Beatles: Classic or Dud?

man, it's my birthday today, please don't spoil it!

I think sexy sadie is a beautiful tune and the piano arrangement is too good (wish I had it now so I could go on about this). Karma police has imcromprehensible giberish masquerading as lyrics (this can be a good thing but Thom Yorke lacks imagination to make it good) and the piano in the whole thing is set up to make you feel depressed. Radiohead cry all the way tot he bank...

Yes, the blue album covers the hits, but in doing so it leaves off quite a few of my favorite songs, and includes some I would just as leave not hear again. (In general, I can do without the anthemic late songs like "All You Need Is Love" or "Let It Be," though they have their good points.)

The Beatles legacy was exposed to me during a "Beatles A to Z weekend!!" on a local classic rock station. I made tapes of most of what I heard, starting somewhere in the middle of the B's. With a few exceptions, the early straight-ahead songs have never grabbed me. At this point I have Sgt. Pepper (obviously upgraded to a reissued LP), White Album, Hey Jude, Magical Mystery Tour, Rubber Soul, and two Abbey Roads. I would like to get Revolver, but might be slightly embarrassed to buy a copy.

I find it unfortunate that it's probably the aftershock of all the DUD! screamers which gives rise to my hesitation. There shouldn't be anything wrong with enjoying this band. Good songwriting, interesting studio experimentation, blah blah etc. I am by no means and avid fan, and the records dont often find their way onto the turntable anymore, but still i come down on the side of Classic.

this is just the sort of hysterics that I encounter among Beatles fans that can really put a lot of ppl off. That's before I realised the 'fans' and what the band is are two quite diff things and should be considered separetely. There are no sacred cows, and that includes the Beatles. There is far too much good music that hasn't got the beatles' name attached to it OK!

No.

Nononononononono.

For all my reservatiuons about those boys, they wrote too many absolute classics to be written off as duds. Judging on musical impact alone, the Beatles have inspired far too many other musicians to ever be devalued. Alright, so the White Album is horribly overrated, Let It Be is crap and all the early stuff is bubblegum, it's the stuff like Soul, Revolver, Submarine and Road which gets me going - songwriting like that is never going to stop tickling people, surely.

As for experientation and innovation, The Beatles may not have been as out there as some of their more obscure comtemporaries, but esentially as a pop band, they proved that it was possible to simultaneously push the envelope and write incredible accessible music. A lesson which has invaluable ramifications for pop.

Basically, the Beatles have written some fucking good tunes. I was listening to Paperback Writer last night in fact and that snare crack after the first refrain to bring it in and that high bass trill from Paul is sheer brilliance. The Beatles oeuvre is littered with fantastic musical moments which undergo repeated scutiny without ever shedding their fascination.

Classic.

That doesn't mean that the question should be answered "DUD!!", of course.

I still think the question probably shouldn't be answered because the responses are much less interesting than the usual c-or-d stuff.

Something that has come up - the Beatles-as-lullabies stuff. My parents owned a couple of Beatles recs and almost nothing else and I did spend a lot of my childhood listening to them, but for me I think that's where the root of my *non* fandom lies - the 'overfamiliarity' stuff as above, i.e. I'd be as likely to want to put on Sgt P as to put on "Puff The Magic Dragon".

I think I will buy a Beatles record. The compilation albums are too expensive though.

tom you should buy RUBBER SOUL first, and listen to it while reading the AESTHETICS OF ROCK and eating smoked oysters dipped in chocolate

sgt pepper = 7th beatles LP out on the 7 june 1967 my seventh birthday DO YOU SEE!! DO YOU SEE!!??

ps anyone who thinks ringo is not a perfect pop drummer is some kind of devolving zappa-fan imo

but when was a classic or dud thread ever any good anyway in terms of saying something that could change your mind in a 180 degree fashion. It can make you think abt soemthing on x artist but really that's as much as you're going to get (most of the time anyway). It's either classic or dud or somewhere in between. There can be some interesting arguments but if you heard an alb and you make up yr mind no thread on x artist will change anything drastically surely.

but I'm not interested in reading about them but i think this is a good replacement for that.

''I think I will buy a Beatles record. The compilation albums are too expensive though.''

You don't have to buy them surely. You can just borrow it from the local library (80p for 2 weeks at mine) and then just copy it onto tape. Most beatles recs should be there (unless you actually value holding them in which case just borrow a few and see which is the best one). I wish they did the same thing w/Sun ra (now THAT would have been worthwhile).

''Julia, my favourite love song of all-time, justifies the purchase of this album.''

At a time I first heard it there this new acoustic movement that NME invented (badly drawn boy etc.). This is surely the sort of thing they were up against. Heard some tracks on the radio and none of the bands came with as good a song.

''i like that song too, tho i think white album is in general a bit TOO diffuse (= they were no longer writing songs to impress/amaze each other, but had actually broken back into their constituent individual parts)''

very 'eclectic' i think...they try to go through a lot of types of arrangements with mixed results. It's part of the flaw and part of its goodness.

That doesn't follow. You could think the Bs were beyond criticism, but still think lots of other pop worth talking about. (My own position is not a million miles from this)

By saying The Beatles are the Best Ever it seems to me that assumptions are being made that what the Beatles were very good at doing - melodies, harmonies, use of the studio - are better or higher qualities than what the Beatles were OK or not very good at doing - 'funkiness' or 'aggression' or arguably lyric-writing, say. It also shuts off the things the Beatles couldn't/didn't do (sample or use computers, for instance). This is kind of what I meant by "rock criticism evolved as a way to talk about the Beatles" (and it's also kind of what is meant by "rockism"). It is a completely reasonable perspective - but not one that's 'beyond' argument.

Saying a question 'shouldn't' be asked is merely suggesting that while the question may be a valid one the discussion resulting is likely to be unproductive.

It's been my experience in talking about the Beatles that nobody on either side is able to muster very convincing arguments. No Beatles hater has ever been able to make me doubt the excellence of "A Day In The Life", just as no Beatles lover has been able to make me want to re-listen to "Hey Jude" and try and find something bearable in it.

(I'm someone who regularly goes back to music with fresh ears after reading about it, btw - I know some of you aren't).

Hmm...I think I have a goal.

So perhaps this is really a sense of the limits of 'C/D', rather than a disagreement re. whether we should talk about the Bs.

Once again, I think I very much agree with you about the typical *pointlessnes* of debates re. Beatles. (Possibly, though, I find all pop debates pointless in a way - no one has ever convinced me of anything in a pop debate, and vice versa.)

Morrissey too - bonus!

>>> inclusivity is too rarely celebrated in pop to kick Carter aside. And besides I love how folksy and rudimentary Carter were - nobody else has ever sounded quite like them.

Your last point is good. But the 'inclusivity' one I don't buy. I feel like there's been loads of it, rhetorically; and when that record came out the gesture already felt very tired *in specifically carter-USM terms*. Maybe I am misjudging here cos of B&S and Murdoch's worthy, dull rhetoric of inclusivity.

>>> THE BEATLES - "For No One"
So, I finally bought a Beatles album. "For No One" is the best track on the patchy Revolver, McCartney's singing on it a measured miracle (I could lose a day in those vowels). Why did everyone rip off Lennon's throaty yowlings and ignore McCartney's proud, stiff-backed regionalism?

'Patchy'? How? I mean, what's Bad on it?

Apart from that, you are on the money - and you are bringing out sth specific that seems almost never to have been raised. The precision, the well-spokenness of Macca (despite his love of Little Richard / sandpaper vox etc) - and the relation (whatever it is) between that and the 'regional' quality: this is a key overlooked issue. It almost deserves a thread in itself.

>>> even if it wasn't Vini Reilly's piano would net it a place on this list.

Yes - the piano is maybe the strongest musical touch of all. Of course, the piano on 'For No One' is crucial too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z2vU8M6CYI

(I'm sure we're all a bit fed up with the Fabs at this point, but it's been quite interesting reading early-ilx having a chew over whether the Beatles are any good or not, whilst some dish out the challops as per)

Not much has changed, but they live under water.

we're at the very tail end of the period when they will be listened to alongside contemporary popular music on the same or at least similar terms. Soon their status will become increasingly like, say, Duke Ellington's: revered in theory but listened to only by oldsters and the minority of enthusiasts prepared to work at breaking down the barriers that makes their music sound dated to most ears.

i dunno about this...

especially with the remasters, i get the feeling that these fellows' records will be accessible for quite a while

Oh that Beatles 3000 thing is HILARIOUS!
"Sgt. Pet Sounds and the Spiders From Aja"

LOL at the joke about the Napster-era mislabeling.