Nowadays, I prefer their more experimental work. Though I love most of their songs. The Beatles were one of if not the most diverse bands of all time. Their music spans so many genres. No wonder they have so many fans! As I wrote in some other posts , I consider The Beatles to be one of the greatest lyrical bands of all time.
John, in particular, had such a special way with words. And this resulted in some of the greatest words of all time! Their lyrics touch on nearly everything; from love, to spirituality, to complete nonsense, to made-up characters, to politics, to… We certainly ended up with some beautiful lines! The Beatles broke so many of the expectations made by the establishment. A lot of the bands that went before had a bassist at the back, a drummer playing almost jazzy and a rhythm guitarist playing simple chords to the side.
The Beatles turned this analogy on its head. When it was the norm for popular musicians to have their songs written for them, The Beatles came along and wrote a majority of their tunes themselves.
They became the most popular artist in America at the time, a place where it was unheard of for British bands to be successful. They simply gave up touring. And they celebrated it in so many ways, too!
From the beginning, each Beatle was marketed with contrasting personalities, showing them as individuals within their band. And they were very individual in real life, too. This is also shown in their songs. The Beatles expressed themselves and who they were in their songwriting, as songwriters do. A fan can easily tell a John song apart from a Paul song, and a George song, and a Ringo song because of this.
The Beatles and their brand of individuality have helped so many young people find their identity, over the years. Myself included. And since then, pretty much rock or pop artist since has been influenced by the band, one way or another. The Beatles are probably the most influential band of all time. The Beatles also influenced rock music in general. Ringo is often credited as one of the forefathers of modern rock drumming — same goes for John, Paul and George. Artificial double tracking was also invented in a Beatles session.
And they were the first band to use a Mellotron, and one of the first to use a Moog. They revolutionised pop culture, too. Though many older people were shocked at first, they made it socially acceptable for men to have longer hair. Not to mention the countless mentions of them in TV, film, video games and other music. Just like their musical influence, The Beatles influence on pop culture is practically immeasurable. And I love them! And the music clip. And various types of camera shots.
And with being the first great rock film. That makes it a pretty influential flick, and arguably the best of the five Beatles movies made. Of course, the music is great, too. And the wonderfully witty humour!
According to the special features disc on the DVD, there are plenty of influential camera techniques in it, as well. Yellow Submarine is a classic. Up till this point definitely a great group.
Not a rock group or a revolutionary force but still great enough to be worthy of all the hype. Rubber Soul : the first hint that the Beatles wanted a change.
There is a candid attempt to add hidden meaning to the songs. Hints at drug use are abundant as is the influence of Dylan and the Byrds. There are initial signs of the banal McCartney love songs to emerge in future years — Michelle Ma Belle!!!. Gone are the rhythmic, exciting numbers that got all the girls screaming — the Beatles concert years are behind them.
Grade: B. Revolver : Electric Rock has replaced the folk rock of the previous album and once again the vitality is back: Got to get You into my Life, Taxman, And your bird can Sing. Several songs, notably Tomorrow Never Knows, offer a shift to the East with the use of the sitar. At the time many critics hailed Revolver as one of the greatest albums of all time. In retrospect their praise seems overrated. The songs are strong but the mixture of different styles make it more a unconnected collection of songs than a concept album.
In my opinion no. Marketed as a concept album it falls flat after the second song and leaves us with a batch of psychedelically touched pieces that are unlikely to get you excited today. A great album cover but not my favourite album or even my favourite Beatles album by far. Grade: B-. Magical Mystery Tour : not really worth mentioning. Can you really listen to All you need is Love or Flying without throwing up? Grade: C-. Not really a group album at all.
This album has enough good songs to fill a short, single album but it as a double album it is full of garbage. Even George and Ringo got in the act with Piggies and Goodnight. Did they really believe they they could sell anything? A real embarrassment. Just let me give them an E and leave it at that. Abbey Road : After three previous no shows, no one really saw this coming. My favourite Beatles album by far. The Beatles finally get it together again.
Let it Be : I wish they had. The title song is more gospel than Beatles. Grade: D-. So there you have it. Six great albums, three not so great and four pretty awful ones. So were they really that great. As a rock and roll group they could even get your grandmother up and dancing.
As rock psychedelic revolutionists they were out of their league. Totally disagree with your ratings. A few of the songs you called throwaways are some of my favorite songs! Rubber Soul is one of their best albums!
The only rating I somewhat agree with is of the White Album. That one did have some garbage as filler Number Nine…. The Beatles were so good and unique that even their throwaway songs were better than anything else out there at the time. Nobody else even comes close… and they did it all in a 6 year period! But you totally make a fool of yourself with the low ratings for Rubber soul, Revolver, Pepper and the White album!
This is strange. Had the same thing been true for our generation - that the pop music that superintended our lives dated from before World War I - it would have been more than strange, bizarre.
Why have they lasted? The reason we usually give is that they reflected their time, were a mirror of a decade, the 60s, that we still long for. But the longer that I have listened to them and the more that their time recedes into history, the more vital they sound. I wonder, even, if truly historic pop figures don't always have a backwards relation to their time. Charlie Chaplin, one of the few artists to have a comparable allure, was at work after World War I, the era of the automobile and the machine gun, one of the most disruptive moments in human history.
But Chaplin's work, rooted in Victorian theatre and the Dickensian novel, evokes the values of the time before. His art, energetic on the surface, was elegiac beneath. I think this is true of the Beatles, too. The Beatles were not provocateurs, though often mystics, and their great subject was childhood gone by, and what to make of the austere, rationed, but in many ways ordered and secure English world that they had grown up in, and that was now passing before their eyes, in part because of the doors they had opened.
Their most enduring work, the singles Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane, tell on one side of the dream memory of a Liverpool garden where a lonely alienated boy could find solace, and on the other of a Liverpool street where a bright, sociable boy could see the world. Remembered sounds - of brass bands and 20s rick-a-tick ornament their music and children's books. The Alice books particularly, fill their lyrics. Sexual intercourse may have begun, as Philip Larkin says, with their first LP, but their subsequent ones rarely had too much intercourse with sex.
Their greatest hit singles, She Loves You, and Hey, Jude are songs of avuncular counsel, wise advice given by one friend to another who has got in over his head in a love affair. Peter Sellers did a hilarious piece as a middle-aged Irishman in a pub, using the words of "She Loves You" as natural dialogue passed over the pub table.
Apologise to her. The Beatles' music endures above all because we sense in it the power of the collaboration of opposites. John had reach. He instinctively understood that what separates an artist from an entertainer is that an artist seeks to astonish, even shock, his audience. Paul had grasp, above all of the materials of music, and knew intuitively that astonishing art that fails to entertain is mere avant-gardism.
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