I'm actually not a huge fan of the Beatles* but wow, I really enjoyed this essay.
* I think it's because they are simply so good (an the sense explained in this essay) that I just heard them too much over the last 50+ years and they have become as much a universal cultural cliche as, say, Shakespeare. I have certainly listened to them a lot, with pleasure, but not so much in the past couple of decades.
I was a teenager in the 1980s. For some reason, the Beatles were never on the radio (at least not the stations I listened to). So, I grew up not really familiar with the Beatles music. I watched the documentary and was surprised by how enjoyable a lot of their music is. I was also surprised at how very little I recognized. You would think that with such a popular band I would have heard their music at least occasionally over the past 50 years.
I grew up with their albums (my hippy mom had a few from their psychedelic period, my step father had some of their last few).
If you listen to the albums, not what the DJ's spin in the radio, you got a much richer tapestry of songs, maybe a greater respect for their creativity, inventiveness.
As an example, people unfamiliar with the Beatles complete catalog have of late been flipping over "Tomorrow Never Knows" [1] (from 1966!) and overlooked gems like [2] "Hey Bulldog".
And some people thought they were just "Yesterday" and "Yellow Submarine"....
I love tomorrow never knows, the bass and drums are just unbelievably tight, and I don't have any idea how they were able to do all that creative sampling stuff using magnetic tape.
There was a technical constraint: you pretty much always listened to the whole side of an album so heard a bunch of songs. With many bands there were clunkers and fillers but surprisingly, as noted by the article, there were fewer — barely any, really — such in the Beatles œvre.
I only knew them through Red and Blue albums and somehow it created one vision of the beatles that is split from reality. So much I don't want to watch Jackson's movie.
There were quite a few deep cuts and some of their influences there that unless one listened to every Beatles record and saw their interviews one might not recognize, only the big hits got airplay on genre stations (some pop, some classic rock, some countdown best of) 10-20 years later. I'm about the same age but had all their albums. The last few albums had eclectic mix of songs compared to earlier pop hits centered albums.
Sometimes an artist is so influential that to go back to discover them for the first time, from a modern perspective, they can sound cliche ... when in fact they invented the cliches. Right?
I have chatted with coworkers after "The Lord of the Rings" films came out who had not read Tolkien but after seeing the movies thought that the story was fairly derivative. Maybe not such a surprising take if you allow that nearly all fantasy since Tolkien has been so heavily influenced by him that his fingerprints are everywhere — in D&D, films like "Willow", etc.
I remember hearing Raydio's hit "Jack and Jill" [1] back in 1978 when it came out (I was 14 years old) and it was probably the first synthesizer I had ever heard in a song. I cannot even describe to you how alien and wonderful that sounded when I first heard it. Electronics in music would become so mainstream of course that it is hard to "shock my ears" any longer and even harder for someone used to it to go back and hear this song from over 40 years the way my "virgin ears" heard it.
True, but there's also the tendency of people to look at a fairly rich period of change and wrongly attribute the new ideas to just one or two popular people/groups. This happens a lot with the Beatles (you even get extreme ideas like the Beatles creating the genre of rock) but it's not uncommon with other bands from the 60's either (Velvet Underground, to name one prominent example).
If you listen to a lot of 60's music, you find a ton of interesting ideas coming from all over the place, and coming fast. It's interesting how something that sounds so out of place one year sounds pretty normal two or three years later. The Beatles did interesting stuff, but I haven't found a lot that seems ahead of it's time the way, say, the Kinks using power chords in '64 does.
I don't know: fuzz bass, guitar feedback, orchestral pieces in a rock song, the "concept album", reverse guitars/vocals, countless other studio tricks. I read Geoff Emrick's book "Here, There and Everywhere" and he goes into great detail on the new ground the Beatles forged.
Interesting to me too reading about it, they would create/introduce something new like a tape loop, use it on just one song, and then move on. Where other bands would define their entire sound by just such a novelty.
The thing is, people tend to exaggerate how many of these the Beatles actually were first with. For example, here's fuzz bass from 1961[1], and another instrumental from 1961 with a lot of fuzz[2]. Both by Grady Martin, who's hardly a household name.
There was a lot of musical experimentation during this time period coming form all over. There's a tendency to collapse all of that to just a few popular bands, and then pretend they're the lone geniuses who invented everything.
It is true but consider also that whoever made the first song with a new tech which became popular actually was the first to truly make it work well enough to make it popular.
I listened to everything by the Beatles that I could get my hands on to make a playlist for my wife. The theme was "Beatles-adjacent but as good or better". The Beatles finally clicked for me.
> they have become as much a universal cultural cliche
Same thing happened to me when I first listened to U2's Joshua Tree and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. The first halves just sound like Greatest Hits records. But nope, they're just so ubiquitous that I've already heard half the album through cultural osmosis.
He is far from alone in thinking that. Even among music critics that are generally positive about U2 there has always been a fair amount of criticism of his voice.
TIL what that actually means (the wiki bit below). Its also the name of a hearing aid company in Ireland [0], making it even more ironic. Pretty sure this is where the name originated from.
Found out that (according to wikipedia)[1]:
"is an alteration of bonavox, a Latin word which translates to "good voice"."
There are a number of artists where if you hear them on the radio at the supermarket or whatever, it sounds like boring pop background noise, but if you actually sit down and listen, you understand how special it is. Cat Stevens was like that for me.
It's become fashionable to say that the Beatles are bad (maybe you don't enjoy the music, but they were revolutionary) or to trivialize them as a boy band (they were, but even early on they were so much more). I don't particularly love them, but it's hard not to be fascinated by their fairly brief career.
I always felt that even if ABBAs songs might be catchy and perfectly put together, they lacked depth. They were shallow. They had very little to say to their fellow human beings except "I am super trooper dancing queen"
It's pop (shallow I can see), but it's a masterpiece. The drum groove, the piano locks, the bass, the harmonies, the recording it's all just perfect fit and flows from start to finish.
My favorite Swedish band was Army of Lovers. Well-done pop-music as well but it also gives the impression, maybe just an illusion of depth. https://youtu.be/cUo0YkLyrjU
Their only song worth the effort is Waterloo, but hey what a song. It was the year of dinosaur bands doing more dinosaur music, and Waterloo was such a tremendous breath of fresh air. Really wonderful, it was.
Funny, I've found that enough time can heal the "overexposure" and I can listen again. Sometimes it takes years, as in 5 to 10. Speaking of the Beatles, I have pretty much all of their songs completely memorized so I need to take long breaks. For quite a while I would listen to them every couple of years and that was it.
I'm now conscious of when I'm overplaying something and lay off it for a while.
A similar thing happens for me when songs are used in commercials or movies and I subsequently have trouble listening to them without the visual association taking over. This has "ruined" many songs for me in the past, but after enough time away I can thankfully appreciate the song on its own.
” This fatigue cannot be cured by decades of not hearing it.”
But it also can. I caught myself enjoying old one hit wonders that I hated at the time due to listening to it so much. Then decades later, I could enjoy them.
It helps if you play an instrument. And especially if you switch from let's say a guitar to a bass or a keyboard or drums. You don't have to be good. But pretty soon you'll hear new layers in old songs you thought you know fully.
I can enjoy a lot of music I wouldn't otherwise like, if I listen to one of two instruments within. In my opinion, playing an instrument, not matter how badly, greatly expands the joy you get from music.
That too. For songs I listened the most I even prefer cover versions now. The more the cover strays from the original - the better. You still have the song you love but it's also fresh in some ways.
Sometimes a change of perspective, or a new piece of information can revitalize a song that was 100% dead to you. For example, I would ALWAYS turn the station / hit skip when I heard Cecelia by Simon and Garfunkel, since I overdosed on it as a teen in the late 80s. I lately found out that Cecelia is the patron saint of musicians, which completely changed the song for me and it is new again.
Likewise as an adult I found out about the romantic drama within Fleetwood Mac, and the Rumors album was resurrected for me. I really hope something like this happens to me again, it's a great feeling.
I'm a lyrics person meaning I listing to the lyrics. If I don't like the message/story I can't listen. Cecelia is one of those.
. Making love in the afternoon with Cecilia
. Up in my bedroom (making love)
. I got up to wash my face
. When I come back to bed
. Someone's taken my place
Seriously? You're in love with a girl who cheats on you in 5 minutes? I guess if you're polyamorous but if that was the case the song wouldn't exist. The fact that they person sticks around for this mental abuse is a complete turn off. I love how catchy the song is but I can't take message of such a bad relationship and that fact that he's digging his own hole by continuing to hope she'll stop cheating.
As the post you're responding to notes, Cecilia is the patron saint of musicians -- the song is about the fleeting nature of inspiration, not a literal description of a interpersonal relationship.
Cecilia suffers more than most songs from typical FM-radio car-listening conditions. It's like a whole different song when played back at home on even minimally-acceptable speakers, from a decent medium.
I don't experience this! Sometimes I'll get stuck on one song and listen to it for days, or an album for months, for multiple hours each day. Sometimes all day. Then one day I'll stop entirely. I always still love the music afterwards.
* I think it's because they are simply so good (an the sense explained in this essay) that I just heard them too much over the last 50+ years and they have become as much a universal cultural cliche as, say, Shakespeare. I have certainly listened to them a lot, with pleasure, but not so much in the past couple of decades.