DannyDee wrote:That clearly flew right over your head, didn't it?
Uh, no? Rock and Roll has always been Rock and Roll. It has gone through a few different phases or different genres of Rock have branched off of it, but in the end the rhythm and the genre hasn't changed at all. It's the same as it has been since the 1940's. The Beatles didn't change it, they didn't introduce anything new into it, they didn't plagiarize it, and they didn't shape it as a whole. They were famous, maybe a little overrated, but their music was good.
Were they over-popularized? Sure, I guess you could say that, but it doesn't remove the fact that their music was good all around.
If somebody composes the most divine music but no major label picks him up and sells him around the world, a lot of rock critics will ignore him. If a major label picks up a musician who is as stereotyped as can be but launches her or him worldwide, your average critic will waste rivers of ink on her or him. This is the sad status of rock criticism: rock critics are basically publicists working for major labels, distributors and record stores. They simply highlight what product the music business wants to make money from.
It's not just rock music that does this, you seem to be targeting a singularity in something that happens to the mass of music just for the sake of taking the piss out of a specific genre that had a legendary group. You seem to be forgetting idols like Elvis who did the same exact thing you describe The Beatles of doing. The same is happening now for most big-name rappers. It happened with Katy Perry and pop music.
Hopefully, one not-too-distant day, there will be a clear demarcation between a great musician like Tim Buckley, who never sold much, and commercial products like the Beatles. At such a time, rock critics will study their rock history and understand which artists accomplished which musical feat, and which simply exploited it commercially.
Now here's where you trip up.
Tim Buckley was never really associated with Rock and Roll, and he died of a heroin overdose at
28. Because he died so young he wasn't able to be appreciated as an artist as much as say a big Rock and Roll group such as The Beatles, who were a big staple in the
entire music industry. It's hard to get recognized in any type of industry when you're just a single person anyhow, the video game industry and culinary industry are somewhat affected by this, there are probably others that get affected but I can't think of them off the top of my head. It's one of those things that requires a snowball effect, getting a good enough start to begin your growth, some snowballs last longer than others because the snow is a lot wetter.
It also depends on what kind of genre is blooming in the current generation. The 60's, while beginning the psychedelic funk era, were overshadowed by the growing Rock and Roll industry, and that wasn't caused by The Beatles.
Contemporary musicians never spoke highly of the Beatles, and for good reason. They could never figure out why the Beatles' songs should be regarded more highly than their own. They knew that the Beatles were simply lucky to become a folk phenomenon (thanks to "Beatlemania", which had nothing to do with their musical merits). That phenomenon kept alive interest in their (mediocre) musical endeavours to this day. Nothing else grants the Beatles more attention than, say, the Kinks or the Rolling Stones. There was nothing intrinsically better in the Beatles' music. Ray Davies of the Kinks was certainly a far better songwriter than Lennon & McCartney. The Stones were certainly much more skilled musicians than the 'Fab Four'. And Pete Townshend was a far more accomplished composer, capable of entire operas such as "Tommy" and "Quadrophenia"; not to mention the far greater British musicians who followed them in subsequent decades or the US musicians themselves who initially spearheaded what the Beatles merely later repackaged to the masses.
The problem with this is that The Beatles had their own style. The Kinks had their own style. The Rolling Stones had their own style. To not speak highly of another competing band is somewhat common if not egotistical. All three bands, while being part of the same genre, all had their own unique styles of music. To say that their (The Beatles) music was inferior because so-and-so's music had better writing is all based on opinion and not fact. If The Beatles were as bad as you claim they were then they would not have rose to fame like they did. There is a reason why they got so famous, and it was because their music was well received. It may not have been the best, but it was enough to become well received.
The Beatles sold a lot of records not because they were the greatest musicians but simply because their music was easy to sell to the masses: it had no difficult content, it had no technical innovations, it had no creative depth. They wrote a bunch of catchy 3-minute ditties and they were photogenic. If somebody had not invented "Beatlemania" in 1963, you would not have wasted five minutes of your time reading these pages about such a trivial band.
Music is a form of art, and not all art has to be a big, complex, difficult-to-follow, grand-scale creation. Not all music has to have a deep meaning, nor difficult content, or technical innovations (hell music today doesn't have most of that). They were famous because their music was easy to
follow by the masses, and it sold to people who really loved the band. Sometimes to get famous you need to do something crazy simple, such as create the music that The Beatles created. They didn't have big ballads like Queen, they had simplistic songs that could be enjoyed by anyone from any age group, which made them famous.
XerX wrote:3. Also agreed, except I don't follow any religion, but I'm not atheist either.
They way I see it, and this may sound like a conspiracy theory, but I see 'churches' and such as a hierarchy in a way. There is someone in power, whether is be Jesus or God, then there is Father, or the Priest, whatever. Then there are the followers, the puppets, who go out and preach whatever they were told by the Father/Priest. They could literally say anything and they would follow.
Now I'm not saying all religions are like this, nor am I saying all churches are like this, or people. But the majority, I see this kind of thing.
Well said.
Also by logic of shaming otherkins then that means people are shaming the Native Americans who held animals in high regards. OOHOHOOHHOHOOHOHO you could upset a lot of people with that.