What If....The Beatles had Never Existed?

Basically disinventing the Beatles means either:
nominating orinventing another group who gets to be as big as them (and imagining the effect this had)
or
assuming that no rival group ever got as big, and calculating the effect on the industry, studio practice etc etc

- We'd all have shorter hair.
- Charles Manson would be a free man.
- No one would care who "the Walrus" was.
- Michael Jackson wouldn't be quite as rich.

Few if any of the Brit artists who became w/wide stars as a result rush of ambition/credibility The Beatles left in their wake would have made any impact outside UK. Even bands who didn't make much impact outside UK (post Beatles) would have been much more restricted in sense of ambition/scope and general sense of what might be possible.

Britains image as a terminally unhip, wet, miserable, uptight, declining, past-obsessed, class-ridden, theme-park would never have acquired the alter-ego that makes it just about tolerable. No sane person would want to live here.

Is it reasonable to assume that choice is B is the more likely scenario? It seems strange that were no other bands with as much a hold on pop culture during their time, nor since. The only thing close that I can think of was Michael Jackson in the 80s. Even now, if there is a television show or special issue of Mojo about the Beatles, it is an *event*.

http://cjvanston.com/media/images/artcd/ringo.jpg

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http://go.to/stevek

What about James Bond movies? The whole Brit-swank jet set scene seemed to develop independently of the teen-sensation rocknroll scene, probably due to a generation gap of sorts.

But if the Beatles never existed then Cliff Richard woulda done the theme to "Live and Let Die", I guess. Also the Beastie Boys would need some other pop star's famous son to hang around with 'em and release goofy lightweight Tropicalia-pop albums on Grand Royal. And the Meatmen's "One Down Three To Go" would have been about John Bonham.

Skip the whole Rod Stewart rebirth bit, that's a different band as far as I'm concerned.

If The Beatles had not existed, would it have been necessary to create them?

joh lennon would be a bitter drunkard but still alive.

liverpool would receive far fewer japanese tourists and echo & the bunnymen would be its favourite sons.

'penny lane autos' which is actually around the corner on smithdown road would be called 'smithdown road autos'.

Without the Beatles, the Stones may have dominated Rock & Roll, which would have distanced the older generation from Rock & Roll .. so maybe fewer record deals made in the 60s ..

I think it was only their image as clean-cut that was important in history - the music itself was only influential because of their popularity. Their popularity owes more to their image than to their music..

i. no beatles = no rolling stones (except as a long-forgotten covers band in some dingy west london club until the R&B fad ended)
ii. the completely unexpected popularity of their sound — plus the cheeky, quickwitted way they dealt with grown-up interviewers and reporters, their cheerful disrespect for industry norms — consistently outstripped EMI's and later Capitol's attempts to contain or package them
iii. they are "cleancut" maybe in retrospect, after 30 years of rockers calculatedly grooming themselves to be scruffy and non-descript for the easily impressed teenage boy market

I'll give you #1, maybe.. It was only a "what if" - didn't need to be the Stones.. what I meant was that Rock & Roll would continue to be seen as rebellious -

#2 - The "adult" population accepted the Beatles because they were cute & witty, not because they liked Beatles' songs as much as Dean Martin songs.

#3 - huh?? Suits & haircuts = clean-cut (for Rock & Roll) in 1964.

in 1963-65, they were about sex, not its absence

#2 - The "adult" population accepted the Beatles because they were cute & witty, not because they liked Beatles' songs as much as Dean Martin songs

well i'm not sure what "adult" in quotemarks is meant to mean, but this just isn't remotely true of any of the age-groups which actually bought into them: people adored the noise they made

you're backforming a critique of their lack of rebelliousness by judging them against the (somewhat formulaic) stances of rebellion of later years, which of course season on season had to be ratcheted up for effect (until you reach GGAllin)

jonathan miller — in 64/65 — compared them on TV to the Midwich Cuckoos: ie their strange-cut suits and long girlish identikit hair (which made them look quite alike), plus the way they seemed to communicate telepathically, or spoke in this dialect which few Brits outside the North-west and no Americans were familiar with, reminded him of the alien children in Wyndham's sci-fi novel, eg clever and beautiful and threatening

adults who *didn't* like the noise they made, and ESPECIALLY didn't like beatlemania (which of course got compared to nuremburg rallies), found them v.sinister and weird

at the famous encounter of the beatles and the supremes (1964 at a guess), they both managed to freak each other out: the latter by being super-coiffed and accoutred young ladies in demeanour (born poor in the projects and now meeting white ppl, hence on their best best best finishing-school behaviour), when the former were expecting funky and sassy streetwise chiXorZ

you're backforming a critique of their lack of rebelliousness by judging them against the (somewhat formulaic) stances of rebellion of later years
No I'm not... I'm talking about the perception of the Beatles to the adult/establishment population.. Maybe the British response was far different from the American response.. but "even yer grandma loved those lovable moptops from Liverpool." .. (before the Jesus comment.)

Their image is largely irrelevant for first few releases due to lack of media at the time. Easy to forget in the age of the internet that in the UK in 62/63 there was very little in the way of access to media for both consumer and performers, even with the well connected Epstein in charge. Most of the population still didn't own a tv then, radio was 'rationed' and there was no wide ranging pop press other than the NME (Melody Maker still mostly jazz) and definitely no internet. Mainstream press had no interest in music until an act became popular.

People probably didn't even know what they looked like until the singles became hits, (no picture sleeves either). The early singles success in UK is almost entirely down to the music and word of mouth which makes their success all the more extraordinary.

US is a different story admittedly but they wouldn't have broken through as strongly as they did if they didn't have the goods to back it up. Juat look how succesful or otherwise UK acts had been in the 10 years previous.

i think i must have misunderstood what you meant by "importance in history": it's true that relative indifference to content on the part of the sacks helped them GET through into history (it wasn't the only factor)

rock&roll (first time round) was "something the kids listened to", acc.the view of these same people

basically what i don't understand here is the refusal to grant the biggest pop group in history *any* agency in
i. their own arrival, and
ii. the world they made

it was the success of the beatles that allowed 50s rock'n'roll back in as a subject of discussion: they gave pop an awareness of HISTORY, something it had never really had before (when it happened in jazz, it happened at the point that jazz seceded from the pop world); they opened a space in which trainspotting — cf stones/yardbirds etc — could be chartsexy AND "art"

i think almost all subsequent attempts at historicising them try and strip one of their contradictory elements out of the story, to make it make more sense in the light of whatever aesthetic stream they themselves favour (or else blow them up into this ridiculous Historical Inevitability which anyone wd have blundered into)

billy they DID have picture sleeves!! and also there were lots of teenybop mags, many devoted just to them!!

But if the Beatles hadn't become big, someone else would have - probably later... I'm not trying to discredit the Beatles at all - but as a musical impact, I think someone else would have been there if the Beatles hadn't been. But culturally, I think rock&roll would not have been accepted & taken off as soon if not for the Beatles.

.. I'm choosing #1, and saying it would have taken longer.

Otherwise fair enough about the teeny mags. Before my time of course ;-)

But it was this that allowed heavyweight music establishment figures like Bernstein and Copeland to out themselves as Beatles fans, which completely changed the weather for pop music's development as an art form. Key to this was The Beatle's almost total lack of conventional musical training. They continually presented themselves with musical problems where each solution had to be (in the Koestlerian sense) an Act of Creation, because although there were conventional solutions to these problems(as the songwriters in the Brill building, or at Motown or even to some extent Brian Wilson knew) Lennon and McCartney did NOT know them so that their solutions continually took trained musicians by surprise.

The people in the musical establishment who "bought" The Beatles (and at first of course they were a heavily ridiculed minority) would NOT have bought The Rolling Stones or The Small Faces at any price. And of course it was painful for many to find these qualities in a band so lowest-common-denominator popular.

Also explains punks disavowal of technique. Using it as a means for finding out new things without being constricted by a 'proper' way of doing things.

http://thebeatlesneverexisted.com/

http://thebeatlesneverexisted.com/

Your go.

the kennedy brothers 'd be still alive

site is temporarily unavailable

or perhaps it...never existed

well suspected, Hurting2, well suspected.