Beatles - What's the big deal?

On a side note is there a way for a regular member to ban another regular member?? :lol: Just kidding.

Actually, I agree with you. To me its always just been 60's pop like lots of other pop. Ohh I think they are all four great musicians but I have heard alot of other music that moved me more. Its just a personal opinion.

I do like the Beatles, I just dont LOVE the Beatles.

My 7yo son would disown me if he could read that I just wrote that. Guess he better learn to read better.

Geoo

The attraction the Beatles had for me was in the context of the times and what was "popular" when they were at the forefront of the creative drive in pop music. many genres and/or styles owe much of their success to the Beatles.
In many ways the same argument is often taken up about TV shows, movies, and things that came from the sixtys. the context of the times in comparison is what it was all about.

Take "Star Trek" for instance, i still remember watching the first episode with my dad and how groundbreaking it was at that time.

The long lived popularity of the many Hits they had is also supported by the vast number of songs loved by many that weren't "hits"

Think of how many bands they influenced.
Listen to their albums and how much their music changed.
Beethoven just sounds like 18th century symphonic music to me. What's the big deal?
Chuck Berry, just 50s r&b, right?
I'm being facetious, of course, but in the interest of making a point.

Bob Dylan on the Beatles in 1964:

We were driving through Colorado [and] we had the radio on and eight of the Top Ten songs were Beatles songs. In Colorado! “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” all those early ones.
They were doing things that nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid. .. But I kept it to myself that I really dug them. Everybody else thought they were for the teenyboppers, that they were gonna pass right away. But it was obvious to me that they had staying power. I knew they were the direction where music had to go...in my head the Beatles were it. In Colorado, I started thinking but it was so far-out I couldn't deal with it  eight in the Top Ten.
It seemed to me a definite line was being drawn. This was something that never happened before.
Bob Dylan 1971

They reshaped the way we listen to music.
Does their music sound like 60s music to you? That's because they changed the sound of music in the 60s. You've got it reversed -- 60s music imitates their sound. They paved the way.

You've got to make a distinction between what you do or don't like and understanding the power their music had in its own time and the way they revolutionized music. The first stadium concerts -- the first music videos -- the first attempts to create a sonic landscape that went beyond just the sound of a rock n roll band playing in a dance hall. The first global television broadcast of a rock performance. The list goes on and on. And the individual members invented the first benefit concerts -- Harrison at the concert for Bangla Desh and Lennon's Christmas concert to benefit UNICEF.

There's plenty of reason for considering the Beatles significant -- not least of which is the regard even today's musicans have for them. Even Ozzy Osbourne got into the business because of the Beatles!

'nuff said.

Muse,

I figured you'd have something to say about what I wrote and I can't say that I can really disagree with any of it, yet if I sit and think man I really want to listen to some music....the Beatles would be no where near the top of the list for me..as a matter of fact they wouldn't even be on the list.

And to be honest I sometimes think..is it just me? Why doesn't their music do anything for me? I can't answer that question myself.

It's not like I can say I hate their music or anything but it just doesn't move me and I don't know why.

Ya, know.. I think that Muse made a good point and they probably arent in your top 10 but pretty much a guarantee that their influence is in atleast half of our top ten picks.

Not to straddle the fence or anything. I dont listen to Beatles much either but I know alot of the stuff I do listen to is the way it is because of them.

Geoo

Cnev --
I wish you liked them but you don't. For example, I'm not that moved by Led Zeppelin -- I don't think their music held up very well for me over the decades. But I understand Zep's significance. I can't really explain why I think their music rings kind of hollow for me now but it does. But my point is that we need to make a crucial distinction between personal preferences (do I put zep/Beatles on the stereo often because I need to/ want to hear it?) and understanding that a band is significant, which both of these bands are.

Hope that made sense.

Indeed, importance or impact has little to do with liking the actual songs. And to me, impact doesn't mean much actually. I mean, if noone would have copied the beatles that woulnd't have made their music and less, right? And besides, one could easily argue that the Beatles influenced the RHCP, but who influenced the beatles? They didn't pull those diminished chords out of their behinds, they must have heared them 'somewhere'. I find it hard to believe that the Beatles build the foundation for modern music (as I've heared some people claim), if anything they were the last shift of builders finishing the foundation. In any case they definitely had an influence and are liked by many. Neither matters much in your decision to actually buy the albums or not.

Coming from someone who wasn't there fifty years ago and might be completely wrong. :lol:

Well, I have to place myself firmly in cnev's camp. I recognise their significance, but their music never did very much for me. I have a very eclectic taste, but (in the 60's) I would have listened to the Stones, Yardbirds, Animals, Who, Kinks, etc. before the Beatles. They never managed psychedelia like Jimi.

Tim,

Makes perfect sense..and my headline was alittle misleading..I recognize the significance they had..although to me some of it just comes from the fact they came out in the infancy of rock and roll before most other people..

I wish I knew why they don't do it though and it's not like I dislike their music I just don't love it...but I will say that they do more than their share of pop rubbish..

Again only my opinion but songs like I wanna Hold your hand and Eight days a week are just pop and if they came out today I don't think they'd even get a lot of airplay, but at the time girls were fainting when they sung those songs.

On the other hand I really like David Bowie, I don't really know why I do although I have an idea, maybe he was influenced by the Beatles although I've never heard it. And he's written a bunch of pop rubbish too, yet I can listen to Bowie albums for hours(mostly early stuff though)

I guess I used the Beatles as an example only becasuse they seem to be the #1 band that people here still talk about daily and I somehow feel I'm abnormal for not liking their music and I was wondering if there were other "peopl" like me out there.

I think maybe one reason they don't do it for me is that most of their songs were very poppish/ even bubblegum popish, they never really were into the heavy overdriven lead guitar sound that I think is what I like..damn now I don't even know what I like anymore.

When I think Beatles I don't think rock and roll I think pop/rock.

Grey,

I would say I would have listened to all of them before the Beatles too!

While the beatles never really did much for me as a group, they were a little to goodie goodie for me, I do find myself listening to them as individuals much more than I ever did as a group. Especially George Harrison, I find myself listening to something of his at least 1-2 times a week.

Tele,

Yes that's a good discription goodie-goodie..I just don't think rock and roll when I think Beatles more fluff than substance...OK fluff isn't the best word but the best I could think of

Hmm, songs banned on the BBC. American radio stations afraid to play "Please, please me" because it sounded like the singer was inciting his girlfriend to an act of fellatio, the orgasmic rise of the chorus in their performance of "Twist and Shout", the chorus to "Girl" which repeats a vulgar term for the breast, the first overt drug references of "turning on" in "A Day in the Life", the Manson family claiming "Helter Skelter" as a call for violent revolution, Beatle albums being burned in 65 throughout the US in response to Lennon's comments on the state of contemporary Christianity. Nah, these guys weren't so squeaky clean. Lennon and Ono nude on the cover of his solo album -- nude and interracial on top of that. These weren't just happy moptops. That's just the myth Andrew Loog Oldham used to try to make the Stones seem more dangerous than the Beatles. And listen to one woman writer's reminiscence of her e 1964 experience:
My own consciousness snapped into shape in 1964 at a Beatles concert. I still remember melting into a massive crowd of jumping, screaming girls, all thinking and feeling the same lascivious thoughts. It was my generation's turn to let our libidos go public. I was twelve, just beginning to understand that sex was power: my first feminist epiphany. As the ‘60s tore on, the crowd of girls, now women, was still moving together, marching against the war in Vietnam
Elizabeth Hess quoted in McKinney's groundbreaking study Magic Circles: The Beatles in Myth and History. This was a profoundly libidinous liberation. And besides, they crossed gender boundaries with that hairstyle. Did you have long hair back then? Guess why.... The Beatles started it all (and got the Stones their first recording contract with Decca on top of that!)

And don't forget that people like Ginsberg and Leary dug them and both Ginsberg and Leary were thought to be dangerous in their own right. Nah, the lovable moptop image was just that and it didn't hold. Come on, McCartney discussion LSD use in the press. It just didn't sit well with the parents.

They may have been closet "bad" boys on the inside but they did not portray that "bad" boy rock and roll image..at least not to me.

They really were the start of "Boy" bands..they just played instruments...OK that was a joke.