Do the Beatles get too much credit..

I think that the biggest part of their audience gives them credit for the quality of their songwriting.

It's only us here who are having nice debates such as this one, challenging their innovative and creative qualities.
In that respect, I think they were a catalyst mostly, using ideas from others, adding their own songwriting flair and channeling everything to the masses, many of them ready with guitars and a mike to start up their own band.

I think along similar lines about Bowie and Eno (except for the songwriting skills in his case).

40footwolf wrote: I wouldn't have as much trouble with the Beatles getting so much credit if the groups that surrounded them in the '60s got some of the credit too. You never hear about how much the San Francisco psychedelic scene, SPECIFICALLY this scene and not just nebulous "psychedelic music" that nobody bothers to define, influenced their later work, or how much of "Sgt. Pepper's" is borrowing form the playbook of "Freak Out!" by Frank Zappa. Hardcore music fans will tell you this, of course, but it should be common knowledge. It's unfair to the other great bands of the '60s to think that rock music began with "Revolver".

I completely agree with this. While the Beatles were incredibly important, they didn't exist in a vacuum, and bands like the 13th floor elevators were having quite an impact as well.

The T wrote: Would the Beatles of Sgt Pepper and the other proggy records had been so famous if they hadn't released a lot of pop albums before? What if King Crimson had released two or three pop albums with #1 singles all around before releasing ITCOTCK?

Perceptive post certainly. The Beatles were the biggest band on the planet of any genre before Sgt Pepper, Crimson were just the biggest Prog band on the planet after In the Court.

resurrection wrote: Barking Weasel wrote: To me, the Beatles were more of a pop hit group than a rock band.  Sort of a skilled boy-band of the 60's; I think they are incredibly overrated, particularly in the singing department.  They had a few innovative tendencies, but to me they will always be second-tier in comparison to the Animals or the Beach Boys.  I will grant that their music has aged quite well from the Abbey Road/Srgt Pepper era (especially compared to Frank Zappa's early work), but all they did was write uncomplicated pop songs.  I've never understood the appeal of albums like "Rubber Soul" or "Revolver," both of which I find incredibly annoying.  Most of their music sounds dated, trite, tacky, peppy, commercialized, and lacking in timelessness.  On the flipside, albums like "Let It Be" are overproduced schlock.  I can't stand the Beatles, or anything they represent.  Even the Bee-Gees and the Monkees are more enjoyable than Lennon and Co. from my standpoint, since they were at least explicitly commercial and didn't try to mask themselves behind cutesy garbage facades like Srgt Pepper.     Truly shocking. I am no great Beatles fan but this is like comparing the Wright Brothers with an Airfix plastic model kit. There would be no Rock groups or Prog Forum, and if the planet was ruled by those of similar thought, no hope for the future either (perhaps that's why we are where we are?). Urgent history lessons needed, or my real wish is that this is just a wind up.

40footwolf wrote: I wouldn't have as much trouble with the Beatles getting so much credit if the groups that surrounded them in the '60s got some of the credit too. You never hear about how much the San Francisco psychedelic scene, SPECIFICALLY this scene and not just nebulous "psychedelic music" that nobody bothers to define, influenced their later work, or how much of "Sgt. Pepper's" is borrowing form the playbook of "Freak Out!" by Frank Zappa. Hardcore music fans will tell you this, of course, but it should be common knowledge. It's unfair to the other great bands of the '60s to think that rock music began with "Revolver".

Edited by Floydman - February 28 2011 at 13:45

Floydman wrote: Logan wrote: I've heard the Beatles credited for inventing/ developing tape-loop techniques that were being used by musique concrete composers before them.  It doesn\t surprise me due to pop status, but it does irk me that the Beatles get as much credit as they do for being inventive, and for being modern music geniuses, while the likes of Stockhausen and Xenakis more rarely seem to get mention. The Beatles were lucky to have people such as George Martin  working with them.    This is no different than what Hendrix did with existing techniques like guitar feedback, distortion and putting his stamp on it. So the Beatles were influenced by Stockhausen and Xenakis but they weren't the only ones. I think the Beatles work with looping, sampling and other electronic ideas in the context of mixing it in rock and pop music or putting it out to people who didn't know those techniques are now common recording strategies in popular music now.    Take "Tomorrow Never Knows' the loops were mixed live, they were recorded backwards, one was altered to sound like seagulls, and all those loops were created in a sound collage form. Some will say that "I Want You (She's So Heavy" was influenced by Xenakis. Still the building white noise sound over the overdubbed fuzz guitar sounds is very inventive. Take George Harrison he records his guitar parts on "I'm Only Sleeping" while the tape is running backwards. You think Jimi Hendrix didn't take notice the next year on "Are You Experienced? The Beatles were great songwriters. The Beatles like all great musicians should explore other areas outside of their genre. They mixed both greatly and that in turn exposed people who might not care or know to put into their music.

I agree with your points.

40footwolf wrote: Floydman wrote: 40footwolf wrote: I wouldn't have as much trouble with the Beatles getting so much credit if the groups that surrounded them in the '60s got some of the credit too. You never hear about how much the San Francisco psychedelic scene, SPECIFICALLY this scene and not just nebulous "psychedelic music" that nobody bothers to define, influenced their later work, or how much of "Sgt. Pepper's" is borrowing form the playbook of "Freak Out!" by Frank Zappa. Hardcore music fans will tell you this, of course, but it should be common knowledge. It's unfair to the other great bands of the '60s to think that rock music began with "Revolver".      I think the Beatles in many ways don't get the credit they deserve. The San Francisco bands like the Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead were largely influenced by the Beatles to form as rock bands in the first place. The Byrds also formed largely in part because of the Beatles also. Without those bands and the Beatles influence in the first place are we talking about folk rock and psychedelic rock in the first place?    Frank Zappa and the 13th Floor Elevators like it or not were blimp on the screens when the Beatles were recording Rubber Soul, "Rain" and Revolver. Psychedelic Rock, and  Progressive Rock would have made without Frank Zappa and the 13 Floor Elevators.  Stockhausen said this "John Lennon (The Beatles) were the greatest mediators between serious music and popular music". The Beatles were able to translate their innovative chord progressions and experimental tendencies to the masses. Remember it was these songs "A Day in the Life" and "I Am The Walrus" that influenced Robert Fripp King Crimson Progressive Rock and Can Krautrock to form as bands in the first place.   The Beatles sold millions of records with songs like "Tomorrow Never Knows", "A Day in the Life", "Strawberry Fields Forever" etcc. in their catalog. Those songs not only expanded the parameters of pop music but they gave a huge audience to it also. Musicians like Syd Barrett constantly listened to Revolver and other Beatles releases.   Musically speaking the Beatles had influences but so does every band. Then again, I don't get what San Francisco bands were doing in 65-66  have in common in what the Beatles were doing. Some of the examples are '   "Eleanor Rigby"-  Dorian Mode, two chords, strings as a rhythm with no rock instruments with just vocals   "Tomorrow Never Knows"-  Acid drenched loops and ambient looped effects mxed live, backward guitar lines, harmonically hardly any harmonic motion and it's up front drum and bass repetitive ostinato.  Not only did Jerry Garcia flipped over this track but it influence carried over to modern electronic bands like the Chemical Brothers.   "Yellow Submarine- Might be a slight song but it's use of spoken megaphone dialogue I wonder if Syd Barrett took notice "Astromony Domine" and ambient sounds frames the break.   "Norwegian Wood"-  3/4 time, mixolyding verse and sitar riff, moving to parallel dorian and then going to Ionian.   "Strawberry Fields Forever"-  Is one of those song where the theme of the song (the lyrical idea) is reflected in the chords and structure of the tune. The track has these surreal poetic images, odd rhyhtms, disorienting electronic sounds, unexpected changes, odd ochestration effects, reverse cymbal effects and George Harrison raga like scales from Svarmandal. The the song ends with a false ending/silence/ coming back with this hallucinatory sound collage coda with John mumbling "Cranberry Sauce" in which people who thought was Paul was dead as "I buried Paul".   Yes, other musicians were experimenting in rock music but the San Francisco bands and Frank Zappa were not  writing songs of the quality of say "A Day in the Life" but they in the same process were not able to translate their music to the masses as say the Beatles. For example, there is 3.000 cover versions of "Yesterday" that musicians felt compelled to cover. The buying public felt compelled to buy Sgt. Pepper even though there is not one single or pop friendly song released from that album. You think future prog and heavy metal bands like King Crimson or Black Sabbath didn't benifit from the Beatles example of not releasing singles from albums like Sgt. Pepper or the White Album. Nothing against Frank Zappa or the 13th Floor Elevators were not doing any of the establishing of Progressive Rock, or Psychedelic Rock even though they might have been making that kind of music. The facts are the Beatles by virtue of their songwriting and talents were able to translate this to the buying public. So your thesis is that nobody should give a sh*t that tons and tons of other bands and composers influenced the Beatles because they weren't as popular as the Beatles.  Neato.

Edited by Floydman - February 28 2011 at 20:20

40footwolf wrote: People don't talk about the influences of those other bands because they weren't nearly as big as the Beatles. If they were as big as the Beatles, then time should be given to exploring their roots, too. It should anyway.

Influence in rock music does to a large extent flow from popularity. If a well known band does something innovative, it will catch the attention of more people than an obscure band. Mantas had a decent prototype of death metal in 1983 and yet Metallica and Slayer are more INFLUENTIAL.  Funnily enough, more people talk about the influence of Death, which came a few years later by which time thrash was already advancing towards the then new death metal genre in the form of Kreator and Sepultura (and therefore not frankly THAT revolutionary re the early Death). How does that work?  I hope you get my point.

Rock music is still a young genre so popular artists will pull more weight for some time...until musicians start going back to the archives and reviving lost threads and then we may see something like the revival of Bach. That is, provided rock develops such a culture of serious appreciation of music from an academic standpoint and of fairly giving innovative artists their due.  Sorry to say, we couldn't be any further from that at present and the media and critics ensure we are forcefed popular bands only, no matter how crappy they are.  I mean, once there were light showers in November (unseasonal here) and the resident 'rock critic' wrote about November Rain. Gimme a break!   Not relevant here, but just saying.

Anyhow, the point is there may well have been more innovative bands than Beatles in the 60s, I wouldn't hazard to comment on that but Beatles were more INFLUENTIAL, the two words are not interchangeable as much as we'd wish they were in the world of music.




Edited by rogerthat - February 28 2011 at 20:28

I would like to mention that while many have discussed influence, the question was whether they get too much credit in terms of innovation AND origination (inventiveness).

As I said in the opening post, "Undoubtedly the Beatles were hugely influential (has been incredibly popular), but do you think/feel that the Beatles commonly get too much credit and/or consideration in terms of innovation and origination?"


Edited by Logan - February 28 2011 at 20:42

Logan wrote: I would like to mention that while many have discussed influence, the question was whether they get too much credit in terms of innovation AND origination (inventiveness). As I said in the opening post, "Undoubtedly the Beatles were hugely influential (has been incredibly popular), but do you think/feel that the Beatles commonly get too much credit and/or consideration in terms of innovation and origination?"

That is a much more interesting line of debate but a lot of people have jumped into the fray to deny even their influence as a product of media marketing, so the debate got distorted.  Hmmm, if anybody has the energy and tenacity to refute Floydman....  I am really not so sure about innovation.  There was a Hindi music composer in the 50s who used to write elegant suite-based songs (that moved in a linear direction rather than a pop repeat cycle) based on Indian melody, long before Beatles graduated from Love Me Do to Day in a Life.  I had then asked my friends if they knew of any Western light music (so I am excluding jazz and classical music, obviously jazz was far reaching in the 50s) songwriters who did something similar in the 50s.  They didn't turn up anybody.  Would like to see if somebody here turns up some names, would be a very interesting pursuit.  Just for argument's sake - and not to push this music on anybody, I swear - I am posting an example of what I mean: