My "Hot Take" About The Beatles

Much has been written about The Beatles, to the point where I don’t think there’s anything new to say about them. They’re probably the most famous musical act of all time. No matter what opinion someone has about them, whether it’s that they’re overrated, they’re the best band ever, or anything in between, that opinion has probably been beaten into the ground already.

I’m not going to pretend like my personal “hot take” about The Beatles is “hot” at all, though I’m sure there are people who would have a lot to say about it. Regardless, here it is: I like their earlier stuff better.

I love Please Please Me. I’m not a big fan of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I really enjoy A Hard Day’s Night. Yellow Submarine doesn’t do anything for me. You get the point. Rubber Soul and, to a greater extent, Revolver were turning points in not only the music of The Beatles but the musical landscape in general and...I’m not a fan. I’ve tried to justify this for a long time, but now I’m going to try to lay it all out here and hope it at least makes some sense, even if most people will probably disagree with me.

1. I don’t like music just because it is unique or experimental.

2. I don’t like a specific rhythm that the group seemed to become very fond of.

3. I don’t like psychedelic music.

4. While I’m fine with shallow lyrics, I generally don’t like outright ridiculous ones.

I think these will cover most of the post-Help music of The Beatles and I’ll address them each in turn.

Experimentation:

Obviously, the musical experimentation that The Beatles engaged in was revolutionary and had a huge impact on future artists. It’s just not for me. Being impressed by music and liking it are two very different things. I’ll turn to my tried and true, “Good Vibrations,” to provide an example. I don’t like it because of the fact that different sections were recorded separately and then spliced together. I like it because the spliced parts sound really, really good. I don’t like it because of the fact that the song creates a “pocket symphony” effect. I like it because the “pocket symphony” sounds really, really good. And so on.

I understand that a lot of people are not only impressed by The Beatles’ later stuff, but they also really enjoy it. Personally, the effects and innovations employed in songs like “I Am The Walrus” or “Blue Jay Way” are neat to think about and made them interesting for a few listens, but the novelty of it all wore off fairly quickly and what’s left just isn’t appealing to me. This isn’t meant to detract from the accomplishments of such innovations or the effect they had, but that isn’t a part of the equation when it comes to simply liking a song or not, at least in my case.

Rhythm:

A few months ago, I sat down and went through a majority of The Beatles’ discography because there was a lot of their stuff that I hadn’t listened to. I wanted to see if maybe I was missing out on some hidden gems within their newer works. Nothing I discovered there struck a chord with me, but one pattern I found in a lot of those songs was a certain type of rhythm that, as I listened to song after song using it, drove me crazy.

This rhythm is something I can only describe as a “boom-bah.” If the songs were performed by a marching band, this part would be played by a tuba, continuously blasting out two notes over and over. Songs like “Piggies,” “Don’t Pass Me By,” and “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da” are examples of this, but there are a ton of others. It just comes off as kind of circus-y and can get pretty grating after a while.

Psychedelic:

While not all The Beatles’ newer stuff can be classified as psychedelic, a lot of it is, so this one is fairly simple. I’m just not a fan of that type of music. And as an aside to cover my bases, “Good Vibrations” is generally labeled as a song in some kind of psychedelic genre, but I wouldn’t agree, at least not in the traditional sense. For me, psychedelic music is best represented by songs like “In A Gadda Da Vida” by Iron Butterfly, “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane, “Purple Haze” by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, or “Strawberry Fields Forever” by The Beatles. They have a kind of eerie, almost unnerving edge to them that is absent from the extremely light, polished work of The Beach Boys. But even if that “light, polished work” can be considered a type of psychedelic music, I definitely think it’s distinct from the other songs I mentioned.

Lyrics:

I realize that when people bring up some of the “nonsense songs” that The Beatles created later in their career, a common rebuttal is to point to their earlier songs with less-than-deep lyrics. However, the difference between the early “not deep” stuff and the later “not deep” stuff is notable. Songs like “I Want To Hold Your Hand” or “Please Please Me” are standard pop songs about standard pop topics. Songs like “Octopus’s Garden” and “Hello, Goodbye”...are not. I don’t think it’s difficult to see just how different these two “types” of songs are on an emotional level, even if they can both be classified as “not deep.” I prefer the early type, as there is at least some logic, sense, and feeling to it all, as opposed to a song about saying the opposite of somebody else or dreaming about hanging out with a cephalopod.

And no, I'm not saying The Beatles were bad lyricists or anything. I know that most of the time when they wrote these "nonsense songs," they were doing it on purpose. But making something ridiculous on purpose doesn't make it not ridiculous. Self-aware? Sure. Clever? Possibly. But I'm sorry, if "Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da" was released by someone's senile grandpa plunking away at the old piano in his living room (which is what the song sounds like, by the way), no one would have cared. Even with all the ridicule the song has, in my opinion, rightfully received, it still charted very well, and I've heard people try to defend it. I'm open to hearing alternative explanations, but I can't imagine any reason for its popularity other than it was a song released by The Beatles. It's like how an argument between brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis once made it onto the UK charts: fueled by name value alone (and perhaps a bit of curiosity).

I think that's an important thing to consider when looking at the legacy of The Beatles. Their early stuff was powered much more by merit than authority. As is the case with any new band, it had to be. As time went on, their authority skyrocketed, and that had a huge effect on how their subsequent works were perceived, regardless of merit. That's not to say the music they made was, as a whole, worse in the later years. The band just got more popular. Way, way more popular.

In the end, it all comes down to personal preference. I realize that my personal preference could be categorized as unrefined (I didn’t pull the name of my blog out of nowhere, after all). And in that sense, I’m kind of showing my hand here and outing myself as a bad music reviewer, or at the very least a simplistic one, since I don’t possess a deep appreciation for advanced studio techniques, complex auditory tricks, or music which stretches the limits of sound itself. I hear something, feel some way about it, and sometimes I think about why I feel that way. Every once in a while, I write about it.

Originally, this was going to be a post about my favorite Beatles song off of my favorite Beatles album, but I got caught up in trying to justify why it was an earlier work and decided to just go all the way with it and fully explain myself. I’ll probably make a post about either the song or the album it’s on eventually, but for now, I’ll leave it at this:

Some people will act like it is a crime to dislike The Beatles’ later work. To them, their early work should be considered nothing more than a bunch of necessary yet cheesy stepping stones, leading to bigger and better things. Maybe as time went on, the band became bolder, more varied, and more innovative. To some people, it meant they got better. But to disagree shouldn’t be chalked up to anything more than a difference in taste.