That's why the music from the late 60's early 70's is so much better than the 80's or the 90's.

The Beatles may be simpler than other bands, but they also had the burden of coming earlier.  Would you blame Louis Armstrong for not being as harmonically studied as Miles?  Or blame Ellington for being less developed than Mingus?  Is Mozart worse than Mahler because Mahler is more challenging?

BTW before the Beatles rock had all those crazy negro polyrhythms of Elvis Presly.   

[arpeggiosnake]

I completely disagree with your post. 

Have you never listened to Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band?  I can't see how anyone would view that as anything other than a masterpiece.  What's more, the songs are complex and incorporate things that had never been in rock music before like the Sitar.  It also happens to be the first concept album. A band as popular as the Beatles releasing an album as complicated(for rock) as Sgt Pepper, made other bands willing to do so.  Without Sgt Pepper, there may never have been a Tommy or Led Zeppelin IV, or Dark Side of the Moon.

BTW before the Beatles rock had all those crazy negro polyrhythms of Elvis Presly.   

I didnt wtite those lines, i found them on the net.

Have you listened to  Frank Zappa´s "Freak Out" (1966). Please do your self a big favor and listen to it several times. At the end you will find that all the things you say about Sgt Pepper are wrong.

BTW Whats wrong with "negro" polyrhythms?

BTW Ill post the complete and excellent article, read it and lets see what can you say.

[arpeggiosnake]

Part 2

The Beatles most certainly belong to the history of the 60s, but their musical merits are at best dubious.

The Beatles came to be at the height of the reaction against rock and roll, when the innocuous "teen idols", rigorously white, were replacing the wild black rockers who had shocked the radio stations and the conscience of half of America. Their arrival represented a lifesaver for a white middle class terrorized by the idea that within rock and roll lay a true revolution of customs. The Beatles tranquilized that vast section of people and conquered the hearts of all those (first and foremost the females) who wanted to rebel without violating the societal status quo. The contorted and lascivious faces of the black rock and rollers were substituted by the innocent smiles of the Beatles; the unleashed rhythms of the first were substituted by the catchy tunes of the latter. Rock and roll could finally be included in the pop charts. The Beatles represented the quintessential reaction to a musical revolution in the making, and for a few years they managed to run its enthusiasm into the ground.
Furthermore, the Beatles represented the reaction against a social and political revolution.

They arrived at the time of the student protests, of Bob Dylan, of the Hippies, and they replaced the image of angry kids with their fists in the air, with their cordial faces and their amiable declarations. They came to replace the accusatory words of militant musicians with overindulgent nursery rhymes. In this fashion as well the Beatles served as middle-class tranquilizers, as if to prove the new generation was not made up exclusively of rebels, misfits and sexual maniacs.

For most of their career the Beatles were four mediocre musicians who sang melodic three-minute tunes at a time when rock music was trying to push itself beyond that format (a format originally confined by the technical limitations of 78 rpm record). They were the quintessence of "mainstream", assimilating the innovations proposed by rock music, within the format of the melodic song.

The Beatles belonged, like the Beach Boys (whom they emulated for most of their career), to the era of the vocal band. In such a band the technique of the instrument was not as important as the chorus. Undoubtedly skilled at composing choruses, they availed themselves of producer George Martin (head of the Parlophone since 1956), to embellish those choruses with arrangements more and more eccentric.
Thanks to a careful publicity campaign they became the most celebrated entertainers of the era, and are still the darlings of magazines and tabloids, much like Princess Grace of Monaco and Lady Di.

The convergence between Western polyphony (melody, several parts of vocal harmony and instrumental arrangements) and African percussion - the leitmotif of American music from its inception - was legitimized in Europe by the huge success of the Merseybeat, in particular by its best sellers, Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Beatles, both produced by George Martin and managed by Brian Epstein. To the bands of the Merseybeat goes the credit of having validated rock music for a vast audience, a virtually endless audience. They were able to interpret the spirit and the technique of rock and roll, while separating it from its social circumstances, thus defusing potential explosions. In such fashion, they rendered it accessible not only to the young rebels, but to all. Mediocre musicians and even more mediocre intellectuals, bands like the Beatles had the intuition of the circus performer who knows how to amuse the peasants after a hard day's work, an intuition applied to the era of mass distribution of consumer goods.

[arpeggiosnake]

Final Part:

Every one of their songs and every one of their albums followed much more striking songs and albums by others, but instead of simply imitating those songs, the Beatles adapted them to a bourgeois, conformist and orthodox dimension. The same process was applied to the philosophy of the time, from the protest on college campuses to Dylan's pacifism, from drugs to the Orient. Their vehicle was melody, a universal code of sorts, that declared their music innocuous. Naturally others performed the same operation, and many (from the Kinks to the Hollies, from the Beach Boys to the Mamas and Papas) produced melodies even more memorable, yet the Beatles arrived at the right moment and theirs would remain the trademark of the melodic song of the second half of the twentieth century.

Their ascent was branded as "Beatlemania", a phenomenon of mass hysteria launched in 1963 that marked the height of the "teen idol" mode, a extension of the myths of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. From that moment on, no matter what they put together, the Beatles remained the center of the media's attention.
Musically, for what it's worth, the Beatles were the product of an era that had been prepared by vocal groups such as the Everly Brothers and by rockers such as Buddy Holly; an era that also expressed itself through the girl-groups, the Tamla bands and surf music. What the Beatles have in common with them, aside from almost identical melodies, is a general concept of song: an exuberant, optimistic and cadenced melody.
The Beatles were the quintessence of instrumental mediocrity. George Harrison was a pathetic guitarist, compared with the London guitarists of those days (Townshend of the Who, Richards of the Rolling Stones, Davies of the Kinks, Clapton and Beck and Page of the Yardbirds, and many others who were less famous but no less original). The Beatles had completely missed the revolution of rock music (founded on a prominent use of the guitar) and were still trapped in the stereotypes of the easy-listening orchestras. Paul McCartney was a singer from the 1950s, who could not have possibly sounded more conventional. As a bassist, he was not worth the last of the rhythm and blues bassists (even though within the world of Merseybeat his style was indeed revolutionary). Ringo Starr played drums the way any kid of that time played it in his garage (even though he may ultimately be the only one of the four who had a bit of technical competence). Overall, the technique of the "fab four" was the same of many other easy-listening groups: sub-standard.

Theirs were records of traditional songs crafted as they had been crafted for centuries, yet they served an immense audience, far greater than the audience of those who wanted to change the world, the hippies and protesters. Their fans ignored or abhorred the many rockers of the time who were experimenting with the suite format, who were composing long free-form tracks, who were using dissonance, who were radically changing the concept of the musical piece. The Beatles' fans thought, and some still think, that using trumpets in a rock song was a revolutionary event, that using background noises (although barely noticeable) was an even more revolutionary event, and that only great musical geniuses could vary so many styles in one album, precisely what many rock musicians were doing all over the world, employing much more sophisticated stylistic excursions.

While the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, the Doors, Pink Floyd and many others were composing long and daring suites worthy of avant garde music, thus elevating rock music to art, the Beatles continued to yield three minute songs built around a chorus. Beatlemania and its myth notwithstanding, Beatles fans went crazy for twenty seconds of trumpet, while the Velvet Underground were composing suites of chaos twenty minutes long. Actually, between noise and a trumpet, between twenty seconds and twenty minutes, there was an artistic difference of several degrees of magnitude. They were, musically, sociologically, politically, artistically, and ideologically, on different planets.

Beatlemania created a comical temporal distortion. Many Beatles fans were convinced that rock and roll was born around the early 60s, that psychedelic rock and the hippies were a 1967 phenomenon, that student protests began in 1969, that peace marches erupted at the end of the 60s, and so on. Beatles fans believed that the Beatles were first in everything, while in reality they were last in almost everything. The case of the Beatles is a textbook example of how myths can distort history.
The Beatles had the historical function to delay the impact of the innovations of the 60's . Between 1966 and 1969, while suites, jams, and long free form tracks (which the Beatles also tried but only toward the end of their career) became the fashion, while the world was full of guitarists, bassist, singers and drummers who played solos and experimented with counterpoint, the Beatles limited themselves to keeping the tempo and following the melody. Their historic function was also to prepare the more conservative audience for those innovations. Their strength was perhaps being the epitome of mediocrity: never a flash of genius, never a revolutionary thought, never a step away from what was standard, accepting innovations only after they had been accepted by the establishment. And maybe it was that chronic mediocrity that made their fortune: whereas other bands tried to surpass their audiences, to keep two steps ahead of the myopia of their fans, traveling the hard and rocky road, the Beatles took their fans by the hand and walked them along a straight path devoid of curves and slopes.

Beatles fans can change the meaning of the word "artistic" to suit themselves, but the truth is that the artistic value of the Beatles work is very low. The Beatles made only songs, often unpretentious songs, with melodies no more catchy than those of many other pop singers. The artistic value of those songs is the artistic value of one song: however well done (and one can argue over the number of songs well done vs. the number of overly publicized songs by the band of the moment), it remains a song, precisely as toothpaste remains toothpaste. It doesn't become a work of art just because it has been overly publicized.
The Beatles are justly judged for the beautiful melodies they have written. But those melodies were "beautiful" only when compared to the melodies of those who were not trying to write melodies; in other words to the musicians who were trying to rewrite the concept of popular music by implementing suites, jams and noise. Many contemporaries of Beethoven wrote better minuets than Beethoven ever wrote, but only because Beethoven was writing something else. In fact, he was trying to write music that went beyond the banality of minuets.
The melodies of the Beatles were perhaps inferior to many composers of pop music who still compete with the Beatles with regard to quality, those who were less famous and thus less played.
The songs of the Beatles were equipped with fairly vapid lyrics at a time when hordes of singer songwriters and bands were trying to say something intelligent. The Beatles' lyrics were tied to the tradition of pop music, while rock music found space, rightly or wrongly, for psychological narration, anti-establishment satire, political denunciation, drugs, sex and death.
The most artistic and innovative aspect of the Beatles' music, in the end, proved to be George Martin's arrangements. Perhaps aware of Beatles' limitations, Martin used the studio and studio musicians in a creative fashion, at times venturing beyond the demands of tradition to embellish the songs. Moreover, Martin undoubtedly had a taste for unusual sounds. At the beginning of his career he had produced Rolf Harris' Tie Me Kangaroo with the didjeridoo. At the time nobody knew what it was. Between 1959 and 1962 Martin had produced several tracks of British humor with heavy experimentation, inspired by the Californian Stan Freiberg, the first to use the recording studio as an instrument.

As popular icons, as celebrities, the Beatles certainly influenced their times, although much less than their fans suppose. Even Richard Nixon, the American president of the Vietnam war and Watergate influenced his times and the generations that followed, but that doesn't make him a great musician.

Today Beatles songs are played mostly in supermarkets. But their myth, like that of Rudolph Valentino and Frank Sinatra, will live as long as the fans who believed in it will live. Through the years their fame has been artificially kept alive by marketing, a colossal advertising effort, a campaign without equal in the history of entertainment.

[arpeggiosnake]

1967 was the year that FM radio began to play long instrumentals. In Great Britain, it was the year of psychedelia, of the Technicolor Dream, of the UFO Club. The psychedelic singles of Pink Floyd were generating an uproar. Inevitably, the Beatles recorded Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

This concept album was released while the Monterey Festival was consecrating the sanctifiable, the big names of the times. Unlike most of the revolutionary records of those days, often recorded in haste and with a low budget, Sgt. Pepper cost a fortune and took four months to put together. The Beatles soar in the ethereal refrain of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, utilizing the sitar, distorted keyboard sounds and Indian inspired vocals; they indulge in Vaudevillian tunes such as Lovely Rita and When I'm Sixty Four (a vintage ragtime worthy of the Bonzo Band), and they showcase their odd melodic sense in With A Little Help From My Friends. They scatter studio effects here and there, pretending to be avant garde musicians, in Fixing A Hole and Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite, but in reality these are tunes inspired by the music halls, the circuses and small town bands. A Day In The Life is the culmination of the relationship between technique and philosophy. It represents the happy marriage between Martin's sense of harmony, employing a 40 piece orchestra in which everybody plays every note, and Lennon's hippie existentialism, that dissects the alienation of the bourgeoisie.
Everything was running smoothly in the name of quality music, now entrusted to high fidelity arrangements and adventurous variations of style, from folk ballads to sidewalk Vaudeville, from soul to marching bands, from the Orient to swing, from chamber music to psychedelia, from tap dance to little bands in the park. Everything had been fused into a steady flow of variety show skits.

Rather than an album of psychedelic music (compared to which it actually sounds retro), Sgt. Pepper was the Beatles' answer to the sophistication of Pet Sounds, the masterpiece by their rivals, the Beach Boys, released a year and three months before. The Beatles had always been obsessed by the Beach Boys. They had copied their multi-part harmonies, their melodic style and their carefree attitude. Through their entire career, from 1963 to 1968, the Beatles actually followed the Beach Boys within a year or two, including the formation of Apple Records, which came almost exactly one year after the birth of Brother Records. Pet Sounds had caused an uproar because it delivered the simple melodies of surf music through the artistic sophistication of the studio. So, following the example of Pet Sounds, the Beatles recorded, from February to May 1967, Sgt. Pepper, disregarding two important factors: first that Pet Sounds had been arranged, mixed and produced by Brian Wilson and not by an external producer like George Martin, and second that, as always, they were late. They began assembling Sgt. Pepper a year after Pet Sounds had hit the charts, and after dozens of records had already been influenced by it.

Legend has it that it took 700 hours of studio recording to finish the album. One can only imagine what many other less fortunate bands could have accomplished in a recording studio with 700 hours at their disposal. Although Sgt. Pepper was assembled with the intent to create a revolutionary work of art, if one dares take away the hundreds of hours spent refining the product, not much remains that cannot be heard on Revolver: Oriental touches here and there, some psychedelic extravaganzas, a couple of arrangements in classical style.

Were one to skim off a few layers of studio production, only pop melodies would remain, melodies not much different from those that had climbed the charts ten years before. Yet it was the first Beatles album to be released in long playing version all over the world. None of its songs were released as singles.
The truth is that although it was declared an "experimental" work, even Sgt. Pepper managed to remain a pop album. The Beatles of 1967 were still producing three-minute ditties, while Red Crayolas and Pink Floyd, to name two psychedelic bands of the era, were playing long free form suites - at times cacophonous, often strictly instrumental - that bordered on avant garde. In 1967, the band that had never recorded a song that hadn't been built around a refrain began to feel outdated. They tried to keep up, but they never pushed themselves beyond the jingles, most likely because they couldn't, just as Marilyn Monroe could not have recited Shakespeare.
Sgt. Pepper is the album of a band that sensed change in the making, and was adapting its style to the taste of the hippies. It came in last (in June), after Velvet Underground & Nico (January), The Doors (also January), the Byrds' Younger Than Yesterday (february), and the Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow (February) to signal the end of an era, after others had forever changed the history of rock music. (Most technical "innovations" on Sgt Pepper were copied from Younger Than Yesterday, whose tapes the Beatles had heard from David Crosby at the end of 1966). The uproar generated by Sgt. Pepper transferred those innovations from the American underground to the living rooms and the supermarkets of half the world.

With Sgt. Pepper, the sociology course in melodic rock and roll that Lennon and McCartney had introduced in 1963 came to an end. The music of the Beatles was an antidote to the uneasiness of those times, to the troubling events that scared and perplexed people. The course had the virtue of deflecting the impact of those events, the causes of political upheaval and moral revolution. The Beatles reassured the middle class at a time when almost nothing could reassure the middle class.
Every arrangement of that period - the harpsichords and the flutes, the prerecorded tracks and the electronic effects - was the result of George Martin's careful production. Martin was a lay musician, a former member of a marching band that occasionally had played in St. James Park. He knew that avant garde musicians made music by manipulating tracks, that instruments with unusual timbre existed, that rock bands were dissecting classic harmonies. His background, not to mention his intellectual ability, was of the circus, the carnival, the operetta, the marching band, London's second-rate theaters. He took all he could from that folkloristic patrimony, every unortodox technique. The results might not have been particularly impressive - after all he was neither Beethoven nor Von Karajan - but they were most certainly interesting. He was the true genius behind the music of the Beatles. Martin transformed their snobbish disposition, their childish insolence, their fleeting enthusiasm into musical ideas. He converted their second hand melodies into monumental arrangements. He even played some of the instruments that helped those songs make history. From Rubber Soul on, Martin's involvement got progressively more evident. Especially with Sgt. Pepper, Martin demonstrated his knowledge and his intuition.

The idea to connect all the songs in a continuous flow, however, is McCartney's. It's the operetta syndrome, the everlasting obsession of British musicians of the music halls. The Beatles filled newspapers and magazines with their declarations about drugs and Indian mysticism, and how they converted those elements into music, but it was Martin who was doing the conversion, who was transforming their fanciful artistic ambitions into music.

Around the time of Sgt. Pepper's release, Brian Epstein died. (His death was attributed to drugs and alcohol.) He was the man who had given fame to the Beatles, the fundamental presence in their development, the man who had invented their myth. The Beatles were four immature kids who for years had played the involuntary leading roles in an immensely successful soap opera, a part that paid them with imprisonment. For years they didn't dare step outside their hotel rooms or their limousines. As Epstein's control began to lessen they began to look around, to take notice of the drugs, the social disorder, the ideals of peace, the student protests, the Oriental philosophies. It was a world completely unknown to them, full of issues they had never mentioned in their songs. The revelation was traumatic. Epstein's absence generated chaos, exposing problems with revenue, representation and public relations that eventually caused the demise of the group, but it also gave them the chance to grow up.
Sgt Pepper represents a breaking point in their career on several levels. It's a very autobiographical conceptual take on self-awareness. It's a concept album about the discovery of being able to put together a concept album.

In 1968 Great Britain became infected by the concept album/rock opera bug, mostly realized by Beatles contemporaries: Tommy by the Who, The Village Green Preservation Society by the Kinks, Ogden's Nut Gone Flake by the Small Faces, Odyssey and Oracle by the Zombies, etc. So, with the usual delay, a year later the Beatles gave it a try. Abbey Road (1969), is a vaudeville-style operetta that combines every genre in a steady stream of melodies and structurally perfect arrangements. It's the summa encyclopaedica of their career. It's a series of self-mocking vignettes, mimicking now the circus worker (Maxwell's Silver Hammer), now the crooner (Oh Darling, a parody a la Bonzo Band), now the baby-sitter (Octopus's Garden, in the silly vein of Yellow Submarine), culminating in the overwhelming suite of side B. Starting with the primitive exuberance of You Never Give Me Your Money (a mini rock opera worthy of early Zappa) and Mean Mr Mustard, the suite comes in thick and fast with Polytheme Pam and She Came In Thru The Bathroom Window, and dies melancholically with yet another goliardic chorus, Carry That Weight (that reprises the motifs of Money and I Want You). It's the apotheosis of the belated music hall entertainer in Paul McCartney. And it is, above all, a masterpiece of production, of sound, of sonic puzzles.

[arpeggiosnake]

As was the case with their contemporaries - Who, Kinks, Small Faces and Zombies - this late album/thesis runs the risks going down in history as the Beatles' masterpiece. Obviously it doesn't even come close to the creative standards of the time (1969), but it scores well. The result is formally impeccable melodic songwriting, although it must be noted that the best songs, both written by George Harrison, are also the most modest. Abbey Road is their last studio album, again produced by George Martin.

All efforts at cohesion notwithstanding, their personalities truly became too divergent. The modest hippie George Harrison became attracted to Oriental spiritualism. (Something and Here Comes The Sun are his melancholy ballads). Paul McCartney, the smiling bourgeois, became progressively more involved with pop music (every nursery-rhyme, Get Back and Let It Be included, are his). John Lennon, the thoughtful intellectual became absorbed in self-examination and political involvement. His was a much harder and/or psychedelic sound (Revolution, Come Together, the dreamy and Indian-like Across The Universe). They were songs ever more meaningless and anonymous. After all, the break-up had begun with Revolver (Lennon wrote Tomorrow Never Knows, Harrison Love You Too, McCartney Eleanor Rigby), and had been camouflaged in successive records by Martin's painstakingly arrangements.

The Beatles adapted their music to suit the styles in fashion: doo-wop, garage-rock, psychedelia, country-rock. Very few bands changed style so drastically from year to year. Perhaps they began to feel obsolete listening to Cream. Cream concerts were the first musical phenomenon in Great Britain to rival Beatlemania. Cream did all they could to make the Merseybeat sound terribly old, precisely what the Beatles had done to the sound of Elvis Presley. In 1969, Led Zeppelin changed completely the importance of radio and charts. [Led Zeppelin is the first enormously successful band whose album didn't get any air play on AM radio (only FM) and whose songs didn't make the singles charts. The change they brought about was significant because it shifted the importance of the charts from singles to albums.

[arpeggiosnake]

In 1970 the Beatles broke up and every member began a solo career.

 John Lennon (murdered in December 1980 by a deranged fan) didn't do much worthy of the great singer songwriters of the time. Had it not been for his personal and political involvement, and his past as a Beatle, he would not have made it by his music alone. His solo career fluctuated ambiguously between hard-rock and ballads, the utopia of peace and love and domestic romanticism. His solo career actually began with Two Virgins (Apple, 1968), an album he made when he was still a Beatle, in collaboration with his famous second wife. Yoko Ono was the heiress to a dynasty of Japanese bankers, she held a degree in philosophy, had been a United States resident since 1953, was a member of the avant garde movement Fluxus, and a world renowned performance artist throughout the 60s. The album was followed by the more experimental Life With The Lions (Apple, 1969) and Wedding Album (Apple, 1969), and also a live album with Give Peace A Chance (a street chorus a la David Peel). Perhaps the best of Lennon can be found in the autobiographical album John Lennon/ Plastic Ono Band (Capitol, 1970), with a vibrant production by Phil Spector. The imprint of Spector's sound can also be heard in the single Instant Karma. Lennon found much more commercial success with the album that followed, Imagine (1971), which contains Imagine, his most famous song, besides Power to The People and Happy Christmas. Peace activism and involvement in humanitarian causes gave the couple more prominence than music ever did. Lennon scored a #1 hit with the duet with Elton John, Whatever Gets You Thru The Night (1974). An embarrassing string of mediocre albums ended with Double Fantasy (Geffen, 1980), released a couple of months before his death. It contains the hits Starting Over and Woman.

McCartney managed a few albums worthy of the Beatles (as chance would have it produced by George Martin), except they were not called "The Beatles". As a testament to rock consumerism and all the worst the genre embodies, McCartney's songs (solo or in the company of Wings ) regularly bounced to the top of the charts. Between boring lullabies (Maybe I'm Amazed, 1970, Another Day, 1971, Uncle Albert, 1971, My Love, 1973, Band On The Run, 1973, Listen To What The Man Said, 1975, Silly Love Songs, 1976, With A Little Luck, 1978; Coming Up, 1980, No More Lonely Nights, 1984, Spies Like Us, 1985), and duets with other singers (Say Say Say, 1983, with Michael Jackson, Ebony And Ivory, 1982, with Stevie Wonder), McCartney holds the record for #1 songs on the Billboard charts. Band On The Run (Capitol, 1973) is perhaps least mediocre of his albums. Mull of Kintyre, (1977) is the first British single that sold more that two million copies. Very few pop singers have been able to release songs so predictable.

While a trivial guitarist and vocalist, George Harrison (who died of cancer in November 2001) was perhaps the only one who made songs worthy of notice. First the experimental Wonderwall (Zapple, 1968) and Electronic Sounds (Zapple, 1969), with help from Bernie Krause, then the three-record box set All Things Must Pass (Apple, 1970), produced by Phil Spector, a reprise of the raga-psychedelic theme. Set in a bucolic-folk context, the album continues the discourse that Donovan had began in 1967 (What Is Life, Isn't It A Pity, Let It Down, Apple Scruffs, Art Of Dying, My Sweet Lord). This record has nothing in common with the music of the Beatles. A dedicated follower of Hare Krishna, among other platitudes of the 60s, Harrison organized the first grand concert to benefit a nation, Bangladesh, in 1972. In 1973 he recorded Living In The Material World with Give Me Love. Dark Horse (1974) and You (1975) also had a couple of hits. After a series of unfortunate albums, Harrison hit the charts in 1987, with I've Got My Mind Set On You, an old soul song by Rudy Clark. The following year he joined Dylan, Petty and Orbison to become one of the Traveling Wilburys.

Throughout the 90s McCartney and a few discographers desperately tried to keep the Beatles myth alive by launching new commercial enterprises geared toward nostalgia. These ventures were followed with interest by the same tabloids that followed Lady Di and Princess Grace of Monaco.
After the breakup, the role of George Martin became evident. We'll never know what the Beatles would have been had they not encountered Martin, but we do know who Martin was before he met the Beatles. Even without the Beatles, George Martin would have been himself, a successful producer who reached the top of the charts with a collection of catchy tunes. And we also know what the Beatles were without Martin:four mediocre singer songwriters. Their solo records tell us how good they were without Martin.
The Beatles made history for their melodies and their arrangements. Beatlemania was created, justifiably, in response to the exuberant rock and roll they played in 1963 with electrical instruments and drums, that managed to revitalize a genre drowned in sugar coated orchestrations supporting teen idols. Revolver must definitely be credited with having created a new sophisticated living room pop art. However, Sgt. Pepper, their most famous album, is nothing more than a hypocritically commercial album, a collection of traditional pop songs masked as psychedelic avant garde music. It nevertheless served as a prelude to the baroque suite Abbey Road, the apex of their formality. Similar parallels can be found in almost every band of those times, but few listeners know the records of those bands.
Even at their best the Beatles didn't represent the spirit of their generation. When they tried they were late, or even against the mainstream. At best they expressed the values of the generation that preceded theirs, the 40s. Those values were moral, musical, and social order, and respect, the very values attacked in the 50s by rock and roll. Thus the fact that the songs of the Beatles were similar in lyrics, music and arrangements to those of Tin Pan Alley shouldn't surprise anyone. Some of those songs will forever be listed in the annals of melodic music: Love Me Do, Hard Day's Night, I Feel Fine, We Can Work It Out, Penny Lane, Hello Goodbye, A Little Help From My Friends, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. For what it's worth, the everlasting refrains of those songs took rock and roll all the way down to a level of silliness and childish humor, separating it from its violent rebellious roots.

The influence of the Beatles cannot be considered musical. Music, especially in those days, was something else: experimental, instrumental, improvised, political. The Beatles played pop ditties. Rock musicians of the time played everything but pop ditties, because rock was conceived as an alternative to ditties. FM radio was created to play rock music, not pop ditties. Music magazines were born to review rock music, not pop songs. Evidently, to the kids (mostly girls) who listened to the Beatles, rock music had nothing to say that they were willing to listen to.

END

[Stolzing]

So we found the one guy who doesnt like the Beatles.

Stupid article.  I could understand saying they are overrated, but suggesting that they weren't as good as a band like Velvet Underground or the Kinks even is just a ridiculous argument.

Wait, was this written by a guy named Pete Best?

[gilad]

the beatles are tops in my books.
you have one serious obssession with them.

[cfortunato]

I fail to see why a LACK of popularity is considered a proof of excellence; nor why popularity is somehow proof that you are lacking.

They WERE the most influential rock band ever, and I don't think there's any question about it.  Even if you prefer guys like (say) Floyd or the Moody Blues, the Beatles were more influential.
[[
"The fact that so many books still name the Beatles "the greatest or most significant or most influential" rock band ever only tells you how far rock music still is from becoming a serious art." ]]

Well, Gee whiz, most books would name William Shakespeare as the greatest or most significant or most influential playwright.  So I guess that proves that theatre is far from being a serious art, too, since Bill Shakespeare was damned popular, and wrote with a large consideration for the box office.  Right?

[drsmoo]

Well I just started reading but... beethoven died poor and forgotten? NO

https://www.artsalive.ca/en/mus/greatcomposers/beethoven.html

"Ludwig van Beethoven's funeral was enormous. 20,000 people lined the streets of Vienna on March 29, 1827. Soldiers were needed to control the grief stricken crowds."

[drsmoo]

wow, the more I read the more wrong there is

The beatles wrote "aryan" music? what?

not respected by their peers? Is this a bad junior high school unresearched essay or what? And no they weren't the best selling rock band either I don't think.

[cfortunato]

[[Contemporary musicians never spoke highly of the Beatles, and for a good reason]]

This is so obviously false, it makes it seems that the author just makes up his own facts.  Contemporary musicians never spoke highly of the Beatles?  Is he kidding?

[prometheus]

Haha, I remember this.