Post by japaneseteeth on Aug 27, 2014 0:54:24 GMT
Speaking of The Beatles, anyone read Piero Scaruffi's utterly scathing essay about them? Some of his points, I can't agree with at all. (Harping on The Beatles for making "music for girls" is just a wee bit sexist. If it's meant for girls, it can't be good, isn't that right, bronies? ... And apparently there were no drugs in their music. Huh.) But he does raise a very interesting point that they never really earned their reputation as musical pioneers. All of their "experiments" and "innovations" were just safer, more-palatable-for-the-masses versions of the music that their contemporaries were already making. They were popularizers, not innovators.
It's sort of like Feynman's statement about how you don't really understand a scientific principle unless you can explain it to a freshman: it definitely takes some skill and expertise to take something relatively niche-oriented and use it to create something that can go mainstream. Yeah, a lot of their stuff was manufactured and sort of a pseudo boyband thing, but I think it's telling that decades later millions of people still listen to them. They must have gotten something right, or they wouldn't be so big now.
Granted, I do agree that the Beatles are often treated as something of a Sacred Cow, and that while I do think they were important, they aren't as important or awesome as lots of people make them out to be. A lot of their early stuff is really kinda meh.