I generally dislike The Beatles.

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that follows U2.
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It's always interesting to discuss Beatle-disinterest. I'm 34, but the first album I ever owned (in the 80s) was by The Beatles, and I've been listening to them / studying them for about 27 years now with no loss of interest. If anything, their music becomes more rewarding to me with the passing of the years.

There are common misconceptions (to my way of thinking) about The Beatles that people with casual interest tend to perpetuate, such as:

-- They started out as a 'pop' band
This is not really true (although in a way it is, as there was no distinction between 'rock' and 'pop' at the time). In fact, The Beatles' entire first era was as a club band, playing live mainly in Liverpool and Hamburg, Germany. They rocked hard but tunefully, playing rock standards and tough R&B. (The Please Please Me album gives some indication of this, but George Martin selected slightly 'softer' tunes for it than the balance of those they were actually playing in clubs).

-- John wrote the 'rockers; Paul the pop-tunes
This is entirely false. While it's true that Lennon generally preferred good-old rock'n'roll as his fall-back genre, he wrote his fair-share of pop tunes and ballads, even schmaltzy stuff like Ringo's "Goodnight" (far cheesier than 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer'). As for Paul, the only thing (in The Beatles' era) he could fairly be accused of is being too diverse -- there's simply no genre of popular music that he didn't master in composition and performance, and all by the age of 26 or so.

Paul wrote and sang "Helter Skelter", arguably the first heavy metal song (which rocks far harder than U2's cover of it, and harder than anything The Stones have ever done). Paul belted out swinging R&B like "Kansas City" and wrote great powerful rock songs like "Can't Buy Me Love", "Lady Madonna", "Back in the USSR", and "Get Back". He also played guitar on a number of Beatles' songs, including playing the fat R&B guitar solos on George Harrison's "Taxman" (because it was taking George too long to master it!). "The Ballad of John and Yoko" is actually the ballad of John and Paul -- only those two chief Beatles appear on the record. Paul plays bass and drums on it.



Ringo, by the way, wrote only two songs in The Beatles -- "Don't Pass Me By" (curiously, a #1 hit in Sweden!) and "Octopus's Garden" (but he got a lot of help from George on that one).

George Harrison was a major songwriter, who wrote memorable Beatles tunes like "If I Needed Someone", "Taxman", "Old Brown Shoe", "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", "Something", and "Here Comes The Sun". Name me another band in rock history where the third-best songwriter in the band wrote international #1 hits and had his songs covered by Frank Sinatra...?


At the end of the day, trying to compare The Beatles to, say, Radiohead or U2 is a pretty futile exercise. It's a bit like trying to compare Newton to Einstein in order to conclude who was "better" (for too many reasons to mention, but for starters things like: in the 60s singles really mattered, not LPs; 60s' bands had two weeks to make a new LP, not two years; 60s' bands didn't work in a post-rock, postmodern age of diverse labels and a thousand different radio-formatted genres, etc. etc. -- I could go on).

(By the way, those assuming it's a "60s thing" might bear in mind that Bob Dylan's recent album Modern Times went to #1 on the pop charts, and The Beatles' 1 was the 2nd-best-selling LP of the entire past decade in the USA.)

There is nothing wrong with not liking The Beatles -- you don't need to feel guilty about it. But there is something wrong with not experiencing The Beatles and being a little bit knowledgeable of them, if you want to understand rock music, that is.
 
That's Dr. Hipster. I didn't spend 5 years avoiding the U2 section of a U2 forum to just be called "hipster," thank you very much.
 
I agree with Cori.

Ditto. Well said, cori :up:.

The only thing I'd maybe argue on point-wise is the whole "starting out as a 'pop' band" thing. I think people who say that do so because they think of their early songs, which were definitely simple 3 minute catchy tunes. Which is characteristic of "pop" music. But the poster does raise a good point in regards to that.

Outside of that, very spot on. And it can indeed be interesting discussion, if all involved are willing to actually expand and discuss their point of view.

Angela
 
I thought that was a really good post.

Feel free to stop being yutzes once in a while, guys.

I was only pointing out that it was very structured in the way a school assignment might be. Wasnt trying to be an ass. Perhaps a winky face would've helped :(
 
"makin' fun of 65980's posts? that's a paddlin'"

thatsapaddlingthumb.jpg
 
Darn tootin'.

Topic? I do not generally dislike the Beatles. They were my first "real" musical obsession.

Michael Jackson and Duran Duran didn't count, because that was mainly just hormonal squeeing. (Although I still enjoy their music.)
 
They were my first favorite band as well.

Just the other day the version of Hide Your Love Away from the Anthology came on where John says "Paul's broken a glass! He's broken a glass. Paul's broken a glass, a glass, a glass!"

That shit is cute.
 
I was a misguided child.

I had a brief Prince phase, which I believe worried my parents greatly, considering I had a poster of him crawling out of a bathtub or something.
 
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