The Beatles are over-rated.

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I don't see what the big deal about the Beatles is. Sure, they have some good songs but they are far from being the best band ever.
Many people say that they are. The Early Beatles songs could have been written by a boy band.
"She Loves you. Yeah Yeah Yeah" Come on! I could have written that in my sleep but wouldn't because it sounds stupid.
People say the Beatles were the best band of their time. Not true! you had "The Kinks",The "Rolling Stones","The Faces" and the "Yard-birds".
These bands are all more talented then the un-fab 4.

A fan would argue that the late Beatles were fantastic and very artistic. True but only when Harrison writes and sometimes Lennon.
"I am the Walrus" Should be changed to "I am the acid" because you have to be under the influence of acid to enjoy that crap.

They only allowed John and Paul to sing except on the rare occasion when George and Ringo were allowed to sing.
That' a bit tyrannic. Don't you think? Harrison was the best singer of the group and "The Bastards" (as they should be called) would not allow him to sing but for three songs on the albums.

I don't understand why they say "The Beatles" changed the face of music. Perhaps they paved the way for "The Backstreet Boys" in the 90's. Oh, but wait they weren't talented!
If The Beatles wouldn't have existed then somebody else influenced by American rock and rhythm and blues would.
A large number of their early songs were covers by American artist like "Chuck Berry".


I am ready for the verbal abuse for my rant!

The Beatles certainly belong in any list of the greatest/most important rock bands in history, but I do not think they indisputably at the top of that list.

A lot of their importance comes from their popularity, I think. Their fame began when rock 'n' roll was less than a decade old, and they helped cement the 3-5 member rock group as the central group type of popular music. We know may take for granted that most bands fit into the basic format of drums, bass, lead guitar with rhythm guitar and/or keyboards, but it wasn't true ten years before the Beatles and it certainly didn't have to remain so (only in the last decade or so has this format begun to fade in importance a bit). Decca records famously declined to sign them to a recording contract with the comment "guitar bands are on the way out". While their early music wasn't particularly revolutionary, they played their genre of music very well, and more importantly did it very popularly. At this time in their careers they were symbolic of a cultural change.

Later in the 60s they made their mark by taking their music more seriously, treating it as art rather than cheap, ephemeral, empty entertainment. They incorporated some elements of indian music (simply putting a sitar in one of the songs seems like a small gesture now, but it was a much bigger change back them) as well as experimented with tape effects etc. and at times abandoned the typical song structure. They greatly expanded what one was allowed to do in pop music, and did all of this whilst remaining hugely popular and successful. This gave other bands the courage to experiment more and gave record companies the courage to record and publish more 'out there' music.

If you simply listen to the music you may well find that you prefer to listen to several other bands more, such as the ones you listed, but also bands like Cream, The Doors, The Velvet Underground and many others. I myself like many of these bands more, and I rarely listen to the Beatles, but you can't deny that the Beatles were far more influential and changed our culture far more than any of these bands.

It's not very interesting to say that the Beatles are overrated. Given how highly they are praised, it would be possible for the Beatles to be overrated and for the Beatles to still be one of the greatest bands ever.

Finally, someone who agrees with me! Yes! The Beatles are so over-rated!

They are highly praised because they are over-rated. They were pop music of the 60's.
George Harrison was quite brilliant and he is one of the reasons why they were influenced by Indian music.

Everyone can't love them!

I'm tired of hearing ABOUT them ever since I was little, so in that sense, they and a few artists/musicians are overrated. But I still think some of their music is good.

It's funny, because I am the exact opposite. Nobody ever told me about the Beatles, but I grew up listening to the Beatles. In fact, listening to certain records over and over again was one of my special interests when I was a kid. My favourite was a two-record set of the Beatles' greatest hits.

So it is impossible for me to judge the Beatles. To me, the Beatles sound like my childhood. When I hear Eleanor Rigby or Come Together, I get misty-eyed.

I can understand

Who is doing this "rating" that people are so worried about?

The Beatles made hundreds of songs, so at the very least they get points for being prolific...
As 60s pop music goes, some of those songs are quite innovative, others not so much.
The progression from Love me Do through Eleanor Rigby, Blue Jay Way and Helter Skelter to A Day in the Life and Across the Universe spanned only a little over five years, so at least they evolved and explored faster than most.

I think I'm in a minority for actually rating The Beatles' pop stuff...

The Beatles are not overrated. They were a turning point in the history of music, so The Beatles must be treated with great respect.

how were the beatles unique and special? let me count the ways-
the beatles were unique because they had a classically-trained producer/visionary in their corner [george martin] who was also an ace engineer. they were the first pop band to use avant-garde signal processing on a large scale [e.g., tape manipulation such as flanging, looping, reverse, microedits, et al]. they were [for a pop band] very imaginative, in ways large and small, such as john lennon playing the organ in unison behind george harrison's guitar on "i wanna hold your hand" - or paul using only a string section for "eleanor rigby" and "yesterday." they were one of the only pop bands to display a penchant for humor, with their handful of novelty songs ["act naturally," maxwell's silver hammer," "yellow submarine," "you know my name (look up the number)," etc. they were the first to use long hair as a means of standing apart from the other bands. as far as i know, they were the first and only pop band to do a cover of meredith wilson's "'til there was you." i mean meredith old-fogie-middle-american wilson, for cripe's sake! -[i.e., the guy who wrote "the music man"]- how many other pop bands had a repertoire as wide [a taste of everything from rockabilly to rock and roll to country-western to jazz to folk to psychedelic to acid rock, among many other styles] as the beatles? not too many. they were the first pop band to explore multimedia. they were the first pop band [as opposed to individual artists] to make "concept" albums. how many others have something as voluminous as the lennon-mccartney song catalogue? not too many. how many other groups gone for 42 years still sell as many recordings as they do? not too many. how many other groups had [weird!] people do baroque and country-western versions of their songs? take a guess. how many other pop band's songs did frank sinatra do his own warbling versions of? you know the answer to that. their music had [and still has] relatively broad appeal, across the age groups, back in the days when the generation gap was more pronounced than it is today. in 50 years [if we survive], their music will be as memorable [and sell as well] as glenn miller's music [a big seller back in the big band era] still is today, among a wide demographic. and after all this hot air, i've still just barely scratched the surface.

I think it's hard to evaluate them not knowing a great deal about music before the Beatles, to see for myself how revolutionary they actually were.
I remember having to read "Heart of Darkness" for a literature class and having it fall quite flat for me because I was born in the late 20th century and knew that colonialism was bad, while in Conrad's time the story was considered quite shocking because most people still believed that colonialism was good for "the savages." Maybe it's the same for the Beatles. We take the chord changes and being able to sing about Walruses and Octopuses for granted and aren't able to hear how shocking the Beatles were for their time. To a modern audience the Stones I think sound more revolutionary because they were more openly sexual and sang rather openly about the drugs.

hiya, MagicToenail
welcome to our fun little club
there is before the beatles and after the beatles, they were fairly singular while they were a group, in that nobody had a wider range of musical and cultural influences [on themselves as a group] than they did.

Thank You for the welcome auntblabby!
I'm not a great Beatles fan myself, but I am a great Robyn Hitchcock fan, and he worships John Lennon, so there must be something to them! I really like what I've heard of the psychedelic side of them, but their early pop stuff goes over my head
because music starts at 1968 or thereabouts for me.

I read something years ago-- I don't recall if it was in Spin or Rolling Stone-- that equated the progression of the Beatles' music to the Backstreet Boys becoming Nirvana, and then becoming Radiohead, all in the span of about five or six years. It's a feat that would be rather difficult to duplicate in the current climate. And honestly, the concept that "I Want To Hold Your Hand" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" were produced by the same artists is pretty incredible if you think about it.

I think it's difficult for us, in 2012, to judge the impact the Beatles had on rock and roll history by solely listening to their music. We've all come into this current environment where opportunities for exposure to media are abundant, the music around us is taken for granted, and those of us who are in our 20s and 30s have had the Beatles' greatness drilled into us by our parents and their generation. It's easy to forget the lull that had befallen American music in the early 60s. Elvis had gone into the army, Little Richard had devoted himself to his new-found Christianity, Jerry Lee Lewis had been disgraced by the cousin-marrying scandal, and Buddy Holly was dead. There was a huge vacuum when the Beatles first arrived in the US. The Beatles revitalized a stagnating musical form and broke down a really big barrier, not just for themselves, but for lots of other British bands-- The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who, Pink Floyd. In the process, they experimented with virtually all of the fundamental elements that characterized rock from the late 60s onward. It was a massive jolt to the entire industry, in much the same way that Nirvana's success in the early 90s suddenly made bands like Pearl Jam, Green Day, and Tool commercially viable. In addition to their remarkable evolution, their high ranking in importance to rock music likely owes to that jolt.