Can't Buy Me Love, Hard Day's Night, Help!, Day Tripper, We Can Work It Out, Paperback Writer, Yesterday, Nowhere Man are mid-career Beatles, 1964-66. Most charting bands don't produce memorable pop songs like this over and over.
And then they made the more ambitious albums.
McCartney proved again later that he is an outstanding pop musician. Maybe I'm Amazed, Live and Let Die, etc.
He became one. None of them were very good in 1962. It's debatable how good they would have been without George Martin guiding them.
Are we knocking off points for not being a child prodigy?
Production was done in 60s Britain—still recovering from WWII. With two tracks most of the time. Only around Abbey Road time, do the albums sounds decent by modern standards despite millions focused on remastering. Apparently they/studio finally bought better equipment in that time frame.
Performance, well the guys were in their early twenties. Let's see what anyone else accomplished at that age. There are certainly better soloists on each instrument, but virtuosity is not enough to make compelling music.
And then it was done.
Aren't the Beatles just an example, though? The piece starts with jazz, and even mentions Beethoven got terrible reviews.
I think it's about a more general phenomenon than just the Beatles, though they do get most of TFA's time.
Aside from the raw popularity of the Beetles, there's been all these books, documentaries, and academic work. It's put them into a category like Shakespeare.
It's actually a national pastime, taking potshots at golden idols. The fact that folks don't do it much to the Beatles must mean, what? That folks probably like them?
They were objectively so influential that any contrarian take on this just sounds like bullshit to me.
I'm listening every day 80s radio during lunch and dinner with my kids and think 80s/90s was peak music, 70s was pretty great and it went really quick downhill in 00s.
There is still quite a lot of new electronic stuff worth listening to. Lots of it is derivative, but that has always been true for most pop music styles.
Whatever one may think about it, stuff like barker, raim, empty set, Laurel Halo, all sound very much post 90ies (the period I was a teenager, and started to listen to tons of electronic music).
That said, I wouldn't say things are standing still either in club music. I don't pretend to have been to a club in the past 5 years or so, but even though they played roughly the same genres there's definitely a difference in depth between the acts we danced to in the 00s and acts like Major Lazer and The Weeknd.
Maybe the genres are just sticking around longer and go through subtler changes. If you let teenage me hear Despacito I would've liked it but wouldn't be surprised. Major Lazer though would've blown my mind.
Back in the day it was revolutionary and important I guess, but by nowadays standards it's utterly mediocre movie despite people praising it as something amazing, but to be fair I don't think I'd find movie from CK era which I'd like while I have no problem to find better artists from Beatles era whose music I enjoy much more and like them even nowadays compared to present day music.
And one more unpopular opinion from someone who experienced jail like environment I think even recent highly rated Shawshank redemption while very good and enjoyable movie is romantic unrealistic fairy tale (for women) and I'd rather recommend everyone to watch Das Experiment to see more realistic display of prison I can sign, yet I've of them is rated asking best movies in history and the other is pretty much unknown.
Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band absolutely blew my teenage mind. I listened to it over and over again. Truly a unique and incredible album.
My uncle grew up when it was brand new and relayed a similar story years after I’d come across them independently. His friend said “check out the Beatles!” And he said “that band with I wanna hold your hand? That’s a girlie band!” But took his friends advice, then proceeded to go home and listen to Sergeant Peppers a dozen times in amazement.
Maybe I could chalk it up to some unrealized bias but it sure seemed like genuinely interesting and good music to me.
Conversely, I recognize exactly one song from the White Album, and couldn’t sing a line from any of them.
That's exactly what I think... The Beatles were my parents' generation, not mine but I heard them a lot. I'm listening to music from that era: but that'd be, say and YMMW, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, ...
I always looked at the Beatles as the commercial, pop, easy, and a bit "cheesy" band of their time.
The Beatles are still catchy more than half a century later but, yeah, even if it's an unpopular opinion it's just, to me, mass produced pop that's not particularly deep.
Why do you assume this? When Sgt. Peppers came out in 1967 -- which we now mythologize as a revolutionary step -- that same year you had equally adventurous records by Pink Floyd, The Byrds, Love, Cream, The Doors, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, the 13th Floor Elevators, and on and on.
If you draw yourself back to the early 60s, then there's still nothing about their music that other artists weren't making. If you want to say that they made the "rock band" thing happen, then that's highly debatable because there were an absolute plethora of garage rock (and surf rock) bands around at the time, and I'm sure they were compared endlessly to The Beach Boys. But even if they did make the "rock band" thing happen, that's a result of their popularity at the time and not necessarily whether their music was particularly unique.
They could see clearly about how they actually felt when hearing the music; they could see without the mist of the mythology that now influences us to see The Beatles as revolutionary.
They were allowed to point to Motown and say "this has better songwriting", or early Pink Floyd and say "this is more experimental/adventurous", and they wouldn't have to factor in things like 'influence' when evaluating how they actually felt when listening to the music.
There are (mostly young) people who have started doing it, maybe in connection with a recent post in here which was talking about the lack of a counter-culture (counter to that post, we still seem to have one).
They're seen as precursors of today's "pop optimism", granted, not as commercialised yet as today's pop, but definitely the most worthy predecessors. In today's gloomy and uncertain age that commercialised pop optimism doesn't sit well.
Funny, that reminds me how some 17/18 or so years ago at school some classmate told me that the music collection on my MP3 player wasn't bad, but somewhat a bit "too happy", or some words to that effect :-) – and I did like the Beatles already back then (though at that point I didn't yet have their complete albums) and still like them.
I think SRV had massive talent but a limited imagination when left to his own devices.
He had finally dried himself out and then died in a helicopter crash at 35.
Perhaps the Beatles really weren't that great, but were massively popular for reasons other than master craftsmanship.
Fast-forward a handful of decades, and few now dare voice a dissenting opinion.
(My own personal opinion is that they were great songwriters who never bothered to tighten up their production and performance chops. I disliked them on first listen, then gave The White Album very close attention twenty or thirty times, and that's where I landed.)