I mean with deep respect for Miles Davis and as an admire of Kind of Blue and someone who generally likes bebop, the idea that he was more influent that the Beatles is somewhat comical. Miles changed jazz multiple times but from fusion onward jazz becomes mostly an irrelevant genre like rock-and-roll sadly is today.
Meanwhile the Beatles are the top selling band of all time, voted by specialists as the greatest artists in history. Their impact on global culture is impossible to measure. Virtually everyone knows a Beatles song. So much so that their general impact on the 60s and the world onwards is an actual field of study.
> Virtually everyone knows a Beatles song
OK, Boomer…
Obviously, the Beatles were an enormous global phenomenon for baby boomers and for GenXers like myself. But if you were to poll my children and their classmates how many Beatles songs they could name, you might end up in the single digits.
Not that Miles Davis, whom I prefer, would fare any better, mind you.
> OK, Boomer…
A quick Google search for the age of the Beatles listeners led me to the Spotify statistics for 2019.
The Beatles were streamed 1.7 billions time in 2019. 10% of the total Spotify user base listened to at least one Beatles song during the year. Of these listeners, 30% were between 18- and 24-year-olds, 17% between 25- to 29-year-olds. Hardly what I would call a boomer band.
Amusingly this is second time in this thread that I have been asked to somehow justify the cultural relevance of what is the most successful and most likely the most famous band in the history of humanity. I think we have reached peak HN.
> Amusingly this is second time in this thread that I have been asked to somehow justify the cultural relevance of what is the most successful and most likely the most famous band in the history of humanity.
Living up to your username, mate. It's a lost cause :-)
> The Beatles were streamed 1.7 billions time in 2019
Ed Sheeran, who I doubt will ever be regarded as the most famous musician in the history of humanity, has 4 _songs_ with more streams than that each:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-streamed_songs_on_Spotify https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-streamed_songs_on...
> 10% of the total Spotify user base listened to at least one Beatles song during the year.
That's hardly "virtually everyone", though, is it?
And were they listening to the song because they sought it out, or because it happened to be on a playlist?
> Hardly what I would call a boomer band.
I think they wrote a number of songs which have stood the test of time. But massively overstating their enduring cultural relevance is quintessential boomerism in my opinion.
> Virtually everyone knows a Beatles song. So much so that their general impact on the 60s and the world onwards is an actual field of study.
While I see your point, this excerpt also feels a bit comically overstated. How are the Beatles impacting my life and the world today, exactly?
Though if you're just referring to the collective knowledge of some popular songs, then sure.
The Beatles impact on modern life is difficult to understate. Consider this: music as metaphor, which surely existed before the Beatles, became required for any serious critical acceptance. Before that, Rock and Roll was pure bubblegum, and afterwards: a political force.
> Consider this: music as metaphor, which surely existed before the Beatles, became required for any serious critical acceptance. Before that, Rock and Roll was pure bubblegum, and afterwards: a political force.
I think there's a tendency music fans have of overstating the impact of the bands they like (Velvet Underground is another good example). But from what I've seen, there very rarely is a case where a single musician or band comes along and single-handedly changes everything. Usually there are a lot of musicians influenced by and playing off each other that move along a general trend, and from what I've listened to that was very much what was happening in the 60's.
In terms of lyrical complexity and political commentary in modern American pop music, I'd say that a lot of that starts happening in the more folk-aligned circles (such as Simon and Garfunkel or Dylan) before you see its influence in other groups like the Beatles.
What does "music as metaphor" mean?
Rock'n'roll may have been mostly dance music, but Jazz, Folk, Blues, Chanson etc. already existed before Beatles. And songs like Yesterday or Let it Be are not really rock'n'roll anymore than say Jacques Brel is.
I don’t think virtually everyone knows a Beatles song. I hadn’t heard a song by them until I got into indie music. And began going thru who influenced modern indie rock.
I remember The Beatles being brought up in 10th grade. Someone did a project on it. The teacher said something like “you don’t even need to say the album name. We all know.” I didn’t. I had no clue what was happening. It was just assumed every one knew.
From my standpoint that boggles my mind that someone could never hear Yellow Submarine, or Let It Be, or Imagine, or Hey Jude even incidentally throughout all media at least in the English-speaking world.
I suppose you could hear them in a store and never think to ask who that is. I'm sure I've probably heard an Ed Sheeran song but I could name or identify precisely zero and he's had a billion dollar tour...
I'd say that if you're an "admirer of Kind of Blue" who "generally likes bebop", you probably don't understand Miles' importance. It is certainly true that he had less influence on popular music than the Beatles did. But popularity isn't everything. J.S. Bach also had less influence on popular music than the Beatles did, even in his own time, during which he wasn't particularly popular.
There's a depth to Miles' best that is only reached by a handful of people in in 20th century music. While the Beatles wrote fantastic pop songs, and while I am a major lifelong Beatles fan who has taken a lot of pleasure in studying just about every Beatles song from a music-theoretic framework, I don't feel they reached that level of depth except in A Day In The Life.
John Coltrane is another person who went deep, particularly with A Love Supreme. And Miles' personal influence is such that John Coltrane might not have achieved what he achieved without Miles' personal mentorship.
Agree on all counts, though if I'm being pedantic...
> J.S. Bach also had less influence on popular music than the Beatles did, even in his own time, during which he wasn't particularly popular.
J.S. Bach is probably the single greatest influence on tonal, Western music, period, and thus an argument can be made that he had much more influence on pop music than The Beatles alone because without him, you don't have The Beatles. You can draw a straight line from him to literally everyone that came after him.
I don't think that's right. JS Bach was pretty much forgotten until he was rediscovered by Mendelssohn. The key event was in 1823 or 1824. "Felix's maternal grandmother, Bella Salomon, presented him with a gift that was to alter the course of his life: a copyist's manuscript score of J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion... The score seized Felix's imagination. Despite Bach's generally unfavorable reputation at this time (he was regarded as little more than a musical "mathematician," a reference to what would eventually be recognized as his extraordinary use of counterpoint and musical symmetry) and the numerous difficulties presented by the score (i.e., its complexity and the unfamiliarity of its language), Felix nevertheless conceived the idea of preparing the entire St. Matthew Passion for performance."
And that started the process of JS Bach becoming known once again, eventually much more well-known than when he was alive. Bach was a genius, and probably the all-time greatest for counterpoint, but I think you're overstating his effect on the development of popular music.
I'd actually assert that the Beatles ultimately owe more to John Dowland (a songwriter active in the late 1500's to early 1600's) than to Bach.
I'm glad you agree about Miles though! :)
I don't think anyone has said that he was more influential. That's a silly, go-around-in-circles-pissing-on-each-other argument that I'm not at all interested in having. The influence of both Miles and The Beatles are difficult to quantify and no doubt unimaginably large.
That said, speaking from the perspective of myself, a professional musician has my roots planted deep in a dozen musical traditions, jazz and pop included among them, the shadows of both Miles and The Beatles loom equally large in my mind, in multiple directions and often overlapping.
> Miles changed jazz multiple times but from fusion onward jazz becomes mostly an irrelevant genre like rock-and-roll sadly is today.
This is just...wrong, sorry, and you're really doing yourself a disservice by ignoring such an absolutely massive amount of great music being made. We live in one of the most vibrant times for jazz since the 50s. Tigran Hamasyan, Mark Giuliana, Julian Lage, Wayne Krantz, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Joshua Redman, Kamasi Washington (and his LA jazz scene pals like Thundercat). Legends like Herbie and John Scofield are still around. Jack DeJohnette is doing massively vibrant stuff. Pat Metheny still sells out arenas. Jacob Collier is massively well-known and is this generation's de facto jazz educator, like a little elfen Bob Ross of jazz.
The list goes on and on and on. As a jazz fan and musician myself I can't think of a better time to be alive than right now. Saying jazz is irrelevant is like saying comic books are irrelevant while ignoring the existence of the MCU -- sure, maybe not everyone is reading comic books anymore, but look at what it's become!
Ditto for rock but I'm not even gonna go there, it's even more broad.
These genres evolve, yes, but just because Miles isn't up there in a suit like it's 1958 doesn't mean that jazz is irrelevant.
You're also ignoring the influence of his (reading between the lines, music you dislike) later work. Without his post-fusion stuff, hip hop as we know it would not exist. Quincy Jones' entire career would not exist. Just...stacks and stacks of records would not have even been given their initial drop of lifeblood. Immeasurable. And that's from his "worst" era.
Just because The Beatles changed everything (and, no doubt, they did; I'll happily wax poetic about them just as much as I will about Miles), doesn't mean that others didn't have an equally large impact. I feel pretty confident saying your inability to see that has less to do with objective reality and more to do with your perspective of it.