11 ms·

Why did The Beatles get so many bad reviews?

148 points by SirLJ 4y ago

braingenious 4y ago
tl;dr They were a common subject of public comment in the 60s
junofan 4y ago
They were trying to piss off critics. “We’re more popular than Jesus.”
derbOac 4y ago
It's a really interesting piece but I feel the need to question the premise that there's a "wrong" or "right" with art criticism, as if the purpose of a critique is to reveal to the reader the true state of an artwork — as opposed to just being an expression of an opinion. I realize that "getting it wrong" could be a shorthand for "being so different from the historical majority opinion" but the piece doesn't seem to approach things that way. It's significant in a way because I think over time majority opinions have a way of stifling minority perspectives on things that are most popularly seen as "great art". I don't mean to sound contrarian, I'm just suggesting that maybe consensus about a given work isn't quite what it seems all the time, that there are social pressures and dynamics at play that sometimes distort how people might consciously consider a piece versus how they might react to it completely independently without labels. I also think it points to other things, like art perception being contextually dependent. People change and their tastes change — it doesn't mean one perspective is invalid, just that it was occuring in a different time. Of course, sometimes people just don't fully appreciate something because it's new and are looking at it with a certain lack of imagination. But I also sometimes think we look back at the past as if it were preordained, more so than how we see the future.
- skybrian 4y ago
  The part that particularly seems closed-minded now is not seeing how others might appreciate new music that you personally didn't like. A music critic can't just say "I didn't care for it" and move on - or rather, they could, but then they wouldn't write the article. I think the lesson here is more for the editors: maybe find someone who's a fan to write the piece? Or maybe we get a better picture now that aggregate ratings (like Rotten Tomatoes) are widespread?
  - Andrex 4y ago
    > maybe find someone who's a fan to write the piece Objectivity in journalism may not exist, but most poor quality journalism I find is directly correlated to how big a fanboy that person is about the particular subject. You need intelligence when approaching criticism far more than reverence, is I guess what I'm saying. If someone can intelligently relate to me specifically why they might not like the Beatles, or specific song, in a way that I can understand, I would consider that person more trustworthy than the alternative. But that relies on me, or rather the reader/audience, to be open and receptive to challenging opinions.
    - skybrian 4y ago
      Well, okay, but here's my personal experience. When I created a Mastodon account, I decided to use it to post mini-reviews of accordion-related music from YouTube. (Because I play accordion and I'm interested in hearing unfamiliar kinds of music.) I look around on YouTube for recordings I like. There are lots of recordings I don't like for whatever reason. I don't post them. Why bother? So, nowadays, I'm not sure why anyone should spend time reviewing music they don't like. At all. What's the point? The slush pile is vast. Make the best collection you can of stuff you like. If other people find it good then maybe they'll start to trust your judgement. Admittedly, I have a tiny audience, a newspaper is a little different, and sometimes people like to read a good takedown. But it seems unnecessary?
      - galaxyLogic 4y ago
        > But it seems unnecessary? If something is extremely popular but you perceive something wrong about it of course that's a good reason to write about it. At the same time many critics seem to just try to put artists down because that makes it seem the critic is above the artist because he can see the wrongness in the artist. Critics are wannabe artists.
        skybrian 4y ago
        I don't see any upside in trying to tell people that some music they love is crap. It's different for other media, like an article about how a book or TV show or movie is historically inaccurate is sometimes fun.
- JauntyHatAngle 4y ago
  I mostly agree and welcome your point, but as a footnote, I feel what complicates things is that music (like all art) is both a technical craft which can be rated somewhat objectively in terms of technical merit, while also being subjective in "judging" its cultural significance, evocative nature etc etc.
  - IgorPartola 4y ago
    Not just that. Where the music comes from is also important. For example, a traditionally masculine music genre being suddenly performed by a woman, and performed well, will stick out. See Queen Latifah as an example.
- yeuxardents 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - runsonrum 4y ago
    I have used ChatGPT but, can you ask it if it has responded to a specific article before?
  - yeuxardents 4y ago
    I asked chatgpt to analyze the article, provide feedback, and analysis on why the premise of right or wrong might be incorrect. I am now living in a simulation.
    - Eupraxias 4y ago
      That reminds me of the moment that I realized that I have been a chatbot for a really long time.
  - lovemenot 4y ago
    History may judge your condescension to GPT-3 unkindly. It was, by any objective measure, the greatest AI development since GPT-2. Itself a landmark achievement.
  - Eupraxias 4y ago
    These kind of chatbot comments should be banned. When the chatbot content sticks out from everything else like this, we don't need AI to fish it out.
    - Eupraxias 4y ago
      Oh dear lord, I was being sarcastic and meta! Can we unflag the parent? It was a legit statement, I thought.
  - farrarstan 4y ago
    [dead]
- bnralt 4y ago
  One of the first things I do when I'm considering a piece of media is I read the negative reviews. Finding out the reasons why someone doesn't like something is a good way to see if you'd like it yourself. For instance, most of the time I'm going to enjoy a film that gets dinged for being "confusing" than I am for one that gets dinged for being "bland." Others might find the opposite to be true. It's not that I'm necessarily going to agree with the negative reviews. But I definitely find them much more useful. It's a sad state of affairs when we're told that there's only one correct opinion about a particular piece of media and dissenting views are "wrong." We lose the deep insight that comes from looking at who likes and dislikes a piece and why. And it's hard to truly like something when liking it is presented as the only correct choice from the start.
  - holoduke 4y ago
    For me as as well. Same for dislike buttons. I d like to see them. Shame they dont have it anymore at youtube.
    - zdragnar 4y ago
      Interestingly, I don't think I really found dislike counts to be very useful, though I do go for negative reviews on books first. Negative reviews tend to be a bit more articulate and specific about what they didn't like, and why they didn't like it. Pain points tend to stand out a lot more than positive things, especially if you go into an experience with the expectation that you'll enjoy it. That said, there's also plenty of occasions where I've found nothing useful in the negative reviews, but found some positive reviews compelling enough to try a book. Movies, TV shows and music I tend to ignore specific reviews altogether, and just go by the description and overall positive/negative average from ratings. There are so many more dimensions that short form reviews generally aren't useful at all.
      - Sakos 4y ago
        I wonder how useful it would be for a dislike button to require a brief statement explaining why. I'm not a fan of dislike/downvote buttons in general because there are so many different reasons why something could be perceived as negative, and what might be considered negative by one person might be a positive for somebody else. It just feels like noise to me.
- msla 4y ago
  I distinguish between criticism and reviewing, where criticism is, ultimately, about putting a work in context, and reviewing is about telling someone whether a work is likely to be worth their time. Both can be done in the same piece, of course, and the longer reviews include some aspects of criticism at least to the extent of an after-action report: This work was good/bad, so let's explore what worked/didn't work to contribute to that, which is done in the context of the general language of whatever medium the work is in. On the other hand, reviews don't need to do that, and the shorter ones don't, and criticism certainly doesn't need to engage with the question of whether a piece of media is at all enjoyable. So a review can be right or wrong from my perspective based on how well it reflects my tastes.
  - chongli 4y ago
    Yes exactly. Proper criticism tries to leave preferences out and instead investigate the context of a piece and how it influences other work, how the work was influenced by the context in which it was created. Look at a piece like Picasso’s Guernica [1] without any context and in all likelihood you’ll consider it an ugly, confusing mess. But then if you take some time to read the history [2] and it completely changes how you look at the work. [1] https://www.parisupdate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ParisUpdate-guernica-MuseePicasso2-1024x730.jpg https://www.parisupdate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Paris... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Guernica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Guernica
    - Sakos 4y ago
      That's an important point. I don't believe reviews should leave out preferences. They should be explicit, yet distanced enough. I judge games through the reviews based on how I've contextualized a reviewer's likes and dislikes. My favorite reviewers might not like a game, but admit that the things that bother them might not bother somebody else and they point out things that might appeal to people with different preferences.
      - chongli 4y ago
        I think it's important to make a distinction between criticism as a formal, academic discipline and reviews which are meant to give practical advice about whether or not a particular work is worth the consumer's time.
- atoav 4y ago
  The decision what is good art and what is not is a decision indivdiuals and/or groups within society take. Those indivdiuals/groups might not necessarily be in total overlap with each other. You might e.g. have particular sub-groups who enjoy noise music, something the majority of people wouldn't even call music. That sub group might consider a overwhelming fraction of popular music bad music. Similar a particular country fan might consider rap and techno not music at all, or bad music while they like their own thing very much. Sometimes (often?) these critiques contain an element of social or cultural connotation as well. Techno definitly is hedonistic, rap and hiphop are connected to certain demographics and classes within society, as where the Beatles. That means a criticism should always also be seen in that light: Who criticizes whom from what standpoint? If that country fan dislikes the latest and harshest noise rock release that might be a good guide for fellow country music afficionados, but someone who likes noise rock might rather take that negative review as a compliment. Both sides could try to use the border they draw towards the other as cultural capital within their own ingroups. That means when the Beatles became popular a lot of the criticism they got was also criticism the old generations had towards the younger generations. It was not only about the music, it was also about who decides what good music is. Today (thankfully) we live in times where objectively good art is revealed as the delussional idea it always was.
- bambax 4y ago
  > as opposed to just being an expression of an opinion Well if you're a critic you're supposed to have an informed opinion, something that is not just your personal, knee-jerk reaction but a well thought-out intellectual construction that explains what's good and what's less good and why. Otherwise what's the point? I can get an opinion from any patron at any bar, or from dogs even.
- cageface 4y ago
  To completely dismiss Sgt Pepper is about as close to objectively wrong as you can get in music criticism.
NateEag 4y ago
A completely alternate explanation that I don't quite believe but can't pass up mentioning: Perhaps the Beatles really weren't that great, but were massively popular for reasons other than master craftsmanship. Fast-forward a handful of decades, and few now dare voice a dissenting opinion. (My own personal opinion is that they were great songwriters who never bothered to tighten up their production and performance chops. I disliked them on first listen, then gave The White Album very close attention twenty or thirty times, and that's where I landed.)
- nine_k 4y ago
  To my mind, the best songs written by The Beatles are their later songs, written when the Beatlemania has receded. To me, they progressed from being a typical pop band to producing much more interesting and artful stuff. But likely for many at the time they digressed from producing vibrant pop hits like Hard Day's Night to inane psychedelic experiments.
  - bbreier 4y ago
    I really, really want to agree with this, but as much as I enjoy Abbey Road, I also can never get enough Rubber Soul
  - robotresearcher 4y ago
    The Beatles were a really, really good pop band - much better than typical. Can't Buy Me Love, Hard Day's Night, Help!, Day Tripper, We Can Work It Out, Paperback Writer, Yesterday, Nowhere Man are mid-career Beatles, 1964-66. Most charting bands don't produce memorable pop songs like this over and over. And then they made the more ambitious albums. McCartney proved again later that he is an outstanding pop musician. Maybe I'm Amazed, Live and Let Die, etc.
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      > that he is an outstanding pop musician He became one. None of them were very good in 1962. It's debatable how good they would have been without George Martin guiding them.
deleted 4y ago
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moron4hire 4y ago
I never got the hype about the Beatles. So many people have told me, "well, you had to be there". Ok. So? What does that have to do with my listening choices now? I want to hear an enjoyable song, not "I wanna hold your hand" repeated 15 million times (and that's just one listening!) EDIT: this is hilarious, and not unexpected. As soon as you say something against the Beatles, all the self-described "experts" come out to tell you "you're entitled to your opinion, but your opinion is wrong".
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  It's just consistently good stuff, that's all. To a degree no one else reached. You don't have to like it, but shouldn't be determined not to either. Forget the hype, it's over. Also, the first album is basically enthusiastic teens manipulated by a record company. So try the more mature albums, starting at Rubber Soul as others said.
- yCombLinks 4y ago
  I've never had anyone tell me that. I love the Beatles, and I certainly wasn't there. Nor did I grow up listening to them. That being said their early stuff, like "I want to hold your hand" is pretty basic 60's pop. Everything from Rubber Soul on is the work of well refined musical masters. My favorite is Revolver.
  - moron4hire 4y ago
    Lucky you, then. It has happened at least three times in this thread alone.
  - rgmerk 4y ago
    To appreciate the early stuff (and I agree there’s a lot of filler on the early albums) it’s interesting to listen to what else was around at the time. Any vitality of the early rock and roll artists was long gone and the charts were filled with schmaltz like Bobby Vee. In that context, “Please Please Me” would have sounded something like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” did in 1991 when it arrived in a world of hair metal.
- 4y ago
kazinator 4y ago
Here is an idea: maybe the Beatles are only great in the context of pop music, and particularly in comparison to a lot of pop music that came after the Beatles. These reviewers were working from a larger picture than "is this a good item purely against the backdrop of pop/rock albums?" Note that the reviewer mostly focused on the lack of content. He didn't say that The Beatles couldn't sing well, or play instruments. Nothing of the sort. And he praised the production. Today we understand that rock doesn't need content. It needs good sound, good vibe, skillful execution. Those kinds of stylistic elements are the content. You (mostly) don't go to rock for intellectual content, like intricate counterpoint, labyrinthine key changes or elaborate lyrics.
- bnralt 4y ago
  > Here is an idea: maybe the Beatles are only great in the context of pop music, and particularly in comparison to a lot of pop music that came after the Beatles. I often think it might be the opposite. A lot of the overly effusive praise for the Beatles seems to come from people who aren't very familiar with what was happening with music at the time, and act as if the Beatles single-handedly created modern rock (you get some of this from Velvet Underground fans as well). If you really dig into the music at the time, though, you see that there was a very rich mix of different musical groups experimenting with a lot of different styles that would influence what came later.
  - kazinator 4y ago
    By the way, we can imagine a music critic when he had been a baby. "Yesterday's lullaby sung by my mother was very sweet and I fell asleep like I was supposed to (mostly due to boredom), but beyond that it had little redeeming value. The lyrics were overly simple and repetitive, and it didn't stray from the major scale, except by accident, which could partly be attributed to the gaping lack of instrumental accompaniment."
photochemsyn 4y ago
Music is highly subjective and critics are really just providing entertainment value in their columns, not some peculiarly valuable insight. Someone once expressed their real value/function in this subjective context: "I try to find critics who share my tastes, and then I listen to what they say". Personally the only Beatles album I think has any truly great lasting value is Revolver, that's the only one I'll listen to occasionally, and after that it was mostly downhill - but that's just another subjective opinion, and of course many will disagree. Which is fine, if you like the same thing recycled over and over but just not as good as the high point. Maybe the critics were right? Maybe all that success went to their head and they got lazy and lost their way? The end of their live shows was the end of it? The White Album is just boring noodling-about-at-the-ashram, not inspired at all? I think that's how critics make their living, tossing out opinions that'll get people all riled up one way or the other.
theknocker 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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fijiaarone 4y ago
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- thebrid 4y ago
  There's a lot wrong in that for such a short sentence. The Beatles were not at all renowned for lip syncing. They grew up playing live in Hamburg and played countless live shows, both during and post-Beatles. Many of their most famous TV appearances including Ed Sullivan were performed live. I'm sure you can find times when they were required by shows to lip sync, but I find the criticism a little bizarre. As for writing by committee, about 88% of the songs they recorded were written by the band themselves. Which committee are you referring to then? Perhaps you take issue with the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership? That would stretch the definition of committee to its limits. For you, any music written by more than one person is unacceptable?
sb057 4y ago
See also this (in)famous scathing review of the Beatles by Piero Scaruffi: https://scaruffi.com/vol1/beatles.html https://scaruffi.com/vol1/beatles.html
- missingrib 4y ago
  Classic
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  The Beatles are to rock as Windows is to operating systems? cf the caption of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-punk#/media/File:Televisie-optreden_van_The_Beatles_in_Treslong_te_Hillegom_vlnr._Paul_McCartney,_Bestanddeelnr_916-5099.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-punk#/media/File:Televisie...
- triplesec 4y ago
  This review is as flawed as other roc lreviews, by making incorrect claims and merely asserting that oterh bands have better music, without any deal analysis, except for moaning about rock critics
p-e-w 4y ago
Why did the Beatles get so many bad reviews? Why did Van Gogh die insane and in poverty? Why did Nietzsche sell just a few hundreds copies of his works during his lifetime? Why was Bach forgotten and then suddenly rediscovered a hundred years later? Why are many works that were regarded as masterpieces a century ago out of print today, and nobody reads them anymore? Because any notion of "quality" applied to cultural products is invariably subjective, and indeed more closely resembles (intellectual) fashion than anything else. In the late 23rd century, people may decide that 1980s dance music was actually timeless genius, and the "classics" of 1960s counterculture were boring political drivel. It won't mean anything, just like today's assessment of the Beatles and Van Gogh doesn't mean anything.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  I agree with your point but I think you confuse things a bit by mixing up commercial and critical success. While there is some correlation, there are many cases of having one but not the other so I don't think we can say that the same factors explain both.
  - p-e-w 4y ago
    My point is essentially that "critical success" is meaningless, because critical opinion doesn't actually say anything about the work itself, and will flip back and forth arbitrarily often given a large enough historical timeframe. Commercial success at least implies that at one point, there were large numbers of people who enjoyed the work. But when critics write about a work, they are really writing about themselves, and there is no reason to value what they say beyond its applicability to a very limited temporal and cultural context.
    - sublinear 4y ago
      > there is no reason to value what they say beyond its applicability to a very limited temporal and cultural context Is this not the most valuable thing to know in order to understand the work?
- 4y ago
sinuhe69 4y ago
I found a 3% rule on Youtube. It means regardless how spectacular/popular the piece is, there is always at least 3% Unlikes. Why this particular 3%, I don't know. Perhaps that's the landmark of honest review or it lies in the human nature.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  Suspiciously close to the "Lizardman Constant" https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
- saulpw 4y ago
  I sometimes misclick the downvote when I mean upvote. They're very close together, and I'm sure I don't always catch it and correct it.
rdmreader3319 4y ago
I tried many times to listen to the Beatles but I can't stand a single song. I really tried to understand the popularity, but it does not work on me. I have close friends which are big music fans, they play music as well. We share almost all our tastes in music but they love the Beatles and I never got it. My idea is taste is very tight to genetics and sense does not react the same for everybody. And I am very honest when I say I hate the Beatles!
- oneoff786 4y ago
  Genetics?? Absolutely not. You need to have a feeling for the cultural context around some things to appreciate them. It also doesn’t take much work to refresh a song’s styling and execution to sound relatable.
- petodo 4y ago
  Why did you try many times? Give a go to Abba or Queen, I find those much better than Beatles.
- Jiro 4y ago
  I think there's a difference between "I don't like the Beatles" and those critics. You're not claiming that you're representative of a whole population or that the things you don't like about the Beatles are reasons why nobody else would like them either. And if asked to explain why you don't like the Beatles, you probably wouldn't give the reasons given by the critics in the article.
- sublinear 4y ago
  I also have a deep hatred for The Beatles. It's been bothering me my whole life because it seems so irrational. I love plenty of adjacent music, just not them. Same goes for Elvis. My theory has been that it's because I feel like I'm being gaslit into believing they are innovators when they are really popularizers. Doesn't sit well with me how often those are conflated for the sake of marketing and an indifferent public.
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  https://medium.com/luminasticity/to-speak-meaningfully-about-art-329093dbce7f https://medium.com/luminasticity/to-speak-meaningfully-about... it sounds like The Beatles are just not to your taste, although they had such a wide varying range of styles it seems unlikely there wouldn't be some song you'd think ok that one's ok.
rmason 4y ago
I was a sixth grader living in Detroit when the British music invasion began. There was a lot of great rock on Detroit radio (entirely AM) at the time along with a fair amount of blues late at night. In our school there was a huge amount of buzz about the Beatles before anyone had heard them. There were plenty of cynical kids who didn't buy the hype. But once we heard them and later watched them on the Ed Sullivan show there was near consensus among my peers that they were terrific. For me it was the first time that I felt something truly changed everything. In time I came to become a bigger fan of the Rolling Stones because of the blues influence. But no one at the time was the least bit critical in the least about the Beatles. In time their new albums were eagerly anticipated. I still look at music as before the Beatles and after the Beatles.
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
I think a lot of this is just the well-known "mere-exposure effect". The more you are exposed to something the more likely you are to like it and think it's good. A critic listening to a Beatles album for the first time has never been exposed before and it's inherently unlikely to sound great unless it's already similar to other music they are used to. But over the years since they were so popular later critics were used to them (especially since many other musical acts were influenced by the Beatles) and so it became more typical to consider it great. The same effect applies to the other examples in the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  My parents bought me Abbey Road when it was released. I was immediately entranced by it. I didn't need any "exposure". Declaration of interest: I was living and going to school in Liverpool at the time, and everyone admired The Beatles.
garyrob 4y ago
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." (Quote from computer pioneer Howard Aiken.) If something is truly new, and truly valuable, with an emphasis on "truly" for both parts,it will be different enough that the conventional wisdom will reject it, but it will win in the long tun. That's because it isn't obvious in the current context; if it was, someone would already be doing it. Because it's not obvious, when people are first exposed to it, their immediate instinct is that it is worthless because non-mainstream things usually are, and it's easier to reject all non-mainstream things then to delve deeply enough into each one to actually understand whether it has value or not. In fact, there just isn't enough time to do so, and because it means overriding deep, long-held assumptions, it can be extraordinarily difficult. It's the same in the tech business as it is in art. An anecdote from my personal experience: When, in the mid-90's web sites had to try to actively sell their advertising space in order to get ad revenues, which made it virtually impossible for small sites to get those revenues, I had the idea of ads being distributed through hubs and targetted by tracking people using what are now called "tracking cookies"[1]. I presented the idea to the guy who had been on the cover of Business 2.0 magazine and called the best VC around a few months before, and who was heavily invested in traditional advertising, he said: "I don't see how there's much money to be made here." (To be fair, Ollie Curme at Battery Ventures did get it when I showed it to him.) I think something similar is happening here on HN now with respect to a knee-jerk, snobby rejection of the potential of blockchain by people who have no idea what's being built or what it can enable, especially with respect to potential uses of zero-knowledge proofs in a blockchain context, but see the scams that have been happening which make it especially easy to feel safe in being rejecting. [1] https://www.garyrobinson.net/2021/07/did-i-invent-browser-cookies-for-advertising.html https://www.garyrobinson.net/2021/07/did-i-invent-browser-co...
snozolli 4y ago
The album was just a pastiche, and “reeks of horns and harps, harmonica quartets, assorted animal noises and a 91-piece orchestra.” I actually agree with that. I find Sgt. Pepper's to be harsh and gimmicky in production (e.g. left-right channel wipes because stereo was a novelty). I appreciate their contribution to change in music, but not so much their actual sound. Sometimes I enjoy covers more, like Fiona Apple's Across the Universe. I don't know if that speaks to my sound preference or simply when I was coming of age. Similarity, I never really liked Nirvana that much, but they certainly changed the sound of popular music. In both cases, was it really the band, or did they simply become the havee of change that was already happening? Either way, you'll always get reviews that seem laughable in hindsight because significant change fundamentally creates a sense of culture shock.
- chungy 4y ago
  > (e.g. left-right channel wipes because stereo was a novelty) It's worth remembering that all studio releases and masters of the Beatles were done entirely in monoaural sound. Stereo mixes didn't happen until well after the band broke up and lost all creative control over the material. When stereo was new, there was a tendency to overdo it, and that's what happened with stereo mixes of The Beatles: the older ones sound terrible and are not representative of what the band intended. You'll often find the hardcore fans adamant that the songs must always be listened to in the original mono mixes, and this is a large reason why.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - iggldiggl 4y ago
    > It's worth remembering that all studio releases and masters of the Beatles were done entirely in monoaural sound. That's not quite right. First of all, Abbey Road was done fully in stereo right from the start, with the band's full creative input. Secondly, all the previous studio albums were all released both in mono and stereo versions right from the start, so contemporary stereo mixes were done for all previous albums, too. What's true though is that after their first albums, once the Beatles started getting personally involved with the mixing sessions, they usually only bothered attending the sessions for the mono mixes and left the stereo mixing to George Martin and whoever the respective recording engineer at the time was, right up until around the time of the White Album, where they finally started getting slightly more involved with the stereo mixes, too. (And then like I mentioned Abbey Road was only done in stereo.) The stereo versions of their first two albums were also hamstrung by only having two-track recordings to work with, so even beyond the initial tendency to treat stereo as a gimmicky novelty there wasn't much that could have been done beyond panning the vocals to one side and the instrumental backing to the other side, anyway. (Which is indeed an argument for preferring the mono editions of those albums, unless you need a Karaoke version of those songs :-) ) > Stereo mixes didn't happen until well after the band broke up and lost all creative control over the material. The only case where that is sort of true is with Help! and Rubber Soul, which were remixed in the 80s for their CD re-release, and where that remix has mostly supplanted the original stereo mixes. (Though at least those remixes were done by George Martin, too, and not somebody else random.) Beyond that, there are also the recent remixes of the subsequent albums, though at least for now those are being offered as additional versions, with the original mixes still being available, too.
aurizon 4y ago
Everyone(more or less) in the UK House of Lords and Commons was critical of the US revolution. I recall how all the classicists heaped scorn and umbrage on these emerging musical trends.
- philwelch 4y ago
  > Everyone(more or less) in the UK House of Lords and Commons was critical of the US revolution. This is…not true. Many Whigs were sympathetic to the American cause.
  - aurizon 4y ago
    Yes, It was analogous to the Vietnam war, the UK lost it on the home front as well.
andy_xor_andrew 4y ago
Love this quote: > And consider this: Not only were the Beatles breaking their own rules, but each time they left behind the biggest money-making formula in commercial music. They would develop a new concept, unleash it, sell tens of millions of albums, and. . . then they would walk away from it. > There really is no equivalent—not then, not now, not anytime. It's unreal how dedicated they were to inventing entirely new musical ideas (or pastiching them together from many sources), and then on their next album they throw it out the window and create something new all over again. You can listen to pretty much any pop album from any group in the mid-late 60s and know immediately what year it was recorded. Does it have tape loops/backwards audio? It was recorded right after Revolver. Does it have animal sounds or evoke childhood nostalgia? Recorded right after Sgt Pepper (granted, Brian Wilson started the animal noises thing). Is it stripped down and with very simple production? It was recorded right after the white album.
Synaesthesia 4y ago
Quite a few people here don't love the beatles. That's fine, they're entitled to their opinion, but I think they were fabulous. Every single album they made was good, all 13 of them, and their singles too. It's quite extraordinary consistency. Try writing a 3 minute pop song some time, it's not so easy. Why were they so hated? Easy, why was every popular boy band hated!? They were popular and got the girls, people hate that. Look at the response to Justin Bieber, or any pop star. It's often irrational hatred.
chungy 4y ago
Opinions are just that, and cannot be wrong. It is possible to not enjoy the Beatles at all, it's even possible to do so while recognizing what they did for music overall. I do think the Beatles were (and still are) a little bit overrated.[0] My own feelings are that Sergeant Pepper is the only solidly-good album they released and for the rest, about half the tracks are good and worth listening to today, with the other half being anywhere from bad to dull. The Beatles were very much an experimental and influential band and deserve recognition as such. Sometimes experiments end up as duds, and well, those are the tracks that don't get played on radio or movies these days :) [0] Conversely, for 1960s music, I think The Doors are probably underrated, with a much higher hit-to-miss ratio than the Beatles. Well, I'll just continue to enjoy them both in healthy amounts.
- jemmyw 4y ago
  I enjoyed your opinion but disagree with it. I like the Doors but the Beatles had a greater range of styles, and I think that has helped with longevity. I also really like revolver, abbey road, the white album. Not every track, but more than half of each. So I guess we just like different music.
bruhreally 4y ago
"Experts" are not actually experts, more news at 11 featuring our "experts"
- beebeepka 4y ago
  Critics, not experts. That said, I stopped caring about movie/game reviews after my teens. Quite frankly, short user reviews citing why they like/hate the thing are much more useful. I know what I like
evouga 4y ago
I think a lot of what's happening is that there is not necessarily a correlation between the technical quality of a piece of art and its cultural influence and legacy. The former is far, far easier to evaluate "in the moment" than the latter is to predict. For The Beatles specifically, I don't think it's a particularly controversial take to say that while the Beatles made great music, they (with perhaps the exception of Ringo) were unremarkable musicians. Lennon's butchery of the bass line in "The Long and Winding Road" is one famous example but hardly an outlier. I don't think we need to be too harsh on critics who compiled a long lists of technical failings in the latest Beatles album without recognizing its importance to the trajectory of pop music. The counterexamples are perhaps even more interesting: cases like The Ramones's debut album that were commercial failures but recognized, correctly, by contemporary critics as the start of a momentous change despite its technical failings.
jancsika 4y ago
> This produces the possibility of a Pop symphony or oratorio, with distinct but related movements. Unfortunately, there is no apparent thematic development in the placing of cuts, except for the effective juxtapositions of opposing musical styles. At best, the songs are only vaguely related. They're not wrong.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
The people in place to review popular culture are normally those who have built up a portfolio of critical material over the years. When dealing with young groups like the Beatles, many times, these people are NOT the intended audiences of the art. The Beatles in particular came around at a time of post WWII hegemony. They were born before or during and grew up after the WWII era. Critics of the era were used to artists being a certain thing, whatever that thing was. Then here come the Beatles, popular as hell and willing to reinvent themselves on every album. It's much easier to write about someone doing the same thing they've already done than trying to digest entirely new sounds. They rankled the critics, because their music was never intended for critical consumption. Their music was what they wanted to play and what they wanted to say. Hell, this still happens today. Consider the following 5 songs from Eminem's portfolio: My Name Is The Way I Am Stan Lose Yourself Godzilla Now, granted, he's not a musician in the traditional sense, but each of those songs are very different. And even though this is a high school dropout, his work will be studied for decades simply due to his rhyming structure. And just like the Beatles, the method and manner in which he chose to express himself rubbed some critics the wrong way. He challenged orthodoxy and wrote the songs he wanted to write.
imwillofficial 4y ago
Because they are the worlds most overrated band. Fight me.
tomcam 4y ago
Even worse are the smooth-brained douchenozles like Robert Hilburn of the LA Times, who reamed Led Zeppelin’s early albums, then bitched that the later ones weren’t nearly as good as the old classics. Pathetic hacks like him never gave Kansas, Styx, Journey, or Abba the time of day. They loved burning up 1500 words on the existential tragedy that Van Halen wasn’t Lou Reed. How many people know Carry On Wayward Son vs. dried-up manlet Robert Hilburn now?
fastaguy88 4y ago
This is an interesting example of the structure of many modern (frequently political) blog posts. You start with an historical statement that has proved to be wrong, or (for politics) incendiary, and then have a long discussion about what lead to the error. Yes, a NYTimes reviewer didn't like Sgt. Pepper. But lots of other reviewers did (Time Magazine put it on the cover, and loved it). The internet is big -- it is easy to find examples of bad predictions. And, because it is big, you no longer have to extrapolate from N=1 (although sometimes N=1 and things are repeated). I often remember the review of the new IBM VGA standard, which had no significant advantages (to the reviewer) over the older CGA. The Beatles got bad reviews because review accuracy (whatever that is) has a distribution that includes statements that do not stand the test of time.

148 points by SirLJ 4y ago

braingenious 4y ago

tl;dr They were a common subject of public comment in the 60s

junofan 4y ago

They were trying to piss off critics. “We’re more popular than Jesus.”

derbOac 4y ago

It's a really interesting piece but I feel the need to question the premise that there's a "wrong" or "right" with art criticism, as if the purpose of a critique is to reveal to the reader the true state of an artwork — as opposed to just being an expression of an opinion. I realize that "getting it wrong" could be a shorthand for "being so different from the historical majority opinion" but the piece doesn't seem to approach things that way. It's significant in a way because I think over time majority opinions have a way of stifling minority perspectives on things that are most popularly seen as "great art". I don't mean to sound contrarian, I'm just suggesting that maybe consensus about a given work isn't quite what it seems all the time, that there are social pressures and dynamics at play that sometimes distort how people might consciously consider a piece versus how they might react to it completely independently without labels. I also think it points to other things, like art perception being contextually dependent. People change and their tastes change — it doesn't mean one perspective is invalid, just that it was occuring in a different time. Of course, sometimes people just don't fully appreciate something because it's new and are looking at it with a certain lack of imagination. But I also sometimes think we look back at the past as if it were preordained, more so than how we see the future.

skybrian 4y ago
The part that particularly seems closed-minded now is not seeing how others might appreciate new music that you personally didn't like. A music critic can't just say "I didn't care for it" and move on - or rather, they could, but then they wouldn't write the article. I think the lesson here is more for the editors: maybe find someone who's a fan to write the piece? Or maybe we get a better picture now that aggregate ratings (like Rotten Tomatoes) are widespread?
- Andrex 4y ago
  > maybe find someone who's a fan to write the piece Objectivity in journalism may not exist, but most poor quality journalism I find is directly correlated to how big a fanboy that person is about the particular subject. You need intelligence when approaching criticism far more than reverence, is I guess what I'm saying. If someone can intelligently relate to me specifically why they might not like the Beatles, or specific song, in a way that I can understand, I would consider that person more trustworthy than the alternative. But that relies on me, or rather the reader/audience, to be open and receptive to challenging opinions.
  - skybrian 4y ago
    Well, okay, but here's my personal experience. When I created a Mastodon account, I decided to use it to post mini-reviews of accordion-related music from YouTube. (Because I play accordion and I'm interested in hearing unfamiliar kinds of music.) I look around on YouTube for recordings I like. There are lots of recordings I don't like for whatever reason. I don't post them. Why bother? So, nowadays, I'm not sure why anyone should spend time reviewing music they don't like. At all. What's the point? The slush pile is vast. Make the best collection you can of stuff you like. If other people find it good then maybe they'll start to trust your judgement. Admittedly, I have a tiny audience, a newspaper is a little different, and sometimes people like to read a good takedown. But it seems unnecessary?
    - galaxyLogic 4y ago
      > But it seems unnecessary? If something is extremely popular but you perceive something wrong about it of course that's a good reason to write about it. At the same time many critics seem to just try to put artists down because that makes it seem the critic is above the artist because he can see the wrongness in the artist. Critics are wannabe artists.
      - skybrian 4y ago
        I don't see any upside in trying to tell people that some music they love is crap. It's different for other media, like an article about how a book or TV show or movie is historically inaccurate is sometimes fun.
JauntyHatAngle 4y ago
I mostly agree and welcome your point, but as a footnote, I feel what complicates things is that music (like all art) is both a technical craft which can be rated somewhat objectively in terms of technical merit, while also being subjective in "judging" its cultural significance, evocative nature etc etc.
- IgorPartola 4y ago
  Not just that. Where the music comes from is also important. For example, a traditionally masculine music genre being suddenly performed by a woman, and performed well, will stick out. See Queen Latifah as an example.
yeuxardents 4y ago
[flagged]
- runsonrum 4y ago
  I have used ChatGPT but, can you ask it if it has responded to a specific article before?
- yeuxardents 4y ago
  I asked chatgpt to analyze the article, provide feedback, and analysis on why the premise of right or wrong might be incorrect. I am now living in a simulation.
  - Eupraxias 4y ago
    That reminds me of the moment that I realized that I have been a chatbot for a really long time.
- lovemenot 4y ago
  History may judge your condescension to GPT-3 unkindly. It was, by any objective measure, the greatest AI development since GPT-2. Itself a landmark achievement.
- Eupraxias 4y ago
  These kind of chatbot comments should be banned. When the chatbot content sticks out from everything else like this, we don't need AI to fish it out.
  - Eupraxias 4y ago
    Oh dear lord, I was being sarcastic and meta! Can we unflag the parent? It was a legit statement, I thought.
- farrarstan 4y ago
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bnralt 4y ago
One of the first things I do when I'm considering a piece of media is I read the negative reviews. Finding out the reasons why someone doesn't like something is a good way to see if you'd like it yourself. For instance, most of the time I'm going to enjoy a film that gets dinged for being "confusing" than I am for one that gets dinged for being "bland." Others might find the opposite to be true. It's not that I'm necessarily going to agree with the negative reviews. But I definitely find them much more useful. It's a sad state of affairs when we're told that there's only one correct opinion about a particular piece of media and dissenting views are "wrong." We lose the deep insight that comes from looking at who likes and dislikes a piece and why. And it's hard to truly like something when liking it is presented as the only correct choice from the start.
- holoduke 4y ago
  For me as as well. Same for dislike buttons. I d like to see them. Shame they dont have it anymore at youtube.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    Interestingly, I don't think I really found dislike counts to be very useful, though I do go for negative reviews on books first. Negative reviews tend to be a bit more articulate and specific about what they didn't like, and why they didn't like it. Pain points tend to stand out a lot more than positive things, especially if you go into an experience with the expectation that you'll enjoy it. That said, there's also plenty of occasions where I've found nothing useful in the negative reviews, but found some positive reviews compelling enough to try a book. Movies, TV shows and music I tend to ignore specific reviews altogether, and just go by the description and overall positive/negative average from ratings. There are so many more dimensions that short form reviews generally aren't useful at all.
    - Sakos 4y ago
      I wonder how useful it would be for a dislike button to require a brief statement explaining why. I'm not a fan of dislike/downvote buttons in general because there are so many different reasons why something could be perceived as negative, and what might be considered negative by one person might be a positive for somebody else. It just feels like noise to me.
msla 4y ago
I distinguish between criticism and reviewing, where criticism is, ultimately, about putting a work in context, and reviewing is about telling someone whether a work is likely to be worth their time. Both can be done in the same piece, of course, and the longer reviews include some aspects of criticism at least to the extent of an after-action report: This work was good/bad, so let's explore what worked/didn't work to contribute to that, which is done in the context of the general language of whatever medium the work is in. On the other hand, reviews don't need to do that, and the shorter ones don't, and criticism certainly doesn't need to engage with the question of whether a piece of media is at all enjoyable. So a review can be right or wrong from my perspective based on how well it reflects my tastes.
- chongli 4y ago
  Yes exactly. Proper criticism tries to leave preferences out and instead investigate the context of a piece and how it influences other work, how the work was influenced by the context in which it was created. Look at a piece like Picasso’s Guernica [1] without any context and in all likelihood you’ll consider it an ugly, confusing mess. But then if you take some time to read the history [2] and it completely changes how you look at the work. [1] https://www.parisupdate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ParisUpdate-guernica-MuseePicasso2-1024x730.jpg https://www.parisupdate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Paris... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Guernica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Guernica
  - Sakos 4y ago
    That's an important point. I don't believe reviews should leave out preferences. They should be explicit, yet distanced enough. I judge games through the reviews based on how I've contextualized a reviewer's likes and dislikes. My favorite reviewers might not like a game, but admit that the things that bother them might not bother somebody else and they point out things that might appeal to people with different preferences.
    - chongli 4y ago
      I think it's important to make a distinction between criticism as a formal, academic discipline and reviews which are meant to give practical advice about whether or not a particular work is worth the consumer's time.
atoav 4y ago
The decision what is good art and what is not is a decision indivdiuals and/or groups within society take. Those indivdiuals/groups might not necessarily be in total overlap with each other. You might e.g. have particular sub-groups who enjoy noise music, something the majority of people wouldn't even call music. That sub group might consider a overwhelming fraction of popular music bad music. Similar a particular country fan might consider rap and techno not music at all, or bad music while they like their own thing very much. Sometimes (often?) these critiques contain an element of social or cultural connotation as well. Techno definitly is hedonistic, rap and hiphop are connected to certain demographics and classes within society, as where the Beatles. That means a criticism should always also be seen in that light: Who criticizes whom from what standpoint? If that country fan dislikes the latest and harshest noise rock release that might be a good guide for fellow country music afficionados, but someone who likes noise rock might rather take that negative review as a compliment. Both sides could try to use the border they draw towards the other as cultural capital within their own ingroups. That means when the Beatles became popular a lot of the criticism they got was also criticism the old generations had towards the younger generations. It was not only about the music, it was also about who decides what good music is. Today (thankfully) we live in times where objectively good art is revealed as the delussional idea it always was.
bambax 4y ago
> as opposed to just being an expression of an opinion Well if you're a critic you're supposed to have an informed opinion, something that is not just your personal, knee-jerk reaction but a well thought-out intellectual construction that explains what's good and what's less good and why. Otherwise what's the point? I can get an opinion from any patron at any bar, or from dogs even.
cageface 4y ago
To completely dismiss Sgt Pepper is about as close to objectively wrong as you can get in music criticism.

NateEag 4y ago

A completely alternate explanation that I don't quite believe but can't pass up mentioning: Perhaps the Beatles really weren't that great, but were massively popular for reasons other than master craftsmanship. Fast-forward a handful of decades, and few now dare voice a dissenting opinion. (My own personal opinion is that they were great songwriters who never bothered to tighten up their production and performance chops. I disliked them on first listen, then gave The White Album very close attention twenty or thirty times, and that's where I landed.)

nine_k 4y ago
To my mind, the best songs written by The Beatles are their later songs, written when the Beatlemania has receded. To me, they progressed from being a typical pop band to producing much more interesting and artful stuff. But likely for many at the time they digressed from producing vibrant pop hits like Hard Day's Night to inane psychedelic experiments.
- bbreier 4y ago
  I really, really want to agree with this, but as much as I enjoy Abbey Road, I also can never get enough Rubber Soul
- robotresearcher 4y ago
  The Beatles were a really, really good pop band - much better than typical. Can't Buy Me Love, Hard Day's Night, Help!, Day Tripper, We Can Work It Out, Paperback Writer, Yesterday, Nowhere Man are mid-career Beatles, 1964-66. Most charting bands don't produce memorable pop songs like this over and over. And then they made the more ambitious albums. McCartney proved again later that he is an outstanding pop musician. Maybe I'm Amazed, Live and Let Die, etc.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    > that he is an outstanding pop musician He became one. None of them were very good in 1962. It's debatable how good they would have been without George Martin guiding them.

deleted 4y ago

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moron4hire 4y ago

I never got the hype about the Beatles. So many people have told me, "well, you had to be there". Ok. So? What does that have to do with my listening choices now? I want to hear an enjoyable song, not "I wanna hold your hand" repeated 15 million times (and that's just one listening!) EDIT: this is hilarious, and not unexpected. As soon as you say something against the Beatles, all the self-described "experts" come out to tell you "you're entitled to your opinion, but your opinion is wrong".

mixmastamyk 4y ago
It's just consistently good stuff, that's all. To a degree no one else reached. You don't have to like it, but shouldn't be determined not to either. Forget the hype, it's over. Also, the first album is basically enthusiastic teens manipulated by a record company. So try the more mature albums, starting at Rubber Soul as others said.
yCombLinks 4y ago
I've never had anyone tell me that. I love the Beatles, and I certainly wasn't there. Nor did I grow up listening to them. That being said their early stuff, like "I want to hold your hand" is pretty basic 60's pop. Everything from Rubber Soul on is the work of well refined musical masters. My favorite is Revolver.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  Lucky you, then. It has happened at least three times in this thread alone.
- rgmerk 4y ago
  To appreciate the early stuff (and I agree there’s a lot of filler on the early albums) it’s interesting to listen to what else was around at the time. Any vitality of the early rock and roll artists was long gone and the charts were filled with schmaltz like Bobby Vee. In that context, “Please Please Me” would have sounded something like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” did in 1991 when it arrived in a world of hair metal.
4y ago

kazinator 4y ago

Here is an idea: maybe the Beatles are only great in the context of pop music, and particularly in comparison to a lot of pop music that came after the Beatles. These reviewers were working from a larger picture than "is this a good item purely against the backdrop of pop/rock albums?" Note that the reviewer mostly focused on the lack of content. He didn't say that The Beatles couldn't sing well, or play instruments. Nothing of the sort. And he praised the production. Today we understand that rock doesn't need content. It needs good sound, good vibe, skillful execution. Those kinds of stylistic elements are the content. You (mostly) don't go to rock for intellectual content, like intricate counterpoint, labyrinthine key changes or elaborate lyrics.

bnralt 4y ago
> Here is an idea: maybe the Beatles are only great in the context of pop music, and particularly in comparison to a lot of pop music that came after the Beatles. I often think it might be the opposite. A lot of the overly effusive praise for the Beatles seems to come from people who aren't very familiar with what was happening with music at the time, and act as if the Beatles single-handedly created modern rock (you get some of this from Velvet Underground fans as well). If you really dig into the music at the time, though, you see that there was a very rich mix of different musical groups experimenting with a lot of different styles that would influence what came later.
- kazinator 4y ago
  By the way, we can imagine a music critic when he had been a baby. "Yesterday's lullaby sung by my mother was very sweet and I fell asleep like I was supposed to (mostly due to boredom), but beyond that it had little redeeming value. The lyrics were overly simple and repetitive, and it didn't stray from the major scale, except by accident, which could partly be attributed to the gaping lack of instrumental accompaniment."

photochemsyn 4y ago

Music is highly subjective and critics are really just providing entertainment value in their columns, not some peculiarly valuable insight. Someone once expressed their real value/function in this subjective context: "I try to find critics who share my tastes, and then I listen to what they say". Personally the only Beatles album I think has any truly great lasting value is Revolver, that's the only one I'll listen to occasionally, and after that it was mostly downhill - but that's just another subjective opinion, and of course many will disagree. Which is fine, if you like the same thing recycled over and over but just not as good as the high point. Maybe the critics were right? Maybe all that success went to their head and they got lazy and lost their way? The end of their live shows was the end of it? The White Album is just boring noodling-about-at-the-ashram, not inspired at all? I think that's how critics make their living, tossing out opinions that'll get people all riled up one way or the other.

theknocker 4y ago

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deleted 4y ago

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fijiaarone 4y ago

[flagged]

thebrid 4y ago
There's a lot wrong in that for such a short sentence. The Beatles were not at all renowned for lip syncing. They grew up playing live in Hamburg and played countless live shows, both during and post-Beatles. Many of their most famous TV appearances including Ed Sullivan were performed live. I'm sure you can find times when they were required by shows to lip sync, but I find the criticism a little bizarre. As for writing by committee, about 88% of the songs they recorded were written by the band themselves. Which committee are you referring to then? Perhaps you take issue with the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership? That would stretch the definition of committee to its limits. For you, any music written by more than one person is unacceptable?

sb057 4y ago

See also this (in)famous scathing review of the Beatles by Piero Scaruffi: https://scaruffi.com/vol1/beatles.html https://scaruffi.com/vol1/beatles.html

missingrib 4y ago
Classic
082349872349872 4y ago
The Beatles are to rock as Windows is to operating systems? cf the caption of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-punk#/media/File:Televisie-optreden_van_The_Beatles_in_Treslong_te_Hillegom_vlnr._Paul_McCartney,_Bestanddeelnr_916-5099.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-punk#/media/File:Televisie...
triplesec 4y ago
This review is as flawed as other roc lreviews, by making incorrect claims and merely asserting that oterh bands have better music, without any deal analysis, except for moaning about rock critics

p-e-w 4y ago

Why did the Beatles get so many bad reviews? Why did Van Gogh die insane and in poverty? Why did Nietzsche sell just a few hundreds copies of his works during his lifetime? Why was Bach forgotten and then suddenly rediscovered a hundred years later? Why are many works that were regarded as masterpieces a century ago out of print today, and nobody reads them anymore? Because any notion of "quality" applied to cultural products is invariably subjective, and indeed more closely resembles (intellectual) fashion than anything else. In the late 23rd century, people may decide that 1980s dance music was actually timeless genius, and the "classics" of 1960s counterculture were boring political drivel. It won't mean anything, just like today's assessment of the Beatles and Van Gogh doesn't mean anything.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
I agree with your point but I think you confuse things a bit by mixing up commercial and critical success. While there is some correlation, there are many cases of having one but not the other so I don't think we can say that the same factors explain both.
- p-e-w 4y ago
  My point is essentially that "critical success" is meaningless, because critical opinion doesn't actually say anything about the work itself, and will flip back and forth arbitrarily often given a large enough historical timeframe. Commercial success at least implies that at one point, there were large numbers of people who enjoyed the work. But when critics write about a work, they are really writing about themselves, and there is no reason to value what they say beyond its applicability to a very limited temporal and cultural context.
  - sublinear 4y ago
    > there is no reason to value what they say beyond its applicability to a very limited temporal and cultural context Is this not the most valuable thing to know in order to understand the work?
4y ago

sinuhe69 4y ago

I found a 3% rule on Youtube. It means regardless how spectacular/popular the piece is, there is always at least 3% Unlikes. Why this particular 3%, I don't know. Perhaps that's the landmark of honest review or it lies in the human nature.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
Suspiciously close to the "Lizardman Constant" https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
saulpw 4y ago
I sometimes misclick the downvote when I mean upvote. They're very close together, and I'm sure I don't always catch it and correct it.

rdmreader3319 4y ago

I tried many times to listen to the Beatles but I can't stand a single song. I really tried to understand the popularity, but it does not work on me. I have close friends which are big music fans, they play music as well. We share almost all our tastes in music but they love the Beatles and I never got it. My idea is taste is very tight to genetics and sense does not react the same for everybody. And I am very honest when I say I hate the Beatles!

oneoff786 4y ago
Genetics?? Absolutely not. You need to have a feeling for the cultural context around some things to appreciate them. It also doesn’t take much work to refresh a song’s styling and execution to sound relatable.
petodo 4y ago
Why did you try many times? Give a go to Abba or Queen, I find those much better than Beatles.
Jiro 4y ago
I think there's a difference between "I don't like the Beatles" and those critics. You're not claiming that you're representative of a whole population or that the things you don't like about the Beatles are reasons why nobody else would like them either. And if asked to explain why you don't like the Beatles, you probably wouldn't give the reasons given by the critics in the article.
sublinear 4y ago
I also have a deep hatred for The Beatles. It's been bothering me my whole life because it seems so irrational. I love plenty of adjacent music, just not them. Same goes for Elvis. My theory has been that it's because I feel like I'm being gaslit into believing they are innovators when they are really popularizers. Doesn't sit well with me how often those are conflated for the sake of marketing and an indifferent public.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
https://medium.com/luminasticity/to-speak-meaningfully-about-art-329093dbce7f https://medium.com/luminasticity/to-speak-meaningfully-about... it sounds like The Beatles are just not to your taste, although they had such a wide varying range of styles it seems unlikely there wouldn't be some song you'd think ok that one's ok.

rmason 4y ago

I was a sixth grader living in Detroit when the British music invasion began. There was a lot of great rock on Detroit radio (entirely AM) at the time along with a fair amount of blues late at night. In our school there was a huge amount of buzz about the Beatles before anyone had heard them. There were plenty of cynical kids who didn't buy the hype. But once we heard them and later watched them on the Ed Sullivan show there was near consensus among my peers that they were terrific. For me it was the first time that I felt something truly changed everything. In time I came to become a bigger fan of the Rolling Stones because of the blues influence. But no one at the time was the least bit critical in the least about the Beatles. In time their new albums were eagerly anticipated. I still look at music as before the Beatles and after the Beatles.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago

I think a lot of this is just the well-known "mere-exposure effect". The more you are exposed to something the more likely you are to like it and think it's good. A critic listening to a Beatles album for the first time has never been exposed before and it's inherently unlikely to sound great unless it's already similar to other music they are used to. But over the years since they were so popular later critics were used to them (especially since many other musical acts were influenced by the Beatles) and so it became more typical to consider it great. The same effect applies to the other examples in the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect

denton-scratch 4y ago
My parents bought me Abbey Road when it was released. I was immediately entranced by it. I didn't need any "exposure". Declaration of interest: I was living and going to school in Liverpool at the time, and everyone admired The Beatles.

garyrob 4y ago

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." (Quote from computer pioneer Howard Aiken.) If something is truly new, and truly valuable, with an emphasis on "truly" for both parts,it will be different enough that the conventional wisdom will reject it, but it will win in the long tun. That's because it isn't obvious in the current context; if it was, someone would already be doing it. Because it's not obvious, when people are first exposed to it, their immediate instinct is that it is worthless because non-mainstream things usually are, and it's easier to reject all non-mainstream things then to delve deeply enough into each one to actually understand whether it has value or not. In fact, there just isn't enough time to do so, and because it means overriding deep, long-held assumptions, it can be extraordinarily difficult. It's the same in the tech business as it is in art. An anecdote from my personal experience: When, in the mid-90's web sites had to try to actively sell their advertising space in order to get ad revenues, which made it virtually impossible for small sites to get those revenues, I had the idea of ads being distributed through hubs and targetted by tracking people using what are now called "tracking cookies"[1]. I presented the idea to the guy who had been on the cover of Business 2.0 magazine and called the best VC around a few months before, and who was heavily invested in traditional advertising, he said: "I don't see how there's much money to be made here." (To be fair, Ollie Curme at Battery Ventures did get it when I showed it to him.) I think something similar is happening here on HN now with respect to a knee-jerk, snobby rejection of the potential of blockchain by people who have no idea what's being built or what it can enable, especially with respect to potential uses of zero-knowledge proofs in a blockchain context, but see the scams that have been happening which make it especially easy to feel safe in being rejecting. [1] https://www.garyrobinson.net/2021/07/did-i-invent-browser-cookies-for-advertising.html https://www.garyrobinson.net/2021/07/did-i-invent-browser-co...

snozolli 4y ago

The album was just a pastiche, and “reeks of horns and harps, harmonica quartets, assorted animal noises and a 91-piece orchestra.” I actually agree with that. I find Sgt. Pepper's to be harsh and gimmicky in production (e.g. left-right channel wipes because stereo was a novelty). I appreciate their contribution to change in music, but not so much their actual sound. Sometimes I enjoy covers more, like Fiona Apple's Across the Universe. I don't know if that speaks to my sound preference or simply when I was coming of age. Similarity, I never really liked Nirvana that much, but they certainly changed the sound of popular music. In both cases, was it really the band, or did they simply become the havee of change that was already happening? Either way, you'll always get reviews that seem laughable in hindsight because significant change fundamentally creates a sense of culture shock.

chungy 4y ago
> (e.g. left-right channel wipes because stereo was a novelty) It's worth remembering that all studio releases and masters of the Beatles were done entirely in monoaural sound. Stereo mixes didn't happen until well after the band broke up and lost all creative control over the material. When stereo was new, there was a tendency to overdo it, and that's what happened with stereo mixes of The Beatles: the older ones sound terrible and are not representative of what the band intended. You'll often find the hardcore fans adamant that the songs must always be listened to in the original mono mixes, and this is a large reason why.
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- iggldiggl 4y ago
  > It's worth remembering that all studio releases and masters of the Beatles were done entirely in monoaural sound. That's not quite right. First of all, Abbey Road was done fully in stereo right from the start, with the band's full creative input. Secondly, all the previous studio albums were all released both in mono and stereo versions right from the start, so contemporary stereo mixes were done for all previous albums, too. What's true though is that after their first albums, once the Beatles started getting personally involved with the mixing sessions, they usually only bothered attending the sessions for the mono mixes and left the stereo mixing to George Martin and whoever the respective recording engineer at the time was, right up until around the time of the White Album, where they finally started getting slightly more involved with the stereo mixes, too. (And then like I mentioned Abbey Road was only done in stereo.) The stereo versions of their first two albums were also hamstrung by only having two-track recordings to work with, so even beyond the initial tendency to treat stereo as a gimmicky novelty there wasn't much that could have been done beyond panning the vocals to one side and the instrumental backing to the other side, anyway. (Which is indeed an argument for preferring the mono editions of those albums, unless you need a Karaoke version of those songs :-) ) > Stereo mixes didn't happen until well after the band broke up and lost all creative control over the material. The only case where that is sort of true is with Help! and Rubber Soul, which were remixed in the 80s for their CD re-release, and where that remix has mostly supplanted the original stereo mixes. (Though at least those remixes were done by George Martin, too, and not somebody else random.) Beyond that, there are also the recent remixes of the subsequent albums, though at least for now those are being offered as additional versions, with the original mixes still being available, too.

aurizon 4y ago

Everyone(more or less) in the UK House of Lords and Commons was critical of the US revolution. I recall how all the classicists heaped scorn and umbrage on these emerging musical trends.

philwelch 4y ago
> Everyone(more or less) in the UK House of Lords and Commons was critical of the US revolution. This is…not true. Many Whigs were sympathetic to the American cause.
- aurizon 4y ago
  Yes, It was analogous to the Vietnam war, the UK lost it on the home front as well.

andy_xor_andrew 4y ago

Love this quote: > And consider this: Not only were the Beatles breaking their own rules, but each time they left behind the biggest money-making formula in commercial music. They would develop a new concept, unleash it, sell tens of millions of albums, and. . . then they would walk away from it. > There really is no equivalent—not then, not now, not anytime. It's unreal how dedicated they were to inventing entirely new musical ideas (or pastiching them together from many sources), and then on their next album they throw it out the window and create something new all over again. You can listen to pretty much any pop album from any group in the mid-late 60s and know immediately what year it was recorded. Does it have tape loops/backwards audio? It was recorded right after Revolver. Does it have animal sounds or evoke childhood nostalgia? Recorded right after Sgt Pepper (granted, Brian Wilson started the animal noises thing). Is it stripped down and with very simple production? It was recorded right after the white album.

Synaesthesia 4y ago

Quite a few people here don't love the beatles. That's fine, they're entitled to their opinion, but I think they were fabulous. Every single album they made was good, all 13 of them, and their singles too. It's quite extraordinary consistency. Try writing a 3 minute pop song some time, it's not so easy. Why were they so hated? Easy, why was every popular boy band hated!? They were popular and got the girls, people hate that. Look at the response to Justin Bieber, or any pop star. It's often irrational hatred.

chungy 4y ago

Opinions are just that, and cannot be wrong. It is possible to not enjoy the Beatles at all, it's even possible to do so while recognizing what they did for music overall. I do think the Beatles were (and still are) a little bit overrated.[0] My own feelings are that Sergeant Pepper is the only solidly-good album they released and for the rest, about half the tracks are good and worth listening to today, with the other half being anywhere from bad to dull. The Beatles were very much an experimental and influential band and deserve recognition as such. Sometimes experiments end up as duds, and well, those are the tracks that don't get played on radio or movies these days :) [0] Conversely, for 1960s music, I think The Doors are probably underrated, with a much higher hit-to-miss ratio than the Beatles. Well, I'll just continue to enjoy them both in healthy amounts.

jemmyw 4y ago
I enjoyed your opinion but disagree with it. I like the Doors but the Beatles had a greater range of styles, and I think that has helped with longevity. I also really like revolver, abbey road, the white album. Not every track, but more than half of each. So I guess we just like different music.

bruhreally 4y ago

"Experts" are not actually experts, more news at 11 featuring our "experts"

beebeepka 4y ago
Critics, not experts. That said, I stopped caring about movie/game reviews after my teens. Quite frankly, short user reviews citing why they like/hate the thing are much more useful. I know what I like

evouga 4y ago

I think a lot of what's happening is that there is not necessarily a correlation between the technical quality of a piece of art and its cultural influence and legacy. The former is far, far easier to evaluate "in the moment" than the latter is to predict. For The Beatles specifically, I don't think it's a particularly controversial take to say that while the Beatles made great music, they (with perhaps the exception of Ringo) were unremarkable musicians. Lennon's butchery of the bass line in "The Long and Winding Road" is one famous example but hardly an outlier. I don't think we need to be too harsh on critics who compiled a long lists of technical failings in the latest Beatles album without recognizing its importance to the trajectory of pop music. The counterexamples are perhaps even more interesting: cases like The Ramones's debut album that were commercial failures but recognized, correctly, by contemporary critics as the start of a momentous change despite its technical failings.

jancsika 4y ago

> This produces the possibility of a Pop symphony or oratorio, with distinct but related movements. Unfortunately, there is no apparent thematic development in the placing of cuts, except for the effective juxtapositions of opposing musical styles. At best, the songs are only vaguely related. They're not wrong.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

The people in place to review popular culture are normally those who have built up a portfolio of critical material over the years. When dealing with young groups like the Beatles, many times, these people are NOT the intended audiences of the art. The Beatles in particular came around at a time of post WWII hegemony. They were born before or during and grew up after the WWII era. Critics of the era were used to artists being a certain thing, whatever that thing was. Then here come the Beatles, popular as hell and willing to reinvent themselves on every album. It's much easier to write about someone doing the same thing they've already done than trying to digest entirely new sounds. They rankled the critics, because their music was never intended for critical consumption. Their music was what they wanted to play and what they wanted to say. Hell, this still happens today. Consider the following 5 songs from Eminem's portfolio: My Name Is The Way I Am Stan Lose Yourself Godzilla Now, granted, he's not a musician in the traditional sense, but each of those songs are very different. And even though this is a high school dropout, his work will be studied for decades simply due to his rhyming structure. And just like the Beatles, the method and manner in which he chose to express himself rubbed some critics the wrong way. He challenged orthodoxy and wrote the songs he wanted to write.

imwillofficial 4y ago

Because they are the worlds most overrated band. Fight me.

tomcam 4y ago

Even worse are the smooth-brained douchenozles like Robert Hilburn of the LA Times, who reamed Led Zeppelin’s early albums, then bitched that the later ones weren’t nearly as good as the old classics. Pathetic hacks like him never gave Kansas, Styx, Journey, or Abba the time of day. They loved burning up 1500 words on the existential tragedy that Van Halen wasn’t Lou Reed. How many people know Carry On Wayward Son vs. dried-up manlet Robert Hilburn now?

fastaguy88 4y ago

This is an interesting example of the structure of many modern (frequently political) blog posts. You start with an historical statement that has proved to be wrong, or (for politics) incendiary, and then have a long discussion about what lead to the error. Yes, a NYTimes reviewer didn't like Sgt. Pepper. But lots of other reviewers did (Time Magazine put it on the cover, and loved it). The internet is big -- it is easy to find examples of bad predictions. And, because it is big, you no longer have to extrapolate from N=1 (although sometimes N=1 and things are repeated). I often remember the review of the new IBM VGA standard, which had no significant advantages (to the reviewer) over the older CGA. The Beatles got bad reviews because review accuracy (whatever that is) has a distribution that includes statements that do not stand the test of time.