In reality the Beatles songs werent all that good

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When the rest of the civilized world, including the majority of experts and historians, uniformly agrees on the value of something and you can't see it, that usually says more about you than it does about the historical or artistic merit of the subject at hand. It says you don't have the sophistication to accurately comprehend what you're looking at - much like people who look at a Picasso and complain that it looks like a child's drawing - these people are ignorant of the intellectual purpose of the Cubist approach to painting.

Pop lyrics in general aren't required to make a lot of sense, they're supposed to be singable. It's the melody and the 'hook' that count, because that's what gets in your head and makes you want to hear (and sing) it over and over and over. Paul McCartney is an absolute f**king genius at coining hummable pop music hooks. I can't think of a single composer in the past century any more consistent and prolific at it - not Paul Simon, not Tom Petty - nobody does it better than McCartney. He's not my personal favorite songwriter or even my favorite Beatle, but I respect his innate talent (BTW commercial jingles sound the way they do, because they ape Pop Music).

Here's the deal - you go back and listen to ALL the Pop Music that was making the Billboard charts throughout the 1950s and into the 60s, in the order it was being released, month by month (I have) and listen to the gradual changes. No, "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" may not have been Shakespeare, it wasn't significantly any better or worse that anything else being done at the time, the novelty was more in the Beatles' unique harmonies than anything else. But then something happened. The Beatles met Bob Dylan, who turned them on to Mary Jane, which altered their perceptions of the very music they were making and, in turn, caused them to change their approach to making it. The opening bass note of 'I Feel Fine' was the shot heard 'round the world. Nobody had ever heard anything like it before and from that day forward, Pop Music blasted outward exponentially in every direction. A medium which had been giving the world Pat Boone, Patti Page and The Mills Brothers - a medium that found Elvis and the Beach Boys to be radicals - suddenly gave us Black Sabbath, Yes, Jimi Hendrix, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, The Who and Led Zeppelin - in the space of 6 years, we went from Do Wah Diddy Diddy to Stairway to Heaven and The Beatles led the way. They changed everything, just by being themselves and that is artistic genius. Pop Music (other than Hip Hop, which is an intellectual degeneration), hasn't significantly changed since that period.

Nashville? Seriously? I mean, I'm a lyrics freak and love lyrical poets, like Morrison, Dylan, Ian Anderson, Joni Mitchell, Mark Knopfler, Kate Bush and Tori Amos, but seriously, if The Beatles had done 'Achy Breaky Heart,' or 'The American Honky Tonk Bar Association,' I'd have killed myself.

In Nashville songwriting is a craft that is taken seriously. You're used to only Pop Country radio is not what I to which I am referring. Country music used to be poetry- you use "achy breaky heart" and think that is what I am talking about- that is Pop, not Country.. I'm talking about people such as John Prine, Lucinda Williams, Don Gibson, Willie Nelson, Hank Williams Sr, etc. Im not sophisticated enough to like the Beatles? I guess I'm not! Their music does not move me in any way. Everything they do seems manipulative because its trying to show off rather than authentic.