They're sounding very dated now
I think none but the olds can listen to them anymore.
shareTheir music is timeless.
Songs like Yesterday, Something, Hey Jude, Let it Be, Ticket to Ride, All You Need is Love, Here Comes the Sun, I Feel Fine, and All My Loving would be hits if they were released this week for the first time. It's only their early mop-top stuff that sounds dated.
Other songs like Revolution, Get Back, A Day in the Life, Come Together, Eleanor Rigby, Paperback Writer, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, and Penny Lane are so great and so unparalleled that they aren't tied to any one place or time.
And a lot of their old videos are getting tens of millions of views on Youtube.
The kids don't dig it.
shareThe kids don't "dig" any rock and roll music anymore. In case you hadn't noticed, hip hop knocked rock out of first place in popular music quite some time ago -- a trend which only proves America is in a steep cultural decline. Once The Beatles' music started getting played on "classic rock" stations, instead of just rock and pop stations, that alone meant a lot of younger people don't ever even hear Beatles tunes.
But among those of younger generations who still enjoy that genre of music, The Beatles are as popular as they ever were. The plot of that movie "Yesterday," where a failing musician discovers nobody remembers The Beatles, and he rockets to fame because he records their songs as his own, works because the music is timeless enough that if that really happened, and someone introduced all their post-mop top work today as brand new, it really would climb to the top of the charts.
You think each generation's new twist on the popular music of the day is evidence of a "cultural decline,"--I say that in fact it is evidence of a robust, vital counterculture, without which we would indeed be in a rut.
shareHip hop is a decline. I don't think each generation's new twist on popular music is evidence of cultural decline. Rock and roll was different than jazz or swing or blues, but it was not inferior. Hip hop is inferior. The average hip hop song takes less effort, less talent from it's creator, than any other popular genre. I noticed this when I went into the U.S. army in the 1990s. When I went to college in the '80s, rock was the dominant genre; it's what I heard in the dorms. When I went into the army in the mid '90s, I noticed that whenever the radio was turned on in the motor pool, it was to a country, or R&B/hip hop station, not rock -- the replacement of rock as the dominant genre of popular music had begun. And what I noticed was that fully half of the songs on the R&B stations were R&B/hip-hop covers of rock tunes. Rock, in the '60s, '70s, and '80s was never that imitative. There were always cover tunes, but most of the music was original. Not so with R&B/hip-hop. The use of another artist’s work is a low-effort technique to write a piece -- imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and there's always room for a little of it, but when damn near half of your output is straight up imitation, you're creatively deficient.
The average rap song only excels in beat, rhythm and occasionally form; it falls behind in dynamics, pitch, texture, and is virtually barren of melody or harmony. It's simply less sophisticated. Rock, jazz, blues, country, and especially classical, has beat, melody, harmony, rhythm, pitch, texture, etc., while hip-hop just has beat, rhythm, and form. It's literally lowest common denominator.
Yeah, I call that decline.
The Beatles are still a famous band more than half a century after their end. Songs of theirs that are sixty years old are still being played. How many songs from 1903 were still getting frequent play in 1963? How many performers and songs from 2023 will still be well known in 2083? The answer to the second question, I'm quite confident, will be zero. But I'd bet a lot that in 2083, people will still know who the Beatles were and their songs will still be heard.
shareInteresting post
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