It so happens that in my idle, time-killing habit of scrolling on Facebook, I’ve encountered a certain number of individuals who refer to The Beatles as “overrated,” or respond as much, implicitly, under post prompts, to be exact. Now, admittedly, there’s a number of cultural forces at work here. One, I think, is the intention on the part of a lot of people just to be rude for rudeness’s sake, or to elevate the importance of their own personal tastes to the status of gangsta rapper/Tony Montano level. An insult to something that, to them, isn’t immediately, holistically transcendent, is held as a sort of bit of progress, like that glorious, Apollonian idealization of one’s own voice.
And, of course, I realize that they’re not saying that The Beatles completely suck — they’re only referring to them as overrated. This, I hold, in this post, is as ridiculous as saying, say, “Fastball sucks,” before MGK takes “Out of My Head”; butchers it and reassembles it as a radio mega-hit. (For what it’s worth, “Out of My Head” is about the 10th-best song on All the Pain Money Can Buy.) And all of this I’ll argue in the upcoming paragraphs.
By this point I’m sure everybody has heard about the girls at the Beatles concerts screaming, pulling their own hair out and wetting the floor. I think I’ll kind of gloss over this set of episodes, partly since the type of people who call The Beatles “overrated” aren’t really the kind to have any regard for research and quote citations within online articles.
From this point of Ed Sullivan Show fame and spawning of maniacal behavior on the part of concertgoing coeds, they would very soon stop touring entirely. A lot of people might not know this about The Beatles. And part, I think, of why a lot of people aren’t aware that The Beatles stopped touring, permanently, in the mid-’60s, is that The Beatles had reached a level of fame, ubiquity and artistic merit, that they were pretty much immune to criticism. The only complaint I’ve ever heard that anyone in the 1960s or ’70s has made was that Yoko “broke them up.” It’s clear the message sent from the public to these four blokes from Liverpool during their careers: “More, more more!”
Actually, while we’re on the topic of the band’s own reaction to their being thrust into the public eye, I’d like to present “The Ballad of John and Yoko” as a sort of indicator of that actual achievements these guys produced in their career. In “The Ballad of John and Yoko”; we have, basically, a song about fame, itself — it’s an ingenuous artistic creation having materialized within a condition of already being famous for one’s art, and whose semantics have directly to do with the very phenomenon of being a famous person, on account of one’s own commercially rendered creative art. Very few other artists in history have accomplished this: maybe The Rolling Stones (“Shattered”) and Eminem (“’Til I Collapse”), to name a select few. How’s the quality of the song? Eh, it went to #1 on the UK singles charts, so it could have been worse. I personally love it, but that’s a matter of opinion, of course.
I’m going to make the rest of this post kind of short, for time constraints, both my own, and, of a lot of other people, likely. The primary thing I’d like to say, in support of the obviousness of the band’s cataclysmic impact on pop music, is that, including radio pop itself, The Beatles were instrumental in informing three different movements in music — radio pop, psychedelic rock and classic rock. I’m not 100% sure, put I’m pretty certain that Paul McCartney invented the songwriting technique of repeating only a portion of the chorus, rather than the entire chorus, at the very, tail-end of a song. The Beatles did this with “I Saw Her Standing There”; which was released as a single during various portions of 1963, depending on locale. By the next year, of course, bands like Herman’s Hermits were doing the same thing, to great notoriety, in songs like “I’m into Something Good.” It’s a favorite technique of Billie Joe Armstrong’s (“Worry Rock”; “Oh Love”; “Wild One”) and was also employed by Phish on the indefatigable, mastodon “Back on the Train.”
I’m going to downplay, somewhat, the “psychedelic rock” piece I mention earlier, since, for one, Brian Wilson was more responsible for creating its artistic infrastructure, and, for another thing, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” are two songs by The Beatles I actually do find to be both overrated. Psychedelia was an obsession for them for a couple years in the mid-’60s, leading to, I think, moments of brilliance (and promptly delivered after Pet Sounds, mind you) like “Love You to”; with its hazy, warbly sitar intro, “Long, Long, Long” with its surreal devotion to musique concrete, and, of course, uncomfortable extremes like “Revolution 9.” What The Beatles brought to psychedelia, in form perhaps unparalleled in its historic importance, was an element of discomfort and terror, like that bizarre exclamation at the end of “Helter Skelter” of “I’ve got blistahs on my fingahs!”
Denying, anyway, that the crew were an elite classic rock band, would be completely asinine. Abbey Road (1969) was the last album they ever recorded [1], and differs starkly from their previous album, The Beatles (commonly referred to as “The White Album”), for its lack of sonic-disruptions-as-cinematic-effect, as well as its increased importance on seamless, organic sound and warm, memorable songwriting. Abbey Road is a classic rock album, by all accounts, having produced “Come Together”; which would be tackled in high-profile confidence (for better or worse) by Aerosmith, and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”; at which Halestorm has tried its hand, to great notoriety. I’ve heard Umphrey’s McGee tease the guitar riff in “Something” (a commemoration of George Harrison having just died, actually), as well as run through the entire late-album medley, spanning from “Sun King” through “The End.” These are all cover versions which have spawned just from one album, not counting their other 10 or so albums, all of which are also packed with tunes familiar to almost everyone. I’ve heard “Let it Be” sung in a black church, before, by black people. They have an album called 1, which is 20-something songs and composed exclusively of tunes which have reached #1 on the Billboard charts in at least one country. And they wrote all of their own songs. And yeah, Lennon and McCartney’s solo stuff sucks. I think Paul was devoting all of his post-Beatles efforts to his primary true love, Badfinger.
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[1] Although Let it Be was released after Abbey Road, most of it was recorded with Phil Spector in 1968 and early 1969, and then shelved for disagreements on production methods with Phil Spector and other complications.
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