Debate Series #3: The Beatles

YES, says Michael Waters...

 

I came across a jukebox recently in a bar in Leeds. A friend and I thought it well worth one pound to startle the surrounding Stella-smelling wannabe football pundits with the brutal sounds of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, the opening movement of Pictures at an Exhibition, and the completely inappropriately stirring Ode To Joy. It was super, super hilarious. More relevantly, the jukebox’s categories included the following: ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, ‘00s, ‘10s, Classical, The Beatles. Wait. What? The band are a category of music now. It seems that even some four decades on from their disbanding, the entire world is still one shrieking, pant-pissing fan-girl for The Beatles.

 

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is frequently awarded the belt of “definitive album of the ‘60s”. Now, not only is it questionable to read “The Sixties” as some unified event in a linear development of music to begin with, but the designation of individual works or artists as “definitive” is counter-constructive, and just silly. Unless you are putting together a shit pub jukebox.

 

A prominent argument for the importance of Sgt. Pepper… is its part in the development of the album format. It is around this time that power migrates from the record companies to the artists, not only in terms of creative control of the music, but in the selection of artwork, track order, production decisions, and so on. The presence and posterity attributed to certain bands grows: “musicians” are promoted to “artists”, singles disregarded in favour of albums.

 

At this point in the late ‘60s, a perceived rift between “pop” and “rock” is prized open. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones no longer occupy the same space as, say, Engelbert Humperdinck, and this divergence in weapon of choice (single, album) is a concrete marker of this distinction. A distinction based previously on less tangible, youth-centric counter-culture ideals.

 

The Beatles’ success rose in part from their apparent straddling of this “rock”/“pop” dichotomy. Critic Allan F. Moore (author of a Cambridge Press companion to Sgt. Pepper…) observes:

 

 

For The Beatles to have been so far removed from good old Engelbert then, they must have been doing this: pursuing some veiled artistic vision, rather than broad accessibility. But conversely, Sgt. Pepper… was the first record ever to include a lyric booklet, which allowed the audience to sing along and feel like part of record was their own. A curious discrepancy thus arises between the importance of the author and considerations of the audience. The Beatles wedge this “rock”/“pop” distinction with the release of Sgt. Pepper…, but simultaneously work on both sides of it, to their weighty commercial advantage. It's really very clever.

 

“I'm a genius, [...] I've been like this all my life.” (John Lennon)

 

The elevation of the pop star to the pop intellectual is another important contextual catalyst in The Beatles’ success. This is more cosmetic than substantial, however. It was far more important to present as intellectual, than to be so. This impression, serving to place the artist above commodity-pop peddlers, was basically fraudulent; fashion-based. This is evident in how far behind intellectual developments pop culture actually was. For example, also in the late ‘60s, Roland Barthes’ post-structuralist essay, Death of the Author, was published. Ideas of “intentional fallacy” in literary criticism had also come about, over two decades prior. These were arguments that audience perceptions of a text (literary, visual, musical) were of greater importance that the author’s. These new critical proposals undermined authorial importance, whilst - in this newly carved understanding of “rock”, and the release of Sgt. Pepper… - mass culture was seemingly only just recognising it.

 

There is a common claim that Sgt. Pepper… was the first ever concept album. This isn't true. Not only was it preceded by concept albums by The Moody Blues and The Mothers of Invention (not that the music on these wasn't rubbish), but Sgt. Pepper… simply had no concept. George Martin himself, unequivocally the fifth Beatle (if anything he was the fourth and Ringo was the fifth), stated:

 

 

Moreover, even if thematic threads had been present on the record, this would still be less structurally adventurous than most music of the previous two or three hundred years. Sets of musical movements with unifying concepts and ideas had been around since the Baroque era, and these extended, motivically intricate forms would not be properly appropriated by pop music until the progressive rock of the 1970s; the lengthy epics of Yes, King Crimson, early Genesis, and so on. This is further evidence of how unsubstantiated the “intellectual” posturing of The Beatles was.

 

The other untouchable monolith of The Beatles discography was of course Revolver. Yes, due to their success, The Beatles were at liberty to make a lot more audacious requests of the studio engineers. However, the sonic development most people note is the reverse tape playback found on I’m Only Sleeping and Tomorrow Never Knows. Firstly, magnetic tape manipulation to musical ends had been developed through the musique concrète approach in France as early as the 1940s, when Pierre Schaeffer and others adopted the sound object itself as their musical material (see Schaeffer's pioneering work Étude aux Chemins de Fer). Secondly, it was not even The Beatles that first brought these techniques to a mass audience, it was the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, whose experimentation with tape as a musical instrument - soundtracking the radio and television programmes of the day - was essentially the embryo of electronic popular music (see, most famously, the original Doctor Who theme of 1963). Revolver's use of tape manipulation was not innovative, merely interesting.

 

There were innumerable other developments in music around this time that could be argued to be more important. To name a few: The BBC Radiophonic Workshop; Wendy Carlos' Switched On Bach; Perrey & Kingsley’s The In Sound From Way Out!; Downtown minimalism; Scratch Orchestra; Fluxus; John Coltrane’s Ascension; Bitches Brew; Can; In the Court of the Crimson King; Andy Warhol’s Factory and The Velvet Underground; The Piper at the Gates of Dawn; Woodstock. Nobody can proclaim any one of these things “definitive”, or more important than another, and nor should they try. They are all there to be explored, along with everything else documented. We are not putting together a shit pub jukebox.

 

So, there was nothing sonically innovative about The Beatles’ work - besides a few gestures toward developing electronic music and, ahem, “World Music” that border on novelty - and the intellectualism in their work is a total illusion, albeit a hugely gainful marketing point. The Beatles remain one of the most commercially successful bands in the history of recorded music and nobody can argue with that. This is because their music was the intelligent assembly of others’ ideas however, not the treading of new ground. To again refer to Barthes: “the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”.

 

I'm far from deriding The Beatles, since they did pen some of the best pop albums of all time. I am criticising those who deny their “pop” nature, assigning them intellectual weight and musical importance. Their contributions to the development of pop music were less musical, more contextual, and inevitable with it. They were not the most important thing to happen to music in the 20th Century; they were four lads from Liverpool writing great 3-minute pop songs. Their best album is A Hard Day's Night, far and away.

 

 

NO, thinks Joe Rivers…

 

The combination of hyperbole and hindsight could very well be the music critic’s worst enemy. The desperation of wanting to be the person who spots the hip new thing coupled with the fear of missing the boat on the latest act to hit big means that, occasionally, reviews and features heap more praise on an artist than they really merit. Add to this cocktail the element of a fast-approaching deadline and before you know it, Oasis’ Be Here Now has been proclaimed a universal masterpiece. Then, it’s too late, and it’s only when the impossible to ignore poke of hindsight arrives that everyone acknowledges that it’s not a masterpiece, but an ego-laden, coked-up mess of a record that no-one wants to hear again. Of course, the words that were originally written can’t be taken back, and the history music journalism is full of effusive reviews for truly terrible albums.

 

Yet one of the acts that seems immune to these revisions of opinion are those lovable, Liverpudlian mop-tops, The Beatles. They’re hardly unique in this position; you won’t get many articles entitled, “Now I’ve had a while to think about it, Bob Dylan / Ray Charles / Miles Davis / Kraftwerk / Leonard Cohen was a bit rubbish”. However, The Beatles were the only band to combine lasting critical acclaim with such enormous popularity and influence, and that can’t be an accident.

 

If you’re a fan of popular music in any of its multiple forms, being a fan of The Beatles is practically a corollary. Between Please Please Me in 1963 and Abbey Road in 1969 (or Let It Be in 1970, if you’re so inclined), The Beatles redefined the popular landscape, introduced new concepts to a mass audience and developed their sound in a way no band ever has in such a short space of time.

 

It may help to look at The Beatles as two separate bands: the knock-out-songs-every-couple-of-minutes group and the sonic-adventurer group, with 1965’s Rubber Soul charting the time the former metamorphosed into the latter. So, now, a little music might help, so go and put one of those early Beatles albums on, whichever one you like. Have a listen - brilliant, isn’t it? They may sound slightly anachronistic and naïve compared to the music of today but with, for example, I Saw Her Standing There, I Wanna Be Your Man, Can’t Buy Me Love, Eight Days a Week and Ticket to Ride, the quality of the writing and melodies can’t help but shine through. What’s also striking about those early records is the sheer urgency of the delivery. It’s as if they’re trying to burst through your speakers and when you consider how many gigs they were playing, how many songs they were writing and how much they were travelling, it’s just exhausting. Think of your favourite band and work out how long they took between their last two albums. The Beatles were churning out gold-plated, enduring pop records almost at a rate of two a year in their early career.

 

During this prolific formative period, The Beatles went against the received wisdom that you couldn’t write all the songs on your own album whilst retaining popularity. It’s only when you put something like that into context you’re able to see what a feat that is. An appreciation of music and a curious sensibility meant that The Beatles were alchemist magpies; assimilating what they loved and what fascinated them into an irresistible package.

 

The vast majority of bands would have been content to rest on their laurels after such success but The Beatles were always wanting to push the boundaries of popular song and explore further possibilities. Neither of the key songwriting team of Lennon and McCartney were classically trained, meaning that they just made chords that sounded good to them and fitted in with what they were trying to express. From Rubber Soul onwards, you can hear a dissatisfaction with their previous achievements manifesting itself in a yearning for something outside of the constraints of the pop music of the day.

 

The argument against the above is that The Beatles weren’t the innovators; they weren’t the first to discover Eastern mysticism and sitars, incongruous sound effects or the approach of changing tack altogether mid-song (see A Day in the Life). Whilst it’s difficult to refute those claims - how do you prove who was the first person to do anything? - the real genius of The Beatles came in merging these ideas into their records, taking previously specialist concepts into the mainstream and creating their own private universe of which the listener could inhabit with just a 12” record.

 

Appealing to the mass-market and being commercial may be seen as going against the ethics of art and expression, and may even raise accusations of “selling out” (something which seems almost quaint these days) but it’s yet another reason why The Beatles are still so revered these days and why an enterprising writer like myself is spending a sunny Sunday afternoon indoors singing their praises. Their early incarnation may seem like something you’d now liken to a boy band: identical uniforms, hoards of screaming females and songs about unnamed girls in order to make the hysterical 1960's teenager feel that they could well be the subject. It was a tactical masterstroke and The Beatles didn’t lose their ability to market themselves. In fact, they got cleverer.

 

How do you be taken as a serious act and still try and appeal to millions? Keep the matching uniforms but make them grown-up (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), say you’re making a concept album (Sgt. Pepper… again), play on the roof of your record company headquarters, say something outrageous that will be quoted for years to come (“Ringo isn’t the best drummer”, “we’re bigger than Jesus”, and so on). All things that may not have been exactly new, but things that the biggest band around hadn’t done before.

 

All of the above reasons - and many more - tell the story of why The Beatles weren’t over-rated and fully deserve their place at the top of the popular music pantheon. It’s a subject that could stretch out over pages and pages (you may not be entirely unsurprised to hear that this isn’t exactly the first piece of music journalism to conclude The Beatles were a bit better than your average beat combo) and it’s wonderful to think that over 40 years since their last album, The Beatles are still one of the most popular groups around.

 

One last parting shot before you’re free to resume your busy life. As important as all these aforementioned reasons are, not enough has been made of the single most important factor: the quality of the songs. It was touched upon when discussing the raw energy of the early years, but The Beatles never lost sight of why they were so popular in the first place, and endeavoured to still write to the best of their abilities throughout their career. They were incredibly blessed in the writing department: the best groups rely on a songwriting partnership where the two members bring out the best in one another and are free to bounce ideas around. Well, The Beatles had the best partnership in the history of popular music, as well as George Harrison; himself an incredibly competent songsmith. Hey, even the unfairly derided Ringo wrote a handful of better-than-average numbers (admit it; Octopus’s Garden is great). So, if you only take one thing away with you, it’s that you can ignore any hyperbole and with hindsight, recognise that The Beatles had the best songs - it really is as simple as that.

 

 

So, what do you think? Is Michael suffering from too heavy A Hard Day’s Night or do Joe’s opinions mean he should be sent down a Long and Winding Road. We’d love to hear from you using the comment box below.