23) No Ripcord Debate #3: Are The Beatles Overrated?
No Ripcord, 12/09/2010
I came across a jukebox recently in a bar in Leeds. A friend and I thought it well worth one pound to startle the surrounding Stella-smelling wannabe football pundits with the brutal sounds of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the opening movement of Pictures at an Exhibition, and the completely inappropriately stirring Ode To Joy. It was super, super hilarious. More relevantly, the jukebox’s categories included the following: ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, ‘00s, ‘10s, Classical, The Beatles. Wait. What? The band are a category of music now. It seems that even some four decades on from their disbanding, the entire world is still one shrieking, pant-pissing fan-girl for The Beatles.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is frequently awarded the belt of “definitive album of the ‘60s”. Now, not only is it questionable to read “The Sixties” as some unified event in a linear development of music to begin with, but the designation of individual works or artists as “definitive” is counter-constructive, and just silly. Unless you are putting together a shit pub jukebox.
A prominent argument for the importance of Sgt. Pepper… is its part in the development of the album format. It is around this time that power migrates from the record companies to the artists, not only in terms of creative control of the music, but in the selection of artwork, track order, production decisions, and so on. The presence and posterity attributed to certain bands grows: “musicians” are promoted to “artists”, singles disregarded in favour of albums.
At this point in the late ‘60s, a perceived rift between “pop” and “rock” is prized open. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones no longer occupy the same space as, say, Engelbert Humperdinck, and this divergence in weapon of choice (single, album) is a concrete marker of this distinction. A distinction based previously on less tangible, youth-centric counter-culture ideals.
The Beatles’ success rose in part from their apparent straddling of this “rock”/“pop” dichotomy. Critic Allan F. Moore (author of a Cambridge Press companion to Sgt. Pepper…) observes:
“The concern while writing is neither to know what the song is about, nor to recount a narrative or relate a message, but merely to work […] without the slightest care for any prospective audience.”
For The Beatles to have been so far removed from good old Engelbert then, they must have been doing this: pursuing some veiled artistic vision, rather than broad accessibility. But conversely, Sgt. Pepper… was the first record ever to include a lyric booklet, which allowed the audience to sing along and feel like part of record was their own. A curious discrepancy thus arises between the importance of the author and considerations of the audience. The Beatles wedge this “rock”/“pop” distinction with the release of Sgt. Pepper…, but simultaneously work on both sides of it, to their weighty commercial advantage. It’s really very clever.
“I’m a genius, […] I’ve been like this all my life.” (John Lennon)
The elevation of the pop star to the pop intellectual is another important contextual catalyst in The Beatles’ success. This is more cosmetic than substantial, however. It was far more important to present as intellectual, than to be so. This impression, serving to place the artist above commodity-pop peddlers, was basically fraudulent; fashion-based. This is evident in how far behind intellectual developments pop culture actually was. For example, also in the late ‘60s, Roland Barthes’ post-structuralist essay, ‘Death of the Author’, was published. Ideas of “intentional fallacy” in literary criticism had also come about, over two decades prior. These were arguments that audience perceptions of a text (literary, visual, musical) were of greater importance that the author’s. These new critical proposals undermined authorial importance, whilst - in this newly carved understanding of “rock”, and the release of Sgt. Pepper… - mass culture was seemingly only just recognising it.
There is a common claim that Sgt. Pepper… was the first ever concept album. This isn’t true. Not only was it preceded by concept albums by The Moody Blues and The Mothers of Invention (not that the music on these wasn’t rubbish), but Sgt. Pepper… simply had no concept. George Martin himself, unequivocally the fifth Beatle (if anything he was the fourth and Ringo was the fifth), stated:
“We made it appear whole by editing it closely and by tying it up with the idea that the band, themselves, were another band. To heighten that effect, I used sound effects of audiences and laughter and so on, which gave the impression it was a show but in truth, the songs didn’t have a great deal to do with each other.”
Moreover, even if thematic threads had been present on the record, this would still be less structurally adventurous than most music of the previous two or three hundred years. Sets of musical movements with unifying concepts and ideas had been around since the Baroque era, and these extended, motivically intricate forms would not be properly appropriated by pop music until the progressive rock of the 1970s; the lengthy epics of Yes, King Crimson, early Genesis, and so on. This is further evidence of how unsubstantiated the “intellectual” posturing of The Beatles was.
The other untouchable monolith of The Beatles discography was of course Revolver. Yes, due to their success, The Beatles were at liberty to make a lot more audacious requests of the studio engineers. However, the sonic development most people note is the reverse tape playback found on ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Firstly, magnetic tape manipulation to musical ends had been developed through the musique concrète approach in France as early as the 1940s, when Pierre Schaeffer and others adopted the sound object itself as their musical material (see Schaeffer’s pioneering work ‘Étude aux Chemins de Fer’). Secondly, it was not even The Beatles that first brought these techniques to a mass audience, it was the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, whose experimentation with tape as a musical instrument - soundtracking the radio and television programmes of the day - was essentially the embryo of electronic popular music (see, most famously, the original Doctor Who theme of 1963). Revolver’s use of tape manipulation was not innovative, merely interesting.
There were innumerable other developments in music around this time that could be argued to be more important. To name a few: The BBC Radiophonic Workshop; Wendy Carlos’ Switched On Bach; Perrey & Kingsley’s The In Sound From Way Out!; Downtown minimalism; Scratch Orchestra; Fluxus; John Coltrane’s Ascension; Bitches Brew; Can; In the Court of the Crimson King; Andy Warhol’s Factory and The Velvet Underground; The Piper at the Gates of Dawn; Woodstock. Nobody can proclaim any one of these things “definitive”, or more important than another, and nor should they try. They are all there to be explored, along with everything else documented. We are not putting together a shit pub jukebox.
So, there was nothing sonically innovative about The Beatles’ work - besides a few gestures toward developing electronic music and, ahem, “World Music” that border on novelty - and the intellectualism in their work is a total illusion, albeit a hugely gainful marketing point. The Beatles remain one of the most commercially successful bands in the history of recorded music and nobody can argue with that. This is because their music was the intelligent assembly of others’ ideas however, not the treading of new ground. To again refer to Barthes: “the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”.
I’m far from deriding The Beatles, since they did pen some of the best pop albums of all time. I am criticising those who deny their “pop” nature, assigning them intellectual weight and musical importance. Their contributions to the development of pop music were less musical, more contextual, and inevitable with it. They were not the most important thing to happen to music in the 20th Century; they were four lads from Liverpool writing great 3-minute pop songs. Their best album is A Hard Day’s Night, far and away.
For the other side of the debate (from Joe Rivers), see original publication: http://noripcord.com/features/debate-series-3-beatles
