how much credit do the Beatles deserve?
StuffnJunk
Posts: 896
to make a long story short, my friend is a huge beatles fan and he goes on about how the beatles essentially invented rock and roll and how "if it wasn't for the beatles there would be no pearl jam" (or insert any other bands name here) or how the rolling stones are the unskilled version of the beatles, blah blah blah
i think he is way off base....what exactly did the beatles INVENT?
rock and roll existed before the beatles...its all based on black music, if anything whites in general get too much credit for "inventing" anything music related....without the beatles, there would still be elvis, the stones, hendrix, led zep, the grateful dead, etc shaping rock as we know it
i'd say the biggest thing they did was popularize the idea of having a band with distinct personalities (as opposed to one guy like elvis backed by no names)
obviously their appearance on ed sullivan launched a lot of ships and lit a fire under a lot of asses, but again they didn't invent the music, they just had high visibility in playing it
thoughts?
i think he is way off base....what exactly did the beatles INVENT?
rock and roll existed before the beatles...its all based on black music, if anything whites in general get too much credit for "inventing" anything music related....without the beatles, there would still be elvis, the stones, hendrix, led zep, the grateful dead, etc shaping rock as we know it
i'd say the biggest thing they did was popularize the idea of having a band with distinct personalities (as opposed to one guy like elvis backed by no names)
obviously their appearance on ed sullivan launched a lot of ships and lit a fire under a lot of asses, but again they didn't invent the music, they just had high visibility in playing it
thoughts?
"I'll tell you what: If all I had was Pearl Jam, and I didn't have another band in the world, I would not be worried. Because in there is the essence of making great music. You don't have to use it all at once, but it's there." - Neil Young
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Popularised the concept album; stand as a great example of a band evolving in a short space of time; wrote some of the most deservedly popular songs in modern music...
Yeah, they deserve a lot of credit. And I don't even like them that much.
First band to print the lyrics on the records.
Music Videos in the 60's before MTV (i.e. Strawberry Fields Forever).
Guitar feedback in I Feel Fine
Arena rock (Shea Stadium)
Backwards guitar
Also, Tomorrow Never Knows seems like almost the invention of techno to me.
Thank Beatles! i'm so glad you all got those cute little bob haircuts to market yourselves to teenage girls, so that record label executives could see what REALLY should be sold to the music-listening public.
If there is one thing rock music would eventually need, it was teenage girls squeeling in our ears at every show.
kudos.
Rock n Roll was derived from poor depressed black american blues musicians in the south, not a bunch of limey suit-wearing smiling british popstars with cute haircuts
You really can't argue that they created boyband stuff, then deny that they created the rock band as we know it.
+1000
Some things the Beatles "invented":
(and a lot of credit should be given to Geoff Emerick and the Beatles production staff in general, but particularly to the "sound engineers" and Geoff in specific)
1. "Album Rock" \ "Concept Album" , Sgt. Peppers is rather undeniably the first pop album to run songs in to one another using sounds\themes and studio trickery to create a continuity of the aural experience
2. Sample based recording, or "looping": Way way way before Hip Hop or Brian Eno or any other band in the world realy, the Beatles were using every fucking track on every fucking board in Abbey Road studio ... literaly running wires through walls with over a dozen engineers standing all over the building feeding reels of tape to different sound boards at the exact right time as called out over studio mics in order to get all these crazy sounds for Sgt. Peppers on to a final 4 track mix in real time. This was absolutely unheard of in its day, and was a technical nightmare. In a very real sense, the Beatles pioneered sample based recording.
3. Backwards masked guitar\effects\vocals
The Beatles are probably the first band to utilize the tape machines to play back instruments backwards on tape. They prearanged guitar parts that would work backwards, and it was way ahead of its time.
4. Using a Lesley Speaker to sing vocals through -- Lennon wanted to sound "underwater" for some of his vocals (again, on Peppers, I believe) ... first they experimented with putting a microphone in a milk jar filled with water (and nearly killed John through electrocution in the process) ... and then john wanted to actualy try and sing underwater ... but finaly Geoff came up with the idea of using a Lesley speaker. Most great bands since then have "borowed" this trick, everyone from the Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones, to White Stripes and Flaming Lips.
5. The "studio album" as a work in itself, irreplicable on stage: The Beatles were the first band ever to decide that they would focus on making albums so intricate and studio-centric that they absolutely could not be reproduced in good form on stage. In fact, a major reason they wanted to stop performing live was not just the fact that they didn't like the road ... it was that they wanted to be free from the pressure of having to reproduce their impressive studio trickery out in a live setting. They wanted to focus on making a unadulturated studio album, the best it could possibly be.
6. Breaking down "The Producer As Boss" mentality. [the Grateful Dead get a nod here too]
Up until the Beatles came along, the prevailing logic was that The Producer was in charge of just about everything. By the middle of their career, the Beatles had nearly made George Martin little more than an aranger of vocal harmonies (if that) and a simple booking agent for guest musicians. Which brings us to the next one
7. The Beatles were probably the first band to extensively use outside musicians in their pop music. Sure, other artists had used symphonic work or strings, but the Beatles were one of the first to realy go all out with their use of hired musicians ... they used a full symphony orchestra on more than a few ocasions and were probably the first band to piss off said musicians by forcing them in to settings they were uncomfortable with (drugs and improptu performance, no sheet music).
8. Eastern music. One of the first to incorporate eastern melodies and scales in to their music.
9. Dual lead vocalists. How many pop\rock bands before the Beatles had two male lead vocalists that were both extremely impressive song writers? How many bands since then have their even been?
10. More studio tricks than i can list here. Besides the Lesley, the "sampling", and the reverse guitar, the Beatles (vis a vis their strange requests for different sounds coupled with Geoff Emericks amazing talent) pioneered more daring and innovative studio "tricks" than any band before or since. Things like the distortion on "Revolution 1" were absolutely unheard of at the time, primarily because to achieve that sound they had to mic the amps much closer than studio rules allowed (don't want to blow those expensive mics!) and turn up the limit levels on the mixing board way higher than studio protocol allowed (don't want to blow the board either for fucks sake)! That distortion on Revolution 1 alone is probably THE distortion sound that sticks in most "in the know" musicians heads as the sound to beat, to this day. Again, there are more of these type tricks than can even be listed here, all of which are credited to the Beatles alone.
11. Among the first bands to decide that they could build their own studio instead of using a rented space. Abbey Road Studios was one of the first build by a band with big recording contract, for their own personal use. Hendrix is another one of the first.
12. Inventing 4 track before there was 4 tracks. Back in the early days, when all the major studios still had TWO track machines, the beatles were looking for more tracks. They got Geoff to convince the maintenance engineers (the brown coats) to hall the other machine from Studio 2 back in to Studio 1 so that they could Jerry-rig them together using some werid synch technique based off of some new fangled technology that both machines had, that was not ment for rigging them together but only ensuring the correct start time of the tape in one machine ... but never the less, the jerry-rigged them together and in a round about way invented the 4 track recording process ... even though it didn't realy work so well.
13. Esoteric or non-sensical lyrics as something more than just goofey (Louie Louie?) ... John Lennon was one of the first song writers to recognize that a song didn't have to make sense from a "logical" perspective. He helped pioneer the psychedelic rock movement with his new lyrical approach. While one can argue that the Grateful Dead beat The Beatles to LSD proper, it is probably to Lennon that credit must go for the actual change in the way inherent meaning of lyrics to songs became less important than the impression those words left the listener with.
14. Merchandising. The Beatles, hands down, win for the prize for first band whose management figured out how to cash in by marketing the name and image to everything and anything imaginable under the sun. They basicaly invented the pop phenomenon of band products.
15. The Fan Club Christmas Single. You need look no further than Pearl Jam to see how influential the Beatles decision to put out a Fan Club xmas single was.
These are just a handful of the unparalleled (at the time) achievments of the beatles ... and to argue that they get more credit than they deserve is fucking absurd.
I'd say they don't even get enough credit.
Most people have NO idea just how goddamn important their contributions were to rock ... i mean outside of just "yeah they were one of the first real pop\rock bands to bring a hysteria to the masses" ... no ... they actualy pioneered REAL achievments. I can't even think of all of them right now, but i'm sure i could come back and add at least another half dozen to this list. Things like pioneering "album rock" and changing the Talent\Producer dynamic alone should be enough to keep them in the upper echelon of the Pop\Rock pantheon for all time!
If I opened it now would you not understand?
Thanks...people tend to ignore the fact that the most innovative things they did, which we still enjoy today, was manipulation with sounds in the studio. Simply amazing.
Yes.
Two other inter-related "Worlds First" awards that have to do with their love of the studio:
1. First band to push for essentialy unlimited studio time
(Grateful Dead a fighting 2nd)
2. First band, no contest, to have studio hours late in to the night. Even after 8 or 9pm was odd, but the Beatles started pushing it to 3 or 4am on regular occassion. This was unheard of, and caused big scheduling headaches for the studio staff, who still had to wake up and work 8am to 7pm regularly as well!
If I opened it now would you not understand?
White Album, Dude...White Album
Pearl Jam bootlegs:
http://wegotshit.blogspot.com
Summerfest 2006
"Why would they come to our concert just to boo us?" -Lisa Simpson
That's like saying "someone would have thought of the lightbulb eventually". It's easy to say in hindsight, but if someone was to revolutionise music today the way the Beatles did back then, we'd all make one hell of a hoopla.
By the way, I once said Abbey Road wasn't that great. Listened to it in its entirety last night, blaring... and it was amazing. I don't know what I was listening to before.
You think?
It all boils down to taste i guess.
I find it amusing (and a bit indicative) that the cover for the album was not a reflection of their love for the studio or any great thought out gesture ... it was a direct reflection of their desire to get OUT of Abbey Road, and also to not have to be bothered with traveling to a strange location to film a cover for the album ... they literaly gave up thinking of a title and of cover art, and were like "Lets just go out side and shoot a photo, and then call the album Abbey Road, and get on with it."
:cool:
If I opened it now would you not understand?
Well, Maxwell's Silver Hammer still blows.
Well said.
The Beatles were the most overrated music plagiarists ever.I absolutely loath them.All they invented was the boy band phenomenon.
boybands are manufactured cute boys who cant play instruments chucked into a room having never met each other before and told what and when to sing...
i checked this out against the Beatles.. and you're wrong on every aspect of it.
they were mates, played instruments, worked in shitty clubs plying their trade for years and years before they hit the big time and very very early in their career they insisted on recording their own material.
zero boyband about the beatles whatsoever,..
LoL..........Ringo Starr
ringo played drums... still does... its still an instrument
post a youtube of you drumming Helter Skelter and then we can lol
Sure you're not talking about Led Zep? They were a boy band too. Four white boys, making the music of Hendrix and the British folk boom palatable for hicks and rednecks everywhere.
Seriously. You wanna talk about music plagiarism, look at early Led Zep. They didn't even credit their sources.