The Beatles — Their New Sounds
Currently, I’m supposed to be writing a series of critical articles on The Beatles and determining their actual level of greatness. One of the worst problems of my life is my habit of assuming vast and all-consuming projects guaranteed to destroy sanity and consume all waking moments — with the added problem that the internet likes text to be consumable in less than 10 minute increments.
Now of course the reason I am taking this task is I do think the Beatles are pretty great and I would like to see if I can add anything meaningful to the discussions of their greatness, to get some perspective on that greatness, and to consider arguments against the same greatness — because I’m a glutton for critical punishment.
Arguments against their greatness
Anything popular enough for long enough will develop those who dislike it, in a recent post on Hacker News several people commented that they essentially did not find the Beatles that impressive.
Quotes
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.
80’s kid here. I never liked any Beatles songs. Not a single one. And “classic rock” from the 60’s and 70’s is my go-to genre. I always assumed their recognition was more historical. They kicked off the pop band phenomenon as we know it today, and the base rhythms of their songs were no doubt influential. But I’ve never felt that their actual songs were very good. Many of them are downright corny and cringe by the time I listened to them.
These quotes convey a feeling that The Beatles are old and antiquated.
Are These Quotes Meaningful
In an article on how to speak meaningfully about art
There are 4 categories you should be able to divide art into to be able to speak meaningfully about art — those being:
1. Art that is good and to your taste
2. Art that is bad and to your taste
3. Art that is good and not to your taste
4. Art that is bad and not to your taste.
It does somewhat feel like the people who do not like the Beatles in the HN discussion above are not able to consider that something they do not like might be good nonetheless, still for the purposes of analysis we will treat it as if there is a concern that the Beatles are actually bad and not just not to some people’s tastes.
The Old Beatles
In the previous article in this series I dealt with the songs that definitely sound ‘old’, meaning songs that hearing them without any familiarity with the song itself, one would naturally think that song is old. Maybe would even have a very good guess as the year the song was made.
The purpose of this article is to consider the songs that sound new, which means that without any familiarity with the songs themselves you might not be able to reliably place when the song was made.
The quotes above imply that all of The Beatles music sounds ‘old’ but that seems really to be caused by familiarity with the songs, it requires a strong critical faculty to approach something one knows is ‘old’ as if it were potentially ‘new’.
When Old Music sounds Modern
In the article above I said
This is really the temporal marker between when music sounds legitimately old in our culture or not, things in the later 60s up to our present day sound like they could be from our day — unless they have a specific sound that dates them and even so that ‘sound’ can manufactured.
And
The Beatles pre-1966 sound old and from Rubber Soul onwards sound Modern.
The reasons given why old music can sound modern
Oldness coexists with newness
Oldness in any mass medium is sort of weird, because mass media’s ability to replicate product means that old music coexists with new without problems. This same phenomenon can be see in books.
Modern Technology can make the old new
digital remastering of old songs is well enough advanced that it can obfuscate the origins, and at any rate lo-fi is its own aesthetic marketing segment
The Modern Beatles
Ironically the bad reviews of The Beatles above came from a discussion of the following post
Why Did the Beatles Get So Many Bad Reviews?
An inquiry into how critics stumble
www.honest-broker.com
Which asserts
I now realize that the Beatles were getting punished for how quickly they were pushing rock music ahead. If you read enough of these hit pieces, you keep hearing the frustration that the new Beatles album doesn’t sound like the previous one.
if you are continually sounding different from album to album you might end up with the summation of another critic paraphrased in the old sounds article:
half of these songs sound like Oasis, the other half like every other band that has ever existed.
The Beatles have 227 songs, but like I’ve already said their modern sounding period starts from Rubber Soul onward, discounting songs released after their breakup and orchestral tracks that gives us slightly over 100 songs that may end up being counted as the modern Beatles (there are of course outliers like Run for Your Life which do not sound modern, those will be removed from the list), but aside from these there are a few earlier songs that are also modern sounding, or in the case of Yesterday, sounding like they were pulled out of some primordial sea of song — eternal and timeless.
I’ll deal with these songs in a separate article, keeping in mind that the internet — and Medium’s algorithm - does not reward longer articles.
For now, I have put the songs that we can consider in The Beatles Modern period into a playlist — again, disregarding songs not on albums made while they were still together (Let It Be was released shortly after their official breakup)
Other Articles of Interest
This article was written by I.G Agent 19 who prefers more modern music to The Beatles, yet nonetheless feels compelled to write these articles because he is a sucker.
