At 38 years old, they are still my favorite influence. I was weird at 16 trying to get my friends to listen to this "old" band

bizarre, I'm 37 and at 15 was heavily into the beatles and plenty of other 60's music too. my friends also thought i was abit ood for it.

It's a shame, I think, when the Beatles are mentioned that all to often George Harrison is not included in the song writing admiration or credited.
It seems his accomplishments after the break-up would remove any doubt of his abilities. I'm can't imagine that he acquired such skills only after the split.
At any rate it was everything, all of them, the producer, the time, the place....everything. It all lined up. It was a complete package. If something like that happens again we will know. I believe we know it hasn't yet and not sure how something like that could happen again.

ORIGINAL: mythmonkey

I think Oasis is being marketed as the new beetles.

That's my guess.


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That would be like saying The Quireboys are the new Led Zeppelin...

i still say metallica...fairly standard first album followed by increasingly technical albums until '...and justice for all' (sgt peppers)....a band member leaves before the band gets famous and is never reconciled (dave mustaine)...band personalities nearly tear the band apart (lars and james/paul and john)...both bands create and define a genre....obviosuly in metallica's case, they had a hit album, very much less technical than ajfa (akin to the lennon solo album) and have continuted for longer...this is where the beatles would have ended up...

Cromberger, but lets face it 60's and now... things were more straight forward..

me being born in the 70's .. growing up in the 80's... TV is a very good example.. we had 3 channels for years.. now there is about 4329874983274329 + the internet etc.

viewing figures, for tv.. well when video recorders weren't about people had to stay in to watch...

the equivalent now I guess is sky + / tivo etc.. you can fast forward the adverts with ease, much to the annoyance of advertisers

Disclaimer. I'm not now, nor have I ever been, a big Beatles fan. I much preferred the more "dangerous", blues-oriented, raw sexuality of bands like the Stones to the Beatles. But the Beatles were The Beatles and nobody else is likely to come close to their impact, in my opinion, for a very long time, indeed.

+1 I'm a tepid Beatles fan at best, but even I know that no other band really compares in terms of influence and social impact. The only solo act that's in the ballpark is Elvis.

ORIGINAL: foxwolfen
You make some good points, but I think we need to put it into context of "when" as much as "who". Kids were for the first time ever breaking away from the traditional role of "seen but not heard" in society and society was for the first time catering to their needs

Hi, foxwolfen,

Indeed, what you are saying, above, was a large part of my entire point. The Beatles phenomenon was as much a function or *when* it happened as *who* did it. If it hadn't been the Beatles, themselves, it would have been another band that caught the imagination of not only the kids, but the hustlers, advertisers, hanger's-on and everyone else who benefited in one way or another from the Beatles phenomenon and whose interests were served by it.

Society, in general was ripe for exactly what happened. And I also agree with you that Elvis, among st other of the original Rock and Roll folks, like Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, paved the way for the Beatles to influence society in the way they did. Since original Rock and Roll was literally squashed by the govt. as being too subversive and evil for our wonderful, pure kids, it was bound to come back with a vengeance via a group who challenged the social norms, but not to blatantly at first. The Beatles certainly fitted this criteria. After all, their very modest hairdo's were considered radical at the time, yet a large segment of the population found the Beatles "cute" and way less threatening that Little Richard, etc.. This allowed them to gain the degree of popularity that they did at the beginning.

So in that sense, that the time of the Beatles was unique and will not likely occur again in the same manner. They were the first to really benefit from this now more youth centered society, and so get the attention like any other "first".

Absolutely correct. Like some very smart person once said: Timing is everything. ;>)

But most influential, this is not something I am willing to give them wholly.

I think I know what you are saying and I agree. The Beatles were highly influential due to the fact that the public went nuts over them, giving them a pretty powerful pulpit from which to pontificate, as it were.

What makes them unique I think is the level of attribution that we place on them. We say they were ground breaking, but in many ways they were a lot more like Madonna than Bob Dylan. The really were not the first to do anything. Other bands had done what they made popular before. We seem to feel that they ruled the charts the entire time the were together, but they did not. They were influenced as much as they influenced.

I totally agree with this. The Beatles did not invent a new form of music or expression at all. The fact is, George Martin employed all sorts of techniques and chordal structures from the 1930's for some of the pop tunes the Beatles did and used music concrete and other modern compositional ideas from other famous composers to fill out "masterpieces" like Sgt. Peppers, Magical Mystery Tour, etc.. There's no really new ideas that were introduced by the Beatles themselves, per se. Nevertheless, they must get credit for their incredible abilities at writing very good, melodic pop songs. But lets not forget that it wasn't just the Beatles *music* that made them what they were to society, it was their entire image, which was cultivated by their handlers and the press and society in general like an orchid garden.

When I think about the seventies, the Beatles were mostly forgotten. Bands like Led Zeppelin and Kiss made the Beatles seem like our parents music. PM & The Wings made OK music, John Lennon and Yoko were a joke as was Ringo Starr, while George was kinda odd. Nobody I knew had any Beatles albums. Deep purple, sure. The Who, sure. Sabbath, sure. And sure the ex-Beatles members made good music, but the hysteria had long passed and they seemed to be heading the same way of other big name acts, when suddenly John Lennon is murdered on the street in public.

I'm not sure I'd agree that the Beatles were so quickly forgotten in the '70's. Sure, other big bands came along to take the spotlight from the no-longer viable Beatles, but the influence of the Beatles, for better or worse, was still very much alive, at least where I lived at the time.

It's also true, as you say, above, that the Beatles were way more than the sum of their parts, musicianship wise. The four of them together (along with George Martin) put together some incredible collaborative efforts. Individually, their collective output is, to me, quite disappointing and even forgettable. If they hadn't come from the infamous Beatles, I doubt that Ringo would have ever had a solo career, George would be unlikely to have been a big star, either. Maybe John could have been a big star on his own--but I have my doubts. In my mind, only Paul probably would have made it on his own as a pop song writer. But I doubt he'd have achieved the sort of fame he did as a solo act if he hadn't been part of the Beatles. Just my personal opinions, of course, and I'm sure I'll get flamed into oblivion for them.

Boom... martyr, hero, immortal, icon.

I think John was an enormous icon way before he was killed. The murder certainly raised the level to martyr, I suppose, but he was already an historic figure before that senseless act.

Now, I do not know if you have seen some of U2s public events, but there have been just as many fawning, screaming fainting teen girls as was seen in any Beatles event. They draw massive crowds and have a massive and loyal fan following. As they are still active, we will have a hard time identifying where their music may be influential as its still evolving.

As I have said before, there is no doubt that U2 is a great and influential band. But, seriously, they simply didn't arrive at a time in history in the same way that the Beatles did. I simply don't see U2, or any other currently huge band, becoming the voice of an entire generation, worldwide, like the Beatles did. The conditions simply don't exist currently to let that happen. Plus, the world is a much different place now and everything moves so much more quickly now than it did then. It's a tribute to U2 that they've managed to have a long-term career in the pop music field since so few have achieved the same thing in the past twenty something years. Record companies don't nurture new acts, they suck them dry of their one or two radio hits and spit them out in search of the next two-minute wonder. Back in the Beatles day, bands actually had a shot at having a modest career in the music business. That's a thing of the past. The collective attention span of human beings has been significantly reduced by the speed of world-wide communication and that has a huge effect on what we, as humans, pay attention to. Makes me sick, personally.

So I guess only time will answer the question.

You're probably right about this. Who knows, maybe this current global financial crisis will become the rallying cry for the current generation of young people. And maybe U2 will become the voice of these pissed-off kids, like the Beatles did for our generation. As you said, only time will tell. But I'm not going to hold my breath to see if this happens.

(PS we're close to the same age )

Then we old farts better stick together! ;>)

Best regards,
Bill

Barenaked Ladies (still do. Although, with Steven Paige quitting, hard to say if it will be the same).