The Beatles Threadology

[yovargas]

They still have songs with enough musical edge to go up against todays giants. (Radiohead, and the like).

No one can go up against Radiohead. No one.

[PrinceAlarming]

I like Radio Head's earlier albums... Everything before KidA.

I can only take so much falsetto and digital delay.

It's funny, I find that Radiohead usually sounds like they are 'trying too hard' to create something different.

Even Radiohead pays homage to the Beatles, "...bassist Colin Greenwood said "On 'Paranoid Android' what we were into was the idea of a DJ Shadow meets The Beatles thing." Thom Yorke also compared the song to The Beatles' work, saying "it really started out as three separate songs and we didn't know what to do with them. Then we thought of 'Happiness is a Warm Gun' — which was obviously three different bits that John Lennon put together — and said 'Why don't we try that?'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoid_Android

[baby tuckoo]

No one can go up against Radiohead. No one.

I love your enthusiasm. My son (22 years old) would agree with you here. I've grown to admire the Head, but selectively. 'Tis no sin for an artist to err on the side of experimentation.

The evolution of the audience doesn't always follow the artist's own.

But I really like Christopher O'Reilly's recent piano album of all Radiohead songs. Yes, solo piano, for those of you who haven't heard it. It's called "True Love Waits."

[PrinceAlarming]

And it's very good.

[yovargas]

But I really like Christopher O'Reilly's recent piano album of all Radiohead songs. Yes, solo piano, for those of you who haven't heard it. It's called "True Love Waits."

I heard it. It's boring.


If I may get on a brief Radiohead soapbox, my impression was that they never sought out to be "experimental", unlike I imagine The Beatles did. They simply got to a point in their careers where they were able to create the music that they truly wanted to make. Their music now comes not from a desire to be different but from a desire to be themselves. The result is music wholly, breathtakingly unique. They found the existing musical language couldn't say what they need to say so they created a new language that could. To quote a dead-on review of their true masterpiece, Kid A, "It's an album of sparking paradox. It's cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 48 minutes." Let's see the Beatles top that.

[/ Radiohead soapbox]

[Holbytla]

If I may get on a brief Radiohead soapbox, my impression was that they never sought out to be "experimental", unlike I imagine The Beatles did.

No.
The Beatles wanted to be cool rock and rollers like they heard from American songs played on the BBC, and on the big screen.
They wanted to be like Chuck Berry and Fats Domino.
They evolved to what they became.
I insist everyone on the planet watch The Beatles Anthology. I want it as mandatory education worldwide.

And stop comparing today's groups to yesterday's groups. You can't do it. Music evolves like everything else. All you really have is subjective taste.

[yovargas]

And stop comparing today's groups to yesterday's groups.

I will.
As soon as people stop telling me what the world's greatest band is.

[Holbytla]

Everyone can have an opinion and yours or mine is no better or worse than anyone else's.

Whats the use of the greatest band in the world if you think they suck?

What the Beatles did do that no one else did...well they did a lot of that.
Beatlemania. Musical innovations etc. They do need to be given credit for those types of things whether you like them or not.

[yovargas]

Oh, I give them plenty of credit. They were enourmlously original and inescapably influenced virtually everyone making rock/pop music today, including Radiohead. What I take umbrage at (though you can have my umbrage back if you like cuz I don't really want it) is the notion that being the first means being the best. So very not true.

[vison]

Some people of a generation earlier than mine thought Frank Sinatra was the . . . um . . . cat's pjamas.

But.

What made the Beatles unique in their day, or nearly unique, was that they began to write and perform their own music. Formula bands and formula singers didn't. They were in some record company's stable and did what they were told, most of the time.

Mind you, Buddy Holly did a lot of original work.

I know a man who broke down and wept the day Bob Dylan picked up an electric guitar. It was the end of life as he knew it and he never got over it.

I lived through the Bobby Vee and Lesley Gore era. It marked me. Yes, it did. I was too young for Elvis and too old for the Beatles. A woman without a band. How sad.

[baby tuckoo]

Holby is right about the Beatles original intent. Their evolution was a miracle of nature.

*bt takes umbrage out to the woodpile so it can season for later.*

[PrinceAlarming]

And the Beatles did it without drum machines and computers, which for me, gives artists more integrity. If a song sounds good naked, without some haze of the digital generation, it is truely a good song.

I honestly believe that without the Beatles you don't have any of my favorite bands from today...

Without Chuck Berry and Elvis, you don't have the Beatles. Oh, and it goes waaaaay back.

[yovargas]

And the Beatles did it without drum machines and computers, which for me, gives artists more integrity.

That reminds me of the argument that LOTR didn't deserve all the recognition it got cuz it used lots of CGI. The tools used to create art are irrelevant to the quality of the art itself.

[axordil]

I don't care if a band uses banks of computers the size of a van to make music...so long as they can actually still perform live. If a drum machine means they can't perform with a live drummer, that's a bad sign. For me the comparison would be if PJ used CGI to the point where he couldn't do anything BUT CGI. At that point there's a loss.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

This probably deserves a thread of its own (and maybe if the discussion continues in this direction we will split it off), but I really despise the proliferation of drum machines, etc. A drum machine may have perfect timing, but it doesn't have the soul that a real drummer has, and it never will.

[axordil]

It's also hard to jam with.

[PrinceAlarming]

Yeah, The Beatles...

I have Abbey Road in the car. It's perfect length for my drive from Worcester to Boston. I was in Boston the other day, the other very warm nice day, and I was cranking "Come Together" with my windows down. I got thumbs up from a couple of highschool kids, a Jeep full of college students, two men in suits riding in a BMW, and two very old black men who yelled at me to "turn that jam up." That was within a block.

[yovargas]

I don't care if a band uses banks of computers the size of a van to make music...so long as they can actually still perform live.

Fortunately, my beloved Radiohead have a reputation as one of the best live bands out there. I saw them once - I agree.

A drum machine may have perfect timing, but it doesn't have the soul that a real drummer has, and it never will.

This really is getting on a tangent but...

...this is a great example of why artists shouldn't be restricted by such conventions. Radiohead has a very common theme of alieanation running through their music, particularly the theme of modern technology's dehumanizing effects. Radiohead purposefully use the "soullessness" of the drum machine precisely because they're talking about the loss of human soulfulness.

I'll avoid continuing on more Radiohead thesis and bring it back to the more universal idea that an artist who knows what he's doing shouldn't be held back by tradition or conventions.

[tinwë]

The worlds greatest band is Led Zeppelin.

[yovargas]

I agreed with you...until about three years ago.