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Attempt To "Digitalize" Beatles Goes Sour
An anonymous reader points to this article at exclaim.ca, which begins "Just when Beatles fans thought the band were finally going digital, the Norwegian national broadcaster has been forced to call off the deal. Broadcasting company NRK has had to remove a series of 212 podcasts, each of which featured a different Beatles song and would have effectively allowed fans to legally download the entire Fab Four catalogue for free."
For a group closely associated with peace, love and everything good about 60s and 70s counterculture, the Beatles (and their heirs/hangers on/rights holders) certainly seem to behave like craven corporate shills.
Personally I find them to be tremendously overrated too, and not a patch on many of their contemporaries (Pink Floyd, Dylan, Hendrix, The Animals, etc etc etc). Sgt Peppers was rather good though.
Most of those have digital rips of superior vinyl masters, but Apple did provide a teaser of some tracks from a remastered White Album last September to raise expectations once again.
OK -- and mind you it's not as if I listen to Beatles records every day or anything -- but for starters it largely depends on what you're listening to.
Most people who talk about the Beatles as "great music" are talking about their later catalog, and I'm certainly among those. My favorite albums are probably Revolver, Rubber Soul, and Abbey Road, and I like some of the stuff in between. I can not listen to songs like "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," so I can't defend them.
As for what makes it good music, believe it or not, at the time a lot of it was highly creative and original. Though a lot of the songs are credited Lennon/McCartney, in truth the Beatles were a band in the truest sense, with all four members contributing. (Witness the fact that none of their solo efforts were as good as the Beatles stuff.)
Furthermore, they really were good musicians, as well as songwriters/arrangers. If you walked up to Jimmy Page tomorrow and told him to his face that you think George Harrison was a better guitar player than he is, he might just agree with you.
As far as Beatles fans go, I myself am a "Paul." I think he wrote great melodies and just really nice songs. You can call them pop if you want, but then all of rock n' roll up until probably the mid-90s could just as easily be categorized as pop.
And I don't think you can really discount that there really hadn't been any music that sounded like that before the Beatles came along. In other words, hindsight is golden.
Example: Me, the first new music that was really compelling to me in my teenage years was Suicidal Tendencies, GBH, the Dead Kennedys, and Minor Threat. Then I discovered Metallica and Slayer, and I ran in that direction. Then one day somebody played me a Black Sabbath record from the 1970s. My reaction? It's crap. It sounds like crap, it's too slow, it's not "heavy," the singing is weak and silly. Well, look -- I was wrong. And really not a single one of those bands I mentioned would have come around had it not been for Black Sabbath. I just wasn't experienced enough, I didn't understand music or recording or anything else enough, to properly be able to appreciate what had come before the bands I was familiar with. I'm thinking a lot of the Beatles-haters in this thread are falling victim to some of the same.
Someone else in this thread said that the Beatles lacked anyone with the "power" of a Jim Morrison. Oh really? And John Lennon had no cultural impact, did he? Interesting.
I'm the first to admit that a lot of the Beatles' stuff is commercial -- particularly, I think they get way too much credit for inspiring the psychedelic movement -- but to pretend that they weren't groundbreaking, highly original, highly creative, highly talented musicians just makes a person sound ignorant.
Breakfast served all day!
Watch and listen to the progression they made in just a few short years. Yes, arguably some of the earlier stuff might be dismissed as "teeny bopper" stuff, but even a lot of it had much higher production quality and songwriting quality compared to everything else out at the time. So the quality was head and shoulders above much of their 'competition' at the time.
But watch the artistic progression between
1963 - I Saw Her Standing There / All My Loving
1964 - Can't Buy Me Love / Eight Days a Week
1965 - Drive My Car / Day Tripper / Yesterday
1966 - Taxman / Tomorrow Never Knows / Eleanor Rigby / Rain
1967 - I Am the Walrus / Fool on the Hill
1968 - Revolution / Lady Madonna / The Inner Light
1969 - Something / Because / Get Back
Just in the span of a few years the songwriting quality exploded, and brought with it new production techniques and set new standards for what was considered 'art'.
Most of those songs above can hardly be considered 'teeny bop' music, or comparable with Britney Spears. For one thing, the Beatles were 4 people who increasingly expressed their individuality, yet managed to retain a 'Beatlesque' quality to most of their recordings. Britney is one person, and while she probably expresses herself in her music, it's limited by the perspective of her being one person, not bringing the perspective and talents of multiple people (well, multiple 'named stars') to the equation.
Few artists have displayed such remarkable growth and boundary pushing, while still retaining and growing a fan base, as the Beatles have. Arguably U2 might fit that bill, or perhaps REM. They didn't start off as primarily targeting teenage girls, then progress in to more adult themes later - they simply started targetting college age kids from the get go, so the artistic progression is harder to graph, in my mind.
"Had good marketers"? They had radio DJs, and a manager who dressed them in suits. That was about it. They had no massive PR team, or a marketing department. They had a roadie, and later a press agent, but hardly the stuff of mega-acts today (the Stones' organization comes to mind).
Another angle that captivates people about the Beatles is the 'rags to riches' story. 4 kids coming from essentially an outcast area of England London would have cared to forget, conquered the music world and changed pop culture. Simply the fact that they had such an impact is in itself part of the attraction for many people to discover and listen to their music (to see what the fuss is about).
Something about the music (quality of production, songwriting wit, energy of early performances, sophistication of imagery in later song) continues to entrance a large number of new people every year. You're apparently not one of them. Too bad - it's your loss.
creation science book
Yes, the Beatles are pretty unpopular with today's youth. Oh, wait, actual data and not random anecdotes:
http://www.last.fm/charts
And I seriously hope no one tries to argue that enough baby boomers are on last.fm to skew the data.
Given Paul McCartney has left his major label, explicitly calling them out as out-of-touch with the current digital reality, I'd say he's less than terrified by technology.
Especially considering you can buy something like 40 albums with his name on them on iTunes. It's not him, it's the ownership of the music from his previous band.
And only a fraction of Mozart, Beethoven, etc... are still around, or considered timeless...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Wolfgang_Amadeus_Mozart
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Ludwig_van_Beethoven
Now tell me if all, or even a quarter of those are well known... hell half of them don't even have a wiki page, which means accorded to the internet masses, they are less relevant than most Beatles songs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Beatles_songs
I really wouldn't call The Beatles as something all that worthwhile. Perhaps it's just not what's "in" these days.Interesting no?
No. It's just sad (for you).
I'm trying to be nice about this. Let me put it this way: I'm confident that most people your age appreciate the Beatles more than you and your friends.
I can't find a single person above 15 who likes 2000's music. Why is that?
Going out on a limb here: It's because you and your friends haven't yet been able to drench recent events in the thick layer of "irony" you need before you can enjoy something (e.g. 50s, 70s and 80s music).
I'm over 40 and I love some of the music that's been released in this decade: Mike Doughty, Poe, Iron and Wine, Eels, etc.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
I remember my 14 year-old niece. She was wearing a t-shirt that said "The Beatles" as everyone in her school wore them.
I asked her if she ever listened to "The Beatles" and she replied "Who?" and I said "The Beatles, you know like your T-Shirt says." and then she said "What kind of music do they play? Are they rappers or techno or heavy metal?" I said "No, they were Rock and Roll, classic Rock and Roll, like from the 1960's." and she said "What kind of songs did they play?" and I said "Yellow Submarine, Yesterday, A Hard Day's Night, and a few others." she said "They sound silly, are they still alive?" I said "No, two of them are dead." and she said "Then how do they play their music, did they replace the two dead guys yet?" I said "They had like over 200 songs and they are trying to digitze them into new formats." and she said "How can they digitize them when half the band is dead?" and I asked "How could you wear a Beatles logo T-shirt and not know who they are?" and she said "It is a fashion trend at our school, everyone is wearing them because our grandparents used to wear them. You know, Hippies and stuff like that. Retrofashion is so in now."
Ironic that at one time The Beatles claimed they were bigger than Jesus. Now the youth of today hardly even know who they were other than some t-shirt sold in the mall as Retrofashion your grandparents used to wear.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Amen.
I'll try not to bore you all with the rant you've heard thousands of times before, but today's music is so... cold. While the advent of MIDI sequencers and cheap pro audio equipment caused a grassroots indie revolution on the internet (Creative Commons/Jamendo), it also allowed the labels to easily produce a single sound. Today's "artists" have very little creative input on their work.
Any idiot can open up one of the many audio editors, lay down a synthesized rhythm track, and make a dance single. Try it yourself. Pop open an editor, get a beat, record some shitty lyrics (you can fix them with a harmonizer, just like the pros), and add tons of distortion and digital effects. Hey, look at that: you have a rap song that sounds just like one of the top 40.
You think with the power of modern synthesized composition, real artists could actually take advantage of the limitless possibilities. Need a 300-member orchestra for a difficult piece? No problem! A good composition program and a nice set of sampled sound and you've got it in a few days' work.
The problem, really, is the labels. There are LOTS of good independent artists and composers out there, who are doing good things with all these new tools. But the mainstream labels seem to stonewall all of them. All we get is dancefloor song after dancefloor song with the same sound.
Of course, the related issue is the conglomerate ownership of radio. I know of very few independent stations left that aren't owned by some massive corporation. In the local radio market where I live up in Canada, we have four main stations. They are/were called Jet, Magic, CBC, and Jump. Jet and Magic are/were both owned by one of the media conglomerates. CBC needs no introduction, as it is the Canadian national public radio service. Jump is a community-licensed, volunteer run station.
So, massive conglomerate decides that Magic (more locally-focused than Jet) is under threat from the community station, Jump. So they shut Magic down, and seek a new license from the CRTC to open a new station.
Now here's the fun part. The CRTC grants the license to the conglomerate. The new station, Sun, has as of now almost entirely eradicated the publicly-accessible community station, which appears will have to shut down. The airwaves are now pumped with top-40 crap, instead of locally produced content. What gets me is that the CRTC WILLINGLY chose to give priority to the station airing music that has ALREADY SATURATED the market, rather than LOCALLY PRODUCED content. The CRTC needs to be shut down and control transferred to Industry Canada, who at least understand the importance of niche radio applications (Canadian HAMs enjoy some of the laxest restrictions in the world).
Whew... now that that's off my chest...