On the occassion of the Beatles remastered discs coming out, I've been listening to some of the songs I haven't heard since I was about 16 years old. The remastering has made them fresh enough that I'm rediscovering some of this music.
A lot has happened in the nearly 3 decades since I became a certified Beatle freak. I became a fan starting in about the 4th grade, but right about the time I entered High School, I stopped playing football and basketball, became a very moody, very lazy teen, devoted myself to about 4 hours of guitar practice a day, and dealt with the death of John Lennon just as I was fully discovering his music.
It is amazing to me to listen to various musicians talk about the influence of the Beatles. Not just the folks you'd expect, either. Crowded House / Neil Finn sounds like a modern incarnation of the Beatles. Other bands from the Psychedelic Furs to Oasis have been compared to the Beatles. However, the Beatles heavily influenced other bands with sounds as divergent as Ozzy Osbourne and Kiss to Garth Brooks.
Their influence has been everywhere.
In the past 30 years, I've noticed some social trends in music.
First, a lot fewer people play guitar these days. True, a lot fewer people seem to play any sort of instrument, but Elvis and the Beatles inspired an entire generation of guitarists. I think it's no accident that the pyrotechnician / guitar virtuoso generation (Vai, Malmsteen, Satriani, et. al.) happened when kids who were listening to the Beatles as children grew up to be adults.
Second, the further we get away from the first-generation influence of the Beatles, the more disposable and just generally crappy popular music has become. You can almost trace the lineage. The Beatles are the canon of popular music. The music of the 70s is still resonant today. You can sell a lot of cars by putting on Led Zepplin's "Rock and Roll" or Nazareth's "Hair of the Dog".
AC/DC recorded the 2nd best selling album of all-time just 10 years after the Beatles left the scene. The best-selling album of all time? Had a Beatle who performed on it and produced it.
The 80s? Great music starts to fade out, but is still present moreso than on modern charts.
By the time the 90s rolled around, virtually no music of any worth appears to be standing the test of time.
Today? Music is just crap. Sorry kiddies. This is where I wear my old-man's hat with pride. Just as previous generations had to listen to folks say, "Mays is okay, but you never saw Dimaggio", verily I say unto thee: Lady Gaga is an idiotic joke. You should have been raised on the Beatles.
It's to the point that only one act that appeals to young kids even appears to use guitars! (The Jonas Brothers, for whom I don't have a particular love, music-wise, but I appreciate that they're trying to carry the torch of popular music made with guitars.)
The other thing that I've noticed is that no other band has filled that void. If anything, the Beatles have loomed larger with every passing year specifically because no other band has ever come close to their impact on music.
The Beatles broke up when I was about 5 years old. It never dawned on anybody at the time that nobody would carry the torch forward. It was as though Elvis lit the fire, passed it on the Beatles who turned it into an inferno, and then... well... I honestly can't say that I've seen much greatness since. Yeah, there was a spark now and then... but not 15 albums worth and over 200 songs of such quality.
The Beatles story is legendary in its details. A bunch of underage and not-particularly well-regarded musicians from Liverpool go to Hamburg Germany to play in clubs in the red light district. They are forced to play sets that last from 10 to 14 hours, straight, with no breaks. They are sent back home once or twice when it's found out that they are too young to legally work.
They return to England as young 20-ish young men with fierce chops, the tightest harmonies since the Everly Brothers, and the best songwriting ability on the planet.
They literally created the genre of the band as singer/songwriters. There were some singer songwriters prior to the Beatles, but not so much in the big leagues, where the money was real and the expectations were high.
Then, just as quickly as they burst onto the scene, they disappeared after being a presence in the American conscience for only about 6 years and maybe 1 more year in parts of Brittain. Over 200 songs in the amount of time that most modern acts release, at most, 3 albums.
It still stuns me that nobody has filled their shoes, but frankly, our world continues to be over-sanitized and over-protected. A bunch of underage musicians from Akron would no more travel to the red light district of another country to be the house band than they would be legally allowed to drink a beer.
If innovation comes from anywhere, I can't see it coming from the industrial world. It'll have to come from some place like India or China or Russia... unfortunately, instead of being allowed to incubate in the Kaiserkeller on the Rappabond, they'll be plucked too soon and thrust into the spotlight, only to fizzle out as the latest flavor of the week.
When I was 9 years old, I knew the Beatles were the greatest band, ever. I'd been listening here and there since my cousin Charlie brought over his brother Mike's copy of Sgt Pepper's for me to play on my little portable phonograph at age 7. By the time I was 14, I was sure that there wasn't any other band that stood up to the Beatles.
The shocker is that in the time since, they are still the world's greatest rock band. With the way trends are in popular music today, I don't see how anybody will ever be able to equal their greatness. The industry simply would not allow it.
So, re-discovering their music in remastered discs is the closest I can get to finding a new "world's greatest band". I'll take what I can get. In the mean time, I'll hope against hope that somebody picks up the torch.
2 comments:
I feel like you have a LOT of main points within this treatise, many of which I agree with. But some of them I strenuously disagree with, and I'm this guy. So here's a sample of issues I take with your thesis:
Popular music has ALWAYS been mostly crap. During the early 70s, when we had Led Zeppelin, The Who, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, and a whole generation of "classic rock" acts at the top of their games, what was on the charts? You remember, you're just denying it. It was Morris Albert, Leo Sayer, Al Stewart, Captain and Tenille. Starland Vocal Band, Terry Jacks, Paperlace. Have you listened to Muskrat Love lately? Good god. But that's exactly what was hitting the charts in the 70s, when Dark Side of the Moon and Can't Buy a Thrill and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Shootout at the Fantasy Factory were being put brand-new on the shelves. Friggin Innervisions! Guess what's still being played today? It's sure as hell not Feelings and Seasons in the Sun.
So, this does lend agreement to another of your statements, that this is a few short years after the Beatles, at the height of their powers. But are these really all Beatles-influenced bands? Certainly Motown influenced a lot, and a lot came the long way around from the Delta via John Mayall and the Yardbirds. I would say that the Beatles did influence a lot of bands, but I'd rather see music as a continuum, rather than a series of points. I'm not sure you can have Stevie, without first having Scott Joplin or Jelly Roll Morton. You can't have Elvis without having the Negro spiritual. There were horrible bubble-gum things happening in the 60s, that were caused by the Beatles' Yeah Yeah Yeah stuff. And the Beatles broke out of that with Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt Pepper, Abbey Road. They just kept reinventing themselves, like nobody before or since. But then in the 70s, we had disco - funk's idiot miscarriage. So we were saved by something non-Beatle-inspired, something brought about by Television, Velvet Underground, Iggy and Lou. It was punk, then New Wave (punk scrubbed up to meet your parents). In the 80s New Wave and MTV started getting all Rick Astley, so Alice in Chains and Nirvana and that whole Seattle thing saved music in the 90s. But throughout, there has been crap on the radio, crap in the top 40, crap on 12-year-old girls' gossip rags.
We need to recognize that there have /always/ been people who don't understand the album. I remember in the 60s my aunt had a spool of 45s. In the late 70s, I remember being furious because people would listen to individual songs from The Wall. And now, iTunes and Amazon sell you songs for $0.99 each. It's not that coherent albums aren't being made any more. Listen to The Decemberists' latest release: it makes no sense if you don't listen in order. And musically, lyrically, it's a structured whole that even The Decemberists play beginning-to-end in concert. So yes, I hate that people listen to individual songs, but the technology is now such that my kids can take 10,000 songs with them everywhere. Me, I stuck ELO's A New World Record cassette in my Walkman, Bad Company in one pocket and Aja in the other, and that had to last me all day. There was not really a good way to not play the whole record, in order. Today, we hit [shuffle] and jump on the treadmill.
I guess the thing that I want to protest more than anything, is the idea that since we haven't had a band duplicate the body of work in a similar time span, that indicts the worth of today's music. I'd have to say that nobody has duplicated Bach or Mozart, these 200 to 250 years. But that does not impugn the worth of the music that followed. We honor their genius, and we should still listen to it, study it, teach it, let it move us. But it should not lessen what came after: Late classical, Romantic, modern, blues, jazz, soul, rock, pop, and yes, hip-hop and the music of the world that we're now able to get. There is a world of music out there, and it's a vibrant ecosystem of committed artists, some brilliant. Just as it's hard to find an undiscovered island, I think the sheer scale of music publishing, and the ease and speed with which music spreads today, prohibits one artist from turning the entire world upside-down. Maybe we can celebrate that.
But yeah, the Beatles were the greatest. Duke Ellington wasn't so bad, though.
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