Break Out the Loudspeakers: Beatles overrated?
The trailblazing Liverpudlians’ accomplishments are being downplayed by revisionists
"It's in the nature of scholars to dismiss the work of their predecessors. Only this makes it possible to do work that can be hailed as new."
— David Klinghofer
A few weeks ago, veteran music journalist Ted Gioia asked, “Why Did the Beatles Get So Many Bad Reviews?”
Ted is a bit older than myself, and thus grew up on the Beatles — and lived through the after-the-fact reckoning when the consensus of most critics and music journalists was that the Beatles had transcended rock stardom and joined other seminal figures such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Edith Piaf and Frank Sinatra as cultural touchstones.
Now, though, the pendulum is swinging again and it’s become popular of late — almost chic, really — to proclaim that the Beatles are overrated.
There are several Reddit threads, a recent Washington Post article, and college student newspaper articles galore. (Note: If you are going to trash the Beatles, it’s probably best not to start off by admitting you were raised on a steady diet of the Eagles — it fairly calls into question the fundamental development of your musical palate.)
Every budding rock critic or music journalist below a certain age, it seems, almost has to diss the Beatles to establish their contemporary bona fides.
It is becoming sadly predictable, a kind of empty little charade posing as a rite of passage.
Yet making that argument brands you as ignorant.
The truth is, if you claim the Beatles are overrated, you didn’t live through the era and you haven’t gone back and studied their history, either.
If anything, the Beatles are vastly underrated for the impact they’ve had (and continue to have) on popular music — not just how it sounds, but how it’s created in the first place.
My third-grade teacher was just out of college. I don’t remember her name, but she’d worked the summer before as a counselor at the day camp the school district ran on the school playground. So I kind of already knew her when the school year started — she’d handed me an orangeade every morning when I showed up for baseball.
That spring (it would have been April) she came to class one morning clearly having been crying. She told her class of 9-year-olds that the greatest band of all time had broken up. The A/V kid was sent to get a record player, and then she played the song “Let it Be” for us.
We could barely hear Paul’s singing over her sobs.
The original bobby soxer teen idol was Sinatra, in the early part of World War II, when adolescent girls didn’t have local boys to pay attention to as most of them were in the service.
But as the modern teenager became a thing after the war, Elvis was the next teen idol, followed by Ricky Nelson.
The final chapter was Beatlemania.
Sure, there were other teen idols after — David and Shawn Cassidy, Rex Smith, Andy Gibb, all the boy bands of the 1990s.
But nothing ever approached the insanity of Beatlemania.
Nothing ever will, because the sheer scale of media saturation of Beatlemania was unlike anything that had ever been seen before. They had screaming girl fans at all their shows like Sinatra, they made films like Elvis, they were regularly paraded on nearly all of the popular TV variety shows, and they were splashed on the covers of all the pop culture magazines.
You simply couldn’t escape the Beatles at the height of their popularity.
And then, unlike Elvis, they took their music to another level without ever really changing their basic sound.
Outside of Sinatra, none of those other teen idols ever matured into the kind of genre-bending masters of artistic brilliance that the Beatles became in the late 1960s, with a string of breathtakingly original albums from Rubber Soul to Revolver, Sgt. Pepper to The White Album to Abbey Road.
They revolutionized what was possible in the studio — with overdubs and backwards masking and slowing down and speeding up of tape.
They brought in strings and brass to back a rock band, much as jazz musicians had been doing. Then they brought in sitars from India, along with various motifs from Indian classical music.
That hadn’t been done before, and yet in George Harrison’s hands it seemed utterly natural and organic.
As my third grade teacher’s example illustrated, when the Beatles broke up it was major news across the English-speaking world.
While the Beatles had given up playing live shows in the mid-1960s due to Beatlemania making every performance a ridiculous adventure, once the band broke up they all headed out on tour individually and began issuing solo records that were still the talk of the rock world.
Even separately, they were still making hit records.
And until John’s tragic murder, rumors of a Beatles reunion were never far from the surface.
A Beatles reunion tour would have set unbreakable box office records. They could have played every day for a solid year and still not had enough tickets for everyone who wanted one. Were John and George still with us, a 2023 reunion tour of octogenarian Beatles would dwarf Taylor Swift’s remarkable ticket sales.
Heck, when the Travelling Wilburys formed as a lark in the late 1980s, Bob Dylan — as huge a star as he was and is — still found himself playing second fiddle to the third Beatle!
Just from a music standpoint, during a four-year run in the late 1960s, the Beatles almost single-handedly created psychedelic rock, progressive rock and heavy metal - styles other bands would spend a decade and a half trying to catch up to.
More importantly, while they started off as a singles band in an era when 45s ruled, they then picked up on Sinatra’s 1950s’ penchant for themed “concept albums” and reinvented the model for a rock audience.
And even more influentially than that, as Jimmy Webb pointed out in an interview a few years ago, what the Beatles did more than anyone else is to create the expectation that rock bands would compose their own songs — an expectation that lasts to this day.
Before the Beatles, rock ‘n’ roll stars were a lot like jazz and country stars: They largely recorded songs that were written by other people.
The Beatles’ ridiculous success at writing their own material made it difficult for the pure songwriter, of which Webb is perhaps the last truly famous representative. Bands that didn’t write their own material almost never got a record deal, only rarely scored a hit.
No matter how gifted a singer, no matter how dazzling your virtuosity on your instrument, if you don’t write your own songs you just aren’t taken seriously.
Thank Lennon & McCartney for that, with a nod to George Harrison.
The Beatles were also the first rock band to start getting notice from what were considered the more “serious” genres of jazz and classical.
When Count Basie recorded the album Basie’s Beatles Bag in 1966, suddenly it was acceptable for jazz artists to start putting their spin on the band’s catalog of songs.
Before too long, many major symphony orchestras were working Beatles songs into their summer “pops” series, and even recording Beatles songs.
Not even Dylan has been as widely covered by jazz and classical musicians as the Beatles.
In fact, in the last few years before the Beatles broke up — in their so-called late period — they were experimenting with different chords and harmonic structures to the point that jazz musicians were buying their albums to pick up pointers on technique.
Outside of guitarist Jeff Beck, no other rock artist ever held that kind of esteem among jazz musicians.
Not only did the band make and star in four films (“Hard Day’s Night,” “Help!”, “Magical Mystery Tour,” “Yellow Submarine”) they were also the subject of a Saturday morning cartoon series in 1965-66.
While other bands have had concert footage released in theaters, or been the subject of documentaries, no band has so permeated Hollywood as the Beatles:
The Beatle’s music as performed by other musicians was played over World War II footage in the bizarrely camp “All This and World War II” released in 1976
The 1978 fantasy “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” starred the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, and the resulting soundtrack featured a bona fide hit in Aerosmith’s cover of “Come Together”
That same year, members of Monty Python and Saturday Night Live joined forces for the mockumentary “All You Need Is Cash”
Also in 1978, Robert Zemickis directed “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” a comedy about a group of friends trying to get tickets to see the Beatles in the 1964 Ed Sullivan Show debut in New York City
“The Compleat Beatles” is a 1982 documentary narrated by Malcolm McDowell
“Backbeat,” tracing the band’s early days in Hamburg with original bassist Stuart Sutcliffe, was released in 1994
In 1995, Paul and Ringo supervised the eight-part miniseries “The Beatles Anthology”
Cirque du Soleil premiered “Love,” a circus show built around the music of the Beatles in 2006
“Across the Universe” was a jukebox romance film set to the music of the Beatles, and released in 2007
Ron Howard directed “Eight Days a Week,” a big budget documentary released in 2016
Peter Jackson directed the archival “Get Back,” an eight-hour mini-series taken from film shot during the recording of the album of the same name in 1969
But the film that best illustrates the cultural impact of the Beatles is Peter Boyle’s 2019 romantic comedy, “Yesterday.” Set in the current day, it features a young British musician who, after being hit by a bus, wakes up to discover that the Beatles never formed — and yet he (and only he) can still remember all their songs. This allows him to become a huge pop star simply by singing songs the rest of the world has forgotten.
It is quite simply impossible to imagine this concept being applied to any other band — because no other band is as ubiquitous a cultural presence.
The mere existence of the film — and never mind it’s boffo box office numbers (it made $153 million, pulling in a profit of over $100 million) — utterly decimates any argument that the Beatles are overrated.
Those who try to elevate their own profile by dissing on the Beatles inadvertently undermine their own proposition simply by the point of their argument: Nobody argues about whether the Stones or Zeppelin, Skynyrd or The Who were overrated.
The Beatles simply stand apart. As with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Edith Piaf, Sinatra or Elvis, they had no real rivals. They competed against themselves and their own expectations. They influenced the music industry in ways that reverberate today.
I am confident that 100 years from now, young people will still discover the Beatles the way classical musicians still discover Mozart generation after generation, the way young jazz singers still cop from Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.
For their critics who sniff that the Beatles aren’t all that, I suggest a pair of top-flight headphones and a vinyl copy of “Abbey Road.”
-30-
As always, a pleasure.these so called “critics” would get no notice if they didn’t dis something/someone.
Great article. Have you heard "Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles."