Beatlehaters anonymous

Of course pop music is really music - it has all the elements of what is defined music, correct? What is external to the music doesn't stop what is being produced as being music. The thing is, people make the assumption with pop acts that they somehow are MORE image than your average rock act. Everything is image, non-image is image, etc. It's just the way it is - when an indie band runs around spouting at the mouth about how they have NO image and how awful it is that it's not about the music maaaann, that is their image, and it's carefully cultivated. Perhaps not as produced an image as a high class pop act, but if they had any money or fans, they'd have a production going on too ;)

The Beatles one is good though because really, they are the ultimate image based band. Stylistic evolutions, loads of carrying on in the press, making ridiculous statements, movies for god's sake. That's why it always strikes me as humorous when the anti-pop faction (I actually have a very specific nameless melody luvvin' freak in mind here) goes on about the Beatles, because the Beatles are the Backstreet Boys of their day.

There is a VERY enlightening bit tucked away in the new Rolling Stone (imagine that, something intruiging in RS, or that I'm even READING RS!) in the eulogy to Joey Ramone about how concious of their image teh Ramones were. They had a band "stylist". They weren't afraid to admit it either. According to Joey, they had their image before they had any music to play. So in effect, even the godfathers of punk were contrived. What does this have to do with the Beatles? Well, the Ramones were as important as the Beatles, of course. Well really though, I see nothing wrong with worrying a bit about image. Certainly neither of these bands did it to the extent of someone like N'Sync.

They might not have 'done it' -- but they may both have had it done to them. ;-)

yawn.

Always thought the Beatles were meant to be the antithesis of the 'manufactured' band (whatever that is) - they wrote their own songs, loopy musicologists like Wilfrid Mellors compared them to Mozart et al, their manager and producer interfered relatively little with their 'genius' etc. etc.

Loopy musicologists would have a lot more pop music to compare to the classical greats if they would just fucking pay attention.

Even as a sarcastic statement, the idea that the Beatles' producers and manager had "little to do" with their image and sound is ludicrious.

Er, that's "Wilfred Mellers", before this gets out of hand: and I don't believe for a SECOND — since as a musicologist/music-historian WM was always both fairly non-loopy and extremely attentive — that he EVER compared the Beatles to Mozart. "Pan-diatonic clusters" was the phrase the Times's music reviewer (name at present forgot: I'll ask my Dad) was mocked for throwing (correctly) their way in 1966 or so. He (not WM) also compared them to Schubert, specifically in ref. "song- cycles" (he perhaps hadn't heard of Frank Sinatra, tho to do him justice, LPs as albums of thematically or otherwise related songs — note correct use of "albums", anti-rockists everywhere — were fucking rare in all types of music, prior to Pepper and/or Zappa).

Oh dear, crass (misspelt) generalisation shot down in flames by someone who actually knows what they're talking about. But I still don't know of many other 'manufactured' bands who get their 'Pan-diatonic clusters' discussed with a straight face by musicologists, loopy or otherwise.

Actually bothered to do a Google search for Mellers/Beatles this morning and came up with the following... No mention of comparisons to Mozart, but certainly enough to make my point that academic musicologists like Mellers were only too willing to claim the beatles as 'four of their own' (I leave it up to you to judge how loopy or otherwise this stuff is);

1. "Then came the Beatles, who reinstated magic. They were, as Professor Wilfred Mellers once wrote, "simultaneously magicians (dream-weavers), priests (ritual celebrants), entertainers (whiling away empty time) and artists (incarnating and reflecting feeling-rather than thoughts-and perhaps the conscience of a generation)." " http://www.gadfly.org/2000-05/pie.asp

2. ""It must have been evident, early on, that John was an exceptional person; that Paul was bright and had talents; that George had latent potential; that Ringo had humorous fortitude. ... Perhaps it was providential that The Beatles, having found ordinary Ringo, discovered the extraordinariness that made them legendary." -- Wilfred Mellers, Twilight of the Gods - Music of the Beatles (1973)" http://web2.iadfw.net/gshultz/hartsoul.html

3. "While the study of popular music has only in the past two decades become anything like a respectable pastime, the music of the Beatles was among the first to be taken seriously in an academic context, thanks largely to the groundbreaking work of scholars like Wilfred Mellers." http://www.polarities.net/focus/2000/beatles.html

4. "Sontag, had she troubled to read them, would have been appalled by the irrelevance of (to take a notorious example) Wilfred Mellers's overheated hermeneutic excursions into Dylan and the Beatles." http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m2298/2_16/53552766/print.jht ml

5. "Mr. Gopnik compares Hertsgaard's and MacDonald's works to a kind of latter-day Wilfred Mellers'---the fellow who (along with William Mann) first examined the Fabs as musical artists...aeolian cadences, tonic submediants, and all. " http://rmb.simplenet.com/public/files/saki/bookreviewreview.html

William Mann is the Times guy, btw.

OK, well (to rise to the bait) I think Mellers (in particular) was using these guys to try to climb down OUT of the Ivory Castle, and set himself free: so I kind of like his perhaps naive overstatement, and I think "not paying attention" is a REALLY unfair judgment (to him, anyway, not nec. others of his kind). And "like Mellers" is not well defined. (Mann wasn't "like" him... )

Sontag = massive high-art snob, disguised — briefly — as a hip populist circa "Notes on Camp" (just ask oor Suze abt the Supremes NOW).

Responding to the out-of-nowhere MASSIVENESS of the 60s phenom was, you know, kind of a musicologist's job: I think Mellers was often wrong about details and somewhat goofy, because the backstory technical weight of his discipline was just TOO heavy to shrug off where it needed to be (he knew he'd been wrongfooted, but not how), but give him marks for making an effort. He wasn't afraid to say stuff which might leave him with egg on face for eternity: that's a critic's job, I think.

Basically I prefer his idiotic overreach to the wised-up Hornbyish underreach of far too many in-rock post-punk writers: and his book on American music is good.

(And Gopnick is Adam Gopnick of the New Yorker: curated a show at MoMA called HIGH/LOW, abt ten years ago: with actual comics panels beside Pop Art.)

I'm not anonymous about it.
The Beatles are hopelessly, hopelessly overrated.

I prefer the Tape-beatles. wooohoooo

GONG!

Please justify this statement, if you will. If it's a matter of subjective indifference seasoned with a bit of jealously for Young Paul's dreamy hairdo, then please step off the soapbox and let the next speaker be heard. Otherwise, keep on talking.

The fact that the Beatles were a "pop band" (egads, how dreadful) and then became "artistic paragons", shedding the skins of teen poofery and, y'know, using orchestras and growing facial hair (oh, yeah) while millions of folks were following their every waking move - that ALONE is worth recognizing. Not to say their shift into counter- culture significance is any less calculated than their clean cut rapscallion phase.

ANY musician trying to make a sawbuck nowadays has to consider their image, whether it's a matter of happy coincidence or the result of hours and hours and hours and manhours paid out to consultants and stylishs and fashion designers and what have you. Even the bands w/out images - guess what, THAT'S their image! (Informative redundancy recognized from other well-trodden tropes & cliches is acknowledged, thank you.)

The Beatles (and that's a fine name for a band, what's all the guff about?) were just trying to play the game laid out before them, I think. (Shoot me down, all you with a posteriori knowledge on the Fab Four's escape from Hamburg into the waistbands of screaming young undergarments everywhere.) Blame Pat Boone. Or the big bands. Blame FRANK!

GONG!
You prefer Gong? Good choice, David. ;-)

Stop putting bands in my mouth, madam, if you please. *wink wink I can't use emoticons without feeling stupid*

I think that it's very dangerously seductive to apply this rhetorical argument that non-image is image and that even sincerity is contrived, because I think in daily behaviour, none of us truly believe that. We search out earnest music because often we believe that it has earnestness truly within, not because we want to find a good actor who can merely convince us of sincerity. That's not to say that we don't enjoy fake sincerity, or what-have-you, a la Tom Waits or the Strokes, but in the end, there has to be a belief in the existence of "virtues" such as authenticity, otherwise, the patina of contrived sincerity wouldn't work, it'd be like spoofing a spoof.

In some cases, I think some people just didn't care about how they were presented, and while they may have considered what the consequences of not preparing for an image, that does not constitute the contrivance of an actual image. Another words, I think that negation and lack are two different positions.

Beatles, ah beatles, hair and beatles, exhilaration and freedom - the forefront of a whole new shift in human consciousness and the begining of the emergence of the great wedge, counter-culture exploring, experimenting with so much - blew the mould and dust out of many staid old minds and thoroughly annoyed the Edgar J. Hoover - well John Lennon was a protegŽ of Gabriel - who 'backed' John; the herald from on high, archangel Gabriel - no wonder Lennon was finally got at by one verging/moving into insanity. Far from the uptight establishment image the fundies, charissies and evangel-hohums cling to. Such is the nature of the change upon us all - trad. classical music trying to find a new outlet, a move out of the old mould - but where to go? All the old institutions crumbling and tumbling to make waayay for a hole new something - eco based etc., Beatles just ushered in a major energy shift into the pop culture base and the millions of world listeners - imagine the UK without that shove. Lotsa other great singles and groups, experimenting with all sortsa stuff. Gabriel sounded his horn through Lennon and things git moving along. Same with Dianna Brit., to change tack a bit, angelic sister of compassion.

Where is Beatles band?

(Old NME joke, sorry.)