rvacountrysinger wrote:
I respect Beatles fans- and I agree that the beatles changed music in a lot of ways and they did some interesting stuff, but if you really study their songs the lyrics were really not very good.
Like "She loves you- yeah,yeah, yeah. Catchy kind of, but really not very good songwriting there.
Then other songs "Well she looked at me, and I could see that before too long I fall in love with her". Ouch. I know that was early Beatles stuff. They got even worse later on. "Hey Jude take a sad song and make it better"...
One of their best songs "Yesterday" is so full of cliches. It sounds as if they were writing a jingle for anti wrinkle cream.
Those are just a few examples, granted, but I listen to their music. Its okay on the surface, but no where near genius level .They would never make it in Nashville as songwriters where songs count. I think they were more about image and style than anything else.
If you really study their lyrics and songs they were mediocre at best. They were at the right place/right time.
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.
I think it's very understandable from one perspective that it is troubling how airheaded pop music can be. But oh well, people in general are airheaded and they have been so since ancient Rome and back. I don't think there is anything wrong with saying "where is the substance, what is the theme, what is the damned point", but we've been swimming in an intellectual ocean lacking in substance for as history and tradition keeping has been a thing. You toss aside the chaff and find the wheat. It's only natural to look back sometimes and say to yourself "what on earth did we see in that" and it doesn't make you dumb or hysterical if you disagree with everyone else when you say that. I highly doubt experts on pop music of all things are very strident when it comes to philosophical grounds for their work having any value. They value this or that simply because they do, and I don't begrudge them for it. There is just a whole lot of chaff when it comes to looking for substance in pop music and pop music critics.
02 Apr 2014, 6:35 am
