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The Beatles — On Their Old Sound

Illuminati Ganga Agent 86

13 min read·<br>Sep 5, 2023

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I am writing a series of critical articles on The Beatles and determining their actual level of greatness. Also answering if they are great then why?<br>Why Is that needed? Well, without reasons for the greatness of any artist but only declarations given it leaves the room open for arguments against that greatness. And often people give up on describing why the Beatles are so great.<br>But in trying to deal with that I realized there are in fact two distinct periods of The Beatles — the old Beatles and the New.<br>So this article is sort of about the Old Beatles - but really about what Oldness means in modern media — as seen through the lens of an especially popular old band.

A sort of Quote<br>More than a decade ago now, but probably less than two decades I read a review where the hapless reviewer had been tasked with reviewing a CD boxed set of all the Beatles music. The conceit of the review was that he had never heard The Beatles before and from this he drew the hilarious comment (remembered from memory):<br>half of these songs sound like Oasis, the other half like every other band that has ever existed.

This will of course only be amusing to members of the aging cohort that remember who Oasis were.<br>The quote is unsourced as one cannot find anything any more via the internet, and it may not be wholly accurately remembered, but who cares if it is accurate either in remembrance or in its statement, pithiness beats out accuracy in matters of expression.<br>It’s true that Oasis does derive their sound from / was inspired by a number of different Beatles records. But not quite so much as half. And also to be fair to Oasis — they are instantly recognizable as who they are.<br>As far as sounding like every other band, critically it is usually considered a bad thing if one does not have one’s own style. The quality of an artist is often calculated based on their uniqueness and instant recognizability. This however does not need that artist’s cannot have a great breadth of styles that they excel in, or feelings that they evoke.<br>In my article on Paul McCartney<br>Paul McCartney — Mr. Nice Guy<br>Today I am going to talk about Paul McCartney — an enigma wrapped inside a really nice guy.

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I noted<br>The fact is that McCartney has a broader palette of taste than almost any critic and probably most musicians as well. Most of the people who would have chosen to write Silly Love Songs could never have written Let Me Roll It or Yesterday, they would never have thought to write Eleanor Rigby or Helter Skelter, Jet or Band on The Run would probably have been abhorrent to them. McCartney has a taste palette that runs from Air Supply to Metallica. That’s weird, and I think a key ingredient in the success of the Beatles

Uniqueness is a necessary component for a piece of art to have Mana, the property that invokes the feeling in people that something is greater or more important that other things.<br>Art as a tool for storing Mana<br>Illuminati Ganga has been using this term Mana for some centuries now, and we should probably talk about what it means…

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Nor that I think the Beatles didn’t have this, I just think it was a weird thing for a critic to claim. I guess it’s important to get in the zingers, even if the implications are not what one actually wants. But I suppose what he actually wanted to say that every other band that ever existed had a sound that reminded you of part of the Beatles. That’s not so much a zinger though.<br>Dividing the Styles of the Beatles<br>The Beatles have 227 songs, and they do cover a lot of styles, but we can do one quick division of their songs into two groups: The songs that sound old, and the songs that sound modern.<br>Ranking the Old Beatles — first attempt<br>In Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé (affiliate link) by Bob Stanley he remarks<br>If you had to explain the Beatles’ impact to a stranger, you’d play them the soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night.

to which I’d have to answer you would really be assuming quite a lot about this stranger. Without comparing the music of A Hard Day’s Night to the other music of the time period how do you think the explanation will go other than — here is a bunch of old sounding music, youngster! (assuming the stranger who needs this explanation is a youngster and not an alien)<br>A knowledge of other music at the time would be at least a preliminary — I can scarce imagine a person stranger than one who knows all the music that was contemporary with The Beatles and yet not know the Beatles.<br>Going by this quote it seems that one...