ReservoirAngel said:
It seems that with almost every band in the world, there is a clearly labelled large group of people who like them, and a large group of people who don't. And this has been accepted for ages.
But the Beatles seems to break this. Apparently, from my experience, admitting to disliking the Beatles is like a social death sentence. Why? I get and respect that the Beatles managed to find some kind of 'timeless' quality market in their music.
And yet it seems people who hate the Beatles are treated as outcasts quite badly because of it. I've asked people why it's so hard for Beatles fans to accept people not liking them, and the response I got was "because those people are obviously ignorant to the history of music".
This utterly fucking baffles me. No other band in the world needs fucking CONTEXT to find them appealing, so why is that the Beatles seem to be this isolated, protected entity when if you don't like them you must be an ignorant beast with no knowledge of music?
It seems they are absolutely immune to the whole 'different strokes for different folks' thing, as if you don't like them, your opinion must mean nothing due to your apparently ignorance.
Personal story time: My dad recently got himself that new-fangled re-release of all the Beatles' stuff in the big box set. My mum went out and he was sat downstairs blasting that shit so loud that I could hear it over my own music upstairs (oddly I was listening to the Rolling Stones at the time, which is another band that seems to sometimes have this 'immune to critique' thing going on) so I went and told him to turn it down...at which point he refuses, because "it's the Beatles. it's better than any shit you listen to, so i aint turning it down".
My dad's normally a nice guy, so him turning into a dick when asked to turn down the Beatles was shocking. I'm not using this to say all Beatles fans are cunts, cause I know they aren't. But it was weird to think people hold that high a view of the band.
Erm...I don't really have any discussion-type questions here...this was mostly just a rant, so I dunno how exactly to round this off...
...erm...I like bacon? I dunno...
Firstly, you don't need to add token discussion value to an OP that already has plenty of discussion value inherent in its question. Please spread the word to other forum users that this is not necessary. Sure, people asking stupid *****-ass questions do need to add discussion value, but your question is quite valid and there's a lot here that can be discussed already.
Now brace yourself, because the actual answer to your question follows, and it's long.
Nobody got it quite on the button. A few people did get it partially right though. The guy with the Phd got it right about the baby boomers, that's part of it, a certain mass of fans in one age group is going to certainly have more commercial weight and thus give something a higher commercial profile, but that doesn't explain why people chose The Beatles as the group to be deified as opposed to anything else, and it doesn't explain why they received both popular
and critical acclaim (many pop bands tend to just get one, or just get the other). The self-contained group thing was new at the time, but The Beatles weren't the only ones doing that. The quality of albums is obviously subjective so that's not it (I personally am not into The Beatles, I find their music frankly boring. I probably would have liked it if I was young when they came out but listening to it now I think their music has aged badly, musically and especially lyrically.) The "they revolutionised music" is about as warm as people got but that's a very vague statement, after all everybody probably thinks that their favourite group "revolutionised music" in some key way, don't they.
Brace yourself because this next bit might get a bit technical, but if you don't understand it that's okay, just keep reading because it will all eventually make sense either way.
What the Beatles did that nobody else did quite as well, or as brazenly, was they made catchy pop music that broke the acceptable harmonic structural rules for pop/rock music in their day. The slow songs in pop had a bit more variation, but upbeat songs done by musical groups that young people were interested in generally fit one or two distinct "flavours", the 12-bar flavour which is generally I-IV-I-V-IV-I like "Rock Around The Clock", the doo-wop style I-vi-IV-V like "Earth Angel", and the classical and jazz influenced boring circle-of-fifths ii-V-I and variations thereof, straight out of the theory textbook about harmonic progression. So as you can imagine, pop music was all sounding very similar - complaints from parents of the day that "this shit sounds all the same" actually had a grain of truth in them back then - more than such complaints nihilistic Internet forum douchebags have about current popular music now. Bands like The Beach Boys were slowly nudging things in a more experimental direction and they did mess around with things like V-II in "Little Deuce Coupe" but it was The Beatles who ripped apart the whole formula, tore it up and then pissed on it - and then wrote a catchy pop song that teenage girls really liked with the remains.
The first song released by The Beatles was "Love Me Do" but their first
huge hit was another track called "Please Please Me".
The verse is a pretty straightforward I-IV-I, but then the chorus goes IV-ii-vi-IV-I-IV-V-I. Nobody was doing anything remotely like that in upbeat pop music in that day and age. Then there's a middle bit which is pretty standard IV-V-I but then at the ending it's all fucking IV-V-I-bIII-ii-V7-I... wait a sec
what is a goddamn bIII doing in a major key pop song? YOU CAN'T DO THAT!
Another very early Beatles song. That's a standard 12-bar blues I-IV-I-V-IV-I (with 7ths) in the verse, but then in the chorus it's III7-vi-ii-iii-I. The fuck? Those last two chords alone are a completely verboten harmonic movement, let along the fact that there's iii and III7 both hanging out together in the same chorus without even a fucking prepared modulation. No question about it, for its day this was
different music.
Your average teenage girl or boy didn't understand all this harmonic rulebook crap, of course (and neither will most people reading this). However, it certainly did register subconsciously - they might not have known the whys and wheres, but they knew if nothing else, they were listening to a very new, unique sound. The beats were more or less the same, the instruments were the same, but
something was different, and back in the days when everyone else was going I-IV-I-V-IV-I this was a huge breath of fresh air, to have a band that genuinely did sound different to everything else, yet similar enough to be enjoyed, that still had sweet melodies you could sing along to, a rock beat, loud (for their day) guitars, a cool image (boy did their haircuts make a fuss even back in the day when they all wore bowl cuts, they couldn't be interviewed without umpteem questions about their hair), were cute guys so girls liked them, were good at talking to the press, and they had that awesome high almost-screaming thing they did every now and then which was intense yet still melodic. With lots of bored young louty directionless baby-boomers milling around being bored on a weekend looking for something to do, this stuff really captured people's imaginations. Hence, in 1962, if you didn't like The Beatles, you were nobody. Imagine sitting down to listen to the weekly pop chart on the radio (TV pop charts hadn't been invented yet, not enough bands had music videos) and finding out that
nine out of the top ten singles were by Justin Bieber. People would probably nearly die of shock, then they'd probably start half a dozen whiny threads in this forum all with the same topic, presuming that somebody cared. That chart situation actually happened with The Beatles, that's how much people were into them. This was indeed a music "revolution" in a literal sense because they overthrew the old guard of 50s rock and doo-wop, that stuff was gradually forgotten about once The Beatles hit their stride. 50s rock was "old person music" by about 1965, and all the people still into that 50s stuff were whining about "this new screaming crap made by guys with funny haircuts that go over their eyes" - sound familiar?
Later on The Rolling Stones, The Monkees and countless other "Mersey Beat" bands appeared, and fucked around even more with the scraps of the harmonic rulebook that The Beatles had already peed on and threw in the furnace, but for a short while there were only two types of bands - The Beatles, and other music that was not The Beatles. The Beatles "beat" everyone to the charge, and for that, they get the "revolutionary" tag.
Having said that, I fucking hate The Beatles, mainly just from overexposure and being told they were "the greatest thing ever" when growing up, but also other reasons which I won't go into because it's not really on-topic - suffice to say that it's just my personal taste. There's only one rule for music really: if it sounds good to you, it's awesome, if it doesn't, then it's not. Everyone likes different shit so just tell your Dad that just because something was "important" once doesn't mean it's now not past its use-by date, like a carton of highly nutritious milk that has been left out on the bench too long.
(damn, last post on the page, hopefully someone actually reads this besides the OP, heh)
)
