Artist Appraisal: The Beatles

Figure 1. Four Asexual Nerds

Welcome to Artist Appraisal! This is my brand new idea that won't stand the test of time because I give up on my ideas very quickly. Artist Appraisal is where I talk about musicians and bands that I either don't know well enough to formally review (yet) OR musicians and bands that I find too intimidating to make an attempt to review for various reasons (extremely famous, extremely overwritten already, critically acclaimed beyond my understanding, hard to write about, etc. etc. etc.). Take it as a very in-the-moment snapshot of my feelings about these musicians. The feelings are subject to change over time and, honestly, my whole goal in life is to skew my opinions over to the positive side in every case...eventually. Even if it takes decades.

So it's only fitting that the fuckin' Beatles has been chosen as my very first Artist Appraisal feature! Fuck the Beatles!

Not really. But I oh-so very much hated the Beatles for the first 22 years of my life until I decided to get the stick out of my ass, go through all their albums in chronological order one-by-one, and give them a real open-minded critical listen. I did this in spring of 2010. The verdict? Yeah, I kinda like the Beatles. They're ok.

I've got a lot of problems with them, though. They are so ubiquitous that it's impossible to approach them with a completely fresh perspective. If you're not necessarily predisposed to enjoying their brand of music you can easily grow to despise them after hearing "Come Together" and "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Love Me Do" and "Ticket To Ride" and "Drive My Car" and 50 others on the radio constantly year after year after year. Every person born after 1965 has had all these songs drilled into their heads from infancy, so if you'd rather listen to Black Flag or Judas Priest you're going to have a tough time being able to train yourself to become a Beatles fan, let alone fanatic. From that point of view, I find myself completely unable to be fully wowed by their charms or their pop culture status or their talent. The combination of being too young to understand, and I mean REALLY understand, how they changed the world in the '60s and the tendency to better enjoy other music styles has left me appreciating the Beatles as nothing much more than a historically significant milestone in music's history.

This leads into my other problem: everyone and their two dads has already said everything there is to say about the Beatles. They are the most written-about, discussed, analyzed, critiqued, and documented band in the history of creation. There is literally NO available unique point of view. Other than my own personal shitty opinions, there is nothing I could talk about that you can't find written elsewhere (and more intelligently presented anyway). So, obviously, the part of me that wants to start reviewing Beatles albums wants to strive for an off-the-wall gimmick-laden approach to keep it interesting. Like, what if Homer Simpson reviewed Yellow Submarine hahahahahaaahaa lol d'oh d'oh!

And then, my final large problem: because everyone and their molesty uncles have said everything there is to say about the Beatles, you need to be a complete Beatles historian to even tackle them competently or else the average joe will be wise to your lack of enlightenment about these saviors of modern music. You need to have extensive, encyclopedic knowledge of the trajectory of the band, as well as all their extensive solo careers, to allow your subjective opinions to hold any water (or to CARRY THAT WEIGHT, as it were!) lest you look like a big ol' dumbass fuckface. It's the only band I can think of where each member is extremely well-known and each member is significant to shaping contemporary rock and roll. That's some heavy shit, man. And guess what, I am NOT going to power through a bunch of Ringo albums just to understand how his meager contributions to the band mattered (it didn't).

Figure 2. The Founding Members of the Mustache Club

I've listened to the entire official core catalog of 13 UK-released studio albums, but nothing more. No bastardized American-released albums, no live albums, no compilations, no rarities collections. Going literally in chronological order, the very first song that made a legitimate positive impression on my jaded, sneery disposition was "It's Only Love" off of Help!, so five albums in. I still don't know exactly what it was, but perhaps the melancholy minor-key Lennon delivery struck a chord with me at that particular moment. The very first song that I truly adored, the song that really smashed my deliberate Beatles-listening grumpiness, was "Love You To" off of Revolver. No-brainer here: this was the first song in the canon to display George Harrison's newfound obsession with Indian classical music. Me likey! As far as I'm aware, "It's Only Love" and "Love You To" are never played on mainstream radio stations, and I think the lack of exposure had helped me appreciate these songs more than if I had heard them both eight trillion fucking times. The next song I adored, and is still my all-time favorite, is "Tomorrow Never Knows" from the end of Revolver. Now, this was the first time I had heard the original version of this song and I know I've heard it on the radio since, but my initial exposure to "Tomorrow Never Knows" was actually the cover version from the Phil Manzanera/Brian Eno live supergroup project 801. The Beatles version is much weirder. If I recall, this is the first truly out-there weirdo song in the Beatles discography. Psychedelic as shit. At the time I didn't know they had it in them. I was floored. After this, honestly, no other song chronologically had made as much of an impression on me. I had hit the peak.

As for the albums themselves, I consider the first four (Please Please Me, With the Beatles, Hard Day's Night, and Beatles For Sale) to be disposable, cutesy, shallow, and almost completely interchangeable (Please Please Me is even more noticeably lower in quality than the other three). I think Help! is similar to the first four, but it's a step in the right direction for maturity and making actual use of their progressing creativity. Rubber Soul is the first album that brings a distinct personality and identity to the table, with Revolver being the first truly exceptional Beatles album (and the only one that I legitimately love). I found Sgt. Pepper's to be an incredible disappointment. I found Magical Mystery Tour to be too similar to Sgt. Pepper's. My most mixed feelings come from the White Album, which has a few of my favorite songs ("Back in the U.S.S.R.", "Happiness is a Warm Gun", "Birthday", "Helter Skelter") with some real filler ("Glass Onion", "Don't Pass By Me", "I Will", "Revolution 1"), but, being 90 minutes long, I'd think it's a tough album to get through for anybody. I actually kind of like "Revolution 9" though, the most hated Beatles song ever, but even I think it's overlong and pretentious as absolute fuck. Yellow Submarine is garbage. I hate to say this, but Abbey Road just doesn't do it for me. Even with all it's historical context, even with the miracle of the four of them hating each other by this point and still cooperating, even with its pinnacle of artistic maturity, I just don't really like it. Let It Be I've only heard once, I don't remember any of it anymore.

Figure 3. The Only Good Beatles-Related Thing

So, yeah, my major hangup here is that I like the Beatles, but not as much as I'm supposed to. In a vacuum, I'd give Please Please Me a Kinda Bad and I'd slap Yellow Submarine with a big fat red Sucks rating. Revolver would be my only Very Good. Abbey Road would get a Just OK. Does all this sound fair? Considering everything that's been pounded into my head about the band, about their genius and their influence, about the way they completely took control of global cultural trends in the '60s and altered the course forever, about the way things still are in the world to this very day because of them, I'd say absolutely not. But my gut says they aren't as great as everyone says, and until I'm comfortable enough with my disconnected opinions about the Beatles I'm going to stay far, far away from reviewing their work through my unenlightened lens. That is to say, I respect them just enough that I don't really want to slap mediocre ratings on half their discography, so take that for what it's worth.